Tag: Buttigieg

The Iowa Caucuses

Today is the single most important day in the Democratic Primary. Although just 41 pledged delegates are up for grabs tonight, the results and their interpretation will have knock on effects on the rest of the country.

Iowa Predictions

Current Iowa polling shows Sanders and Biden effectively tied with 23% and 22% of the vote respectively. Buttigieg and Warren have each fallen to approximately 15%, while Klobuchar has surged to 11%. However, a naive assessment of these first choice preferences is insufficient in understanding who might win, Iowa is much more complex than that. For each local caucus, candidates who receive 15% or more of first choice preferences immediately bank those votes. However, people who initially supported candidates with less than 15% of the vote will have one opportunity to realign. They could vote for candidates who have already passed the threshold, they could simply go home, or they could support other candidates below the threshold to try and get them up to the 15% mark.

The impact of this system is that second preferences become immensely important. Bear in mind that Iowa voters are generally exceptionally well informed on the candidates due to the intensity of campaigning there, so many will have a well thought out list of preferences. Generally speaking, the field could be sorted into a moderate lane dominated by Biden and Klobuchar and a progressive lane dominated by Sanders and Warren, with Buttigieg in the middle. One would expect voters’ second choices to be from the same ideological lane as their first choice. Campaigns have explicitly reached out to one another to encourage their supporters to select each other as their second choices. The voters themselves will be in the room attempting to convince those realigning to come and support their candidate, all of which makes the process very challenging to predict.

Further complicating matters is the system of delegate allocation, with just 14 delegates being awarded based on the statewide popular vote, and the remaining 27 split between Iowa’s 4 congressional districts. Not only will the allocation be related to the candidates’ popularities in a non-linear manner due to the system of realignment and the 15% threshold, but some of the delegate allocation will be very approximate. Delegates afterall, are people, no candidate can win half a delegate, so the resolution of the system is very low. For example, the 4th congressional district has just 5 delegates, so candidates with very different vote totals could receive the same number of delegates. Furthermore, a candidate with only a few more votes than a competitor could just pip them to the post for an extra delegate, winning far more representation despite having similar vote totals. Currently, our model is predicting that on average, Sanders will win the caucus with 14 delegates. He will be followed by Biden with 12, Warren and Buttigieg with 6 each, Klobuchar with 2, and another candidate with 1, most likely Yang or Steyer.  It is worth noting that these predictions come with a very high degree of uncertainty owing to the complexity of the process.

Media Narratives

This year, for the first time, Iowa will release 3 sets of results. Historically, Iowa simply released the number of delegates allocated to each candidate. However, this year, both the first preference totals and the votes after realignment will be released. It is entirely plausible that these metrics will not all be won by the same candidate, potentially resulting in 2 or even 3 candidates declaring victory tomorrow! Whether or not that happens, the media narrative regarding the results will guide the public interpretation of them. This is not trivial, it is the public interpretation of the Iowa results, especially in terms of tactical voting and changing perceptions of which candidates are electable, which makes Iowa so important. Essentially, it doesn’t help a candidate much to win 13 delegates instead of 12, what matters is whether or not CNN declares them the winner.

Typically, the winner in Iowa receives a substantial bump in the polls. This might be more complicated this year due to potential disagreement over who the “winner” is, but remains electorally crucial. The popularity boost the winner gains is usually greater if they were not expected to win, indeed it may be more useful to consider each candidate’s performance not against one another, but against the respective expectations of each candidate. Currently, the media narratives are effectively, as ever, following intelligent averages of the polls but not accounting enough for uncertainty. Hence Sanders is broadly expected to win a narrow victory over Biden, and Buttigieg has largely fallen out of media coverage. In fact, it is still perfectly likely that any of the top four candidates could win in Iowa, although Sanders does have the best chance. High expectations of Sanders could limit the boost he receives should he win, whereas the potential upside for Buttigieg is massive, something he is counting on given his weak national polling.

Finally, candidates for whom expectations are very low can gain in the polls simply by coming second or third, exceeding expectations. This is effectively what Klobuchar is banking on. With 3 different sets of results it is also plausible that multiple candidates will be clamouring to claim second or third place. As you can probably tell, this is all becoming rather confusing and far too complicated to fit into a typical TV news segment. The manner in which journalists navigate this sea of information, and the spin candidates put on the results, will have a profound impact on the remainder of the primary.

Introducing Our 2020 Democratic Primary Model

There are a lot of conflicting media narratives about the race for the Democratic nomination. Is Biden falling in the polls? Is Warren a “front-runner”? Is Hilary Clinton about to leap into the race and cruise to victory? In such a large and chaotic field engaging in equally numerous and confusing arguments, it can be difficult to see past exaggerated news articles and the biases of those writing them. One way to decode this information is by simply ignoring all the punditry and going straight to the data. That’s why we’ve created a new probabilistic model to provide an overview of how data, not people, predict the primaries are going to go.

Our model draws on polls from dozens of organisations including national and state level research. Combined with data on historic voting patterns and the political similarities of various states, we simulate the primary, including adding random variations to polling averages to model uncertainty. After thousands of simulations, the results are averaged, allowing us to analyse results in individual states and the nation overall.

The headline is that Joe Biden is clearly in the lead. Elizabeth Warren is in second and Bernie Sanders third. That said, pollsters are coming to differing conclusions on the state of the race. Some give Biden double-digit leads on his competitors, others put Warren and Sanders neck and neck or even slightly ahead of the former Vice President. These differences are mainly due to the differing sampling techniques polling organisations employ, and it’s very difficult to say which are more representative of the truth. Our model takes an average of the results, affording more weight to pollsters with strong records and large sample sizes.

PC Dels Won

You may wonder why so few candidates are winning a significant number of delegates despite the crowded field. This is down to the all important 15% threshold. Each delegate is attached to either a particular district in a state or to the state as a whole. If a candidate fails to win at least 15% of the vote in a particular district, that candidate receives none of the district’s delegates. If they win less than 15% of the overall state vote, they win none of the statewide delegates. This makes the primary very punishing for anyone but the top three, who are the only candidates consistently polling above the threshold. The chart also demonstrates Biden’s significant lead, which appears even more pronounced when we focus in on how likely each candidate is to win the most delegates.

Most Pledged Dels

Although he may be winning the most pledged delegates, Biden is still struggling to win an outright majority of them. So long as this is a three horse race that could be a major issue for all the candidates. If nobody controls a majority of pledged delegates by the time the national convention in Wisconsin comes around, superdelegates will get involved. If they can’t push one candidate to an overall majority, there could be an unpredictable brokered convention. This could be quite likely according to the current data, as more than 90% of the time, nobody secures a majority in the first round of voting at the convention.

Majority Pledged Dels

The chaotic nature of this primary doesn’t stop there though. Iowa and New Hampshire are looking to be highly competitive three or even four way races. Pete Buttigieg is gaining ground in Iowa, reaching second place with 20% of the vote in his best polls. By contrast, Biden is struggling in the two earliest voting states. He could very conceivably come fourth in Iowa and then third in New Hampshire, meaning that even if he does win this primary, it will hardly be a coronation, as he is reported to have been expecting when he joined the race. Our model does simulate voters changing their minds in response to the results of earlier primaries, with our calculations based on voter behavior in previous primaries. However, this year features an exceptionally large number of candidates, and the front-runner coming fourth in Iowa would be unusual, so there is a high degree of uncertainty involved. Therefore it’s important to keep track of simulation results in early states as well as the primary overall.

Iowa

NH

Iowa and New Hampshire are not especially diverse states. Many Democrats there are the white college-educated voters who form Warren and Buttigieg’s bases, explaining their above average performance in these early states. However, the often overlooked but still crucial Nevada and South Carolina also vote before Super Tuesday, when over a third of pledged delegates are assigned, and play a key role in shaping the narrative of the race early on. These two states are a lot more racially diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire, allowing Biden to thrive. In some polls Warren and Sanders are struggling to even reach 15% in South Carolina due to their low support among people of color, a severe problem they face in much of the South.

Nevada

SC

Overall, the race continues to be a highly competitive affair. But with many candidates struggling to qualify for the December debate it may start to become a little easier to follow. There are surely plenty of twists and turns left, such as Michael Bloomberg considering entering the race. And there’s still everything to play for as the majority of key party figures, such as Obama, are yet to issue endorsements, and most voters are still considering multiple candidates.