A word about Iowa and polls

[dsc]

There seems to be a huge misconseption as to where the final numbers for the candidates in Iowa came from. Kerry 38, Edwards 32, Dean 18, and Gephard 10 were the percentage of delegates won, not votes cast. And certainly not votes cast in the first instance.

The Dubuque caucus on CSPAN provides a good example to illustrate this. When they first caucused all of the following candidates had some votes (Kerry, Edwards, Dean, Gephardt, Kucinich, and Lieberman). Only Kerry was immediately viable. But Edwards and Dean both had close to viability and Gephard and Kucinich had around 10% each. After all was said and done the votes cast were 110:43:39. That translates to 52:20:19 (all out of 210). I honestly have no idea how many percent Kerry gained from second choices but it was some. Both Edwards and Dean gained some too. But it goes even further. Delegates were awarded 6 for Kerry, 3 for Edwards, and 2 for Dean which is 55% to 27% to 18%. Thus Edwards and Dean who had close to equal numbers going in and votes cast had wildly different total reported. In short, we honestly have no idea how accurate or inaccurate the polls in Iowa actually were unless and until we see the actual votes that were cast in the first instance.

On edit, Clearly this won't go on in NH which means the polls should be more capable of predicting outcomes.

[HFishbine]

1. Kucinich?

Didn't Kucinich end up with a couple of delegates?

[dsc]

3. I didn't recall his exact percentage

and I also didn't know if Lieberman had gotten any. So I stayed with the top four.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Thanks for the clarification

A couple of Kucinich detractors have been saying that DK "got only 1% of the votes." No, he got a little over 1% of the delegates, and each delegate represents a precinct in which he got over 15% of the vote.

There were certainly other precincts where he got a noticeable percentage of the vote but couldn't quite crack the 15% barrier. The same was true of most of the other candidates, depending on the precinct.

[DebJ]

4. and I thought the Federal electoral college system was confusing!

[dsc]

5. Yeah the whole thing is bizarre

I didn't even go into the arbitrary rounding system they used. That was really wacky.

[IowaBiker]

6. It shouldn't be that confusing

Not when you consider that the system puts some of the power brokering into the hands of the actual voters, rather than into the hands of party bosses.

Eventually, the less popular candidates delegates go to somebody else. Why not let a voter choose?

--Brian

[dsc]

7. Here are CNN's entrance polls

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/primaries/pages/epolls/IA/

From the first line and applying weighted averages we get

Kerry 34.84, Edwards 26.24, Dean 20.54, Gephardt 10.30, and Kucinich 4. That isn't outside the MOE of the polls that I saw with the exception of Gephardt.

[Namvet04]

8. Good post - we need a record of each state and the final polls

I would love to see that and show that some of these polls are always way off. Zogby for one.

I am told by people on the ground in NH that Edwards and Dean are up, clark in free fall and no NH people coming to his meetings but it is full of out of state people and that is not liked by NH voters.

I hope NH voters send a message that we need only 3 top people now and vote for Dean, Kerry and Edwards and let us start real debates.

[dsc]

9. Here we have no idea

you can't blame pollsters for the Iowa thing as they really can't measure that effectively. Alot depended on viability from area to area.