Iowa Democratic Party caucus-goers vote Feb. 3 for a presidential nominee. The three cable networks will have wall to wall coverage with panels of their cognoscenti declaring so and so and such and such about who is winning what share of Iowa’s 41 elected delegates as the cable wizards try to pick the winner of the whole shebang – the nomination.
They will be missing the point.
What’s the point? That this contest is entirely different from the last two Democratic primaries, nearly or entirely binary contests between a singularly controversial Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008 and Clinton against Bernie Sanders in 2016. This is a multi-candidate field without a real front runner, without a candidate who is the presumptive nominee no matter the media’s desire to crown one.
That it is not about leading in February polls but about winning 50% plus one delegate of the 1,998 first-ballot pledged delegates from the total 3,979 delegates to be elected starting in Iowa and ending in mid-June in the U.S. Virgin Islands of all places.
If no one accumulates 1,989 pledged delegates to win the nomination outright on the 1st ballot, then the convention goes to a 2nd ballot. On the 2nd ballot and subsequent ballots — when 771 super delegates become eligible to vote and when all pledged delegates are released from their pledges — it will take 2,376 of a total of 4,750 total delegates to win (these are adjusted numbers from prior reporting here based on current exact figures).
And so far, the cable panels have ignored this salient point: On the very same day Iowans caucus, Feb. 3, early primary voting begins in California, four weeks to the day before March 3, when other Californians will vote in person on what is called Super Tuesday.
Think about it this way. In February the first four states will determine the following numbers of pledged delegates: Feb. 3, Iowa 41 delegates; Feb. 11, New Hampshire, 24 delegates; Feb. 22, Nevada, 36 delegates, and Feb. 29 (it’s a leap year), South Carolina, 54 delegates.
So these vaunted February contests — in which polls show no candidate leading in more than two of those four states, and only by small percentages — decide just 155 delegates, 7% of the total needed to win.
And all the while during February, California Democrats will be voting on the march to their March 3 primary, deciding who gets 415 pledged delegates — 21% of the total needed to win on the 1st ballot, a rolling vote right through February.
On Super Tuesday, March 3, in addition to California which sends the largest delegation to the convention, Texas, with the 3rd largest and North Carolina, with the 10th largest, plus nine more states, American Samoa and Democrats Abroad will choose 1,551 delegates, 10 times the number scattered among the four February states.
By April 1, seven of the 10 largest delegations will have been chosen with these numbers of delegates pledged by primary and caucus results: California, 415, Texas 228, North Carolina, 110, all on March 3; Michigan, 125, March 10; Florida, 219, Illinois, 155, and Ohio, 136 on March 17.
By the end of Super Tuesday, 40% of all 3,979 elected pledged delegates will have been chosen. By St. Patrick’s Day some 60% and by April Fools Day nearly 70%.
The last three major delegations will be decided in later primaries. Conceivably they could push a candidate to a pre-convention victory if there has been a breakout from the field. Conceivably? Yes. Necessarily? No.
The last of the top 10 delegate-troves are New York, 2nd-largest with 274 delegates and Pennsylvania, 186 delegates on April 28, and then on June 2 the very last, New Jersey, choosing 126 pledged delegates. Could Memorial Day weekend find candidates campaigning, as we say in New Jersey, “down the shore’?
What do the most recent polls in New Hampshire and Iowa show? They finally show some clarity in a contest in which 25 different people at one time or another have been candidates. Significant developments in January were:
• Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, and Corey Booker withdrew, removing three big names who had seen small results in their candidacies.
• Eight candidates reported enough money to get through or at least scrape through to Super Tuesday: Bloomberg and Steyer obviously, but also Sanders, Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Yang, and Klobuchar.
• The contest appeared to be reducing to a serious six-candidate field of Biden, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Bloomberg (Bloomberg only because he is doing what only he can, spending on a pace to go as high as $1 billion to buy the presidency; a river of money that not even Steyer can match).
• Bloomberg, entering late, is skipping the February states for a big bet on Super Tuesday. By mid-January, he’d spent a reported $161 million to hire 1,000 campaign workers and pour money into television and on-line advertising that in six weeks gave him a slow but incremental polling rise, albeit still in single digits.
While Sanders led all other candidates in 4th quarter 2019 fundraising with $34 million, during the same period Bloomberg spent well over $100 million of his own money and only his own money.
Commenting on the excesses of political fundraising in the U.S., Justice John Paul Stevens famously declared, “Money isn’t speech”. For Bloomberg, it is the way he speaks and it’s loud.
His strategy underscores the difference between Iowa and New Hampshire, where campaigning is candidate-to-voter retail and the rest of the campaign where, especially in the big states, it depends greatly on a wholesale approach of media and online advertising.
California has or shares parts of 14 media markets. Texas has or shares at least 20 media markets. Bloomberg is pouring money into them in advertising and staff. Only Steyer has the kind of money, his own, to compete but Bloomberg can outspend the entire field and appears intent on doing it.
• A new wave of media hype about an emerging feud between Sanders and Warren as the January debate approached, projected the kind of conflict cable news needs to create drama in the reality show called, “The Democratic Debates”. Candidate conflict is the only lens through which cable news panels seem to see.
• The candidates and their campaigns had in January to compete with Impeachment, Trump/Iran and assorted other Trump shenanigans, demonstrating as if it needed to be that he, not they control the news cycle. For the three remaining U.S. Senators in the race, the Senate impeachment trial scheduled to begin in the third week of January is certain to complicate their campaigns and muddle Iowa before its caucuses.
If you like the debates, there will be three, count ’em, three in February alone: Feb. 7 in Concord, New Hampshire; Feb. 19 in Las Vegas, Nev., and Feb. 25 in Charleston, S.C., each timed just ahead of voting in those states.
In January polls showed a four-candidate spread among Sanders, Biden, Warren, and Buttigieg in which their results ranged between 15% and 24% in Iowa and New Hampshire. Klobuchar too began to show movement particularly in Iowa, neighbor to her Minnesota but she got to double digits in only one poll.
The contest has been in a front-runner-of-the-month stage since the summer as each newly media-declared leader slipped back. First Biden slipped, then Warren, then Buttigieg. January, the media decided, showed a resurgent Sanders leading into the Iowa debate in Des Moines.
If there is a signal in the recent polling it lies perhaps in this finding from the respected Des Moines Register (DMR) poll. The DMR reported 60% of Iowans polled said they could change their minds.
And that touches on something that happens in a caucus but not a primary, which is that a voter can indeed change her or his mind even while present to vote. At a caucus, voters can move from one candidate to another through the night until the end of the caucus when a tally is taken.
If candidates fall short of 15% (remember that pesky proportionality rule) voters can move to another who has a stronger showing at their caucus until the scheduled end of the caucus. Meantime, supporters of the candidates can work the room urging support, something no one is allowed to do at a polling place.
This is a different and uncertain dynamic compared to walking into a voting booth, pulling a lever in a few seconds and walking out with your vote cast, or marking an early voting postal ballot. You can only mark it once.
The likely literal movement of Iowa voters between candidates at their caucuses captures the most salient thing so far about the Democratic race. You hear it in your own experience as you ponder, as you talk to friends and family about who should be the nominee, hear and see it in media voter interviews and poll findings like those in the DMR Iowa survey.
No candidate has convinced Democrats, who, it seems, do not yet see a president among their choices. Ask a Democrat today who she or he favors and they are most likely to answer with reasons this or that candidate should not be the nominee rather than explain why this or that candidate should be.
That is the conversation among Democrats. Is it a conversation that will lead to a breakout by one candidate? Or will it go on for months still as actual primary and caucus voting confirms the indecision reflected in the polls up to now?
Is it a conversation that we’ll be having still when Democrats arrive in Milwaukee in July? Will there be a second ballot for the first time since 1952? How close to 1,989 votes on the 1st ballot will a candidate need to be for the others to fold their tents and, even if all the others do, would Bernie Sanders.
In case you’re wondering, the last primary is June 9, for delegates from the U.S. Virgin Islands. If it hasn’t been decided by then, the Virgin Islands primary for 7 pledged delegates is not likely to do it.
Then it could be on to all the suspense cable news stations could possibly want, the best TV drama of the year – a 2nd ballot.
Peeling the Onion 