Post-caucus analysis

You've all suffered through enough of my own 'analysis' that I won't subject you to any more of it, but some interesting insights on last night's caucus victories for Obama and Huckabee.

Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics calls it a victory for "authenticity," on the grounds that Romney and Clinton's respective rebrandings as a lifelong conservative and a change agent simply didn't fly with Iowa voters. Bevan points out that this could be especially tough for Romney since John McCain stands in for Mike Huckabee as the 'authentic' candidate in New Hampshire.

Bevan also draws probably the most conclusive lesson, which is that Ann Selzer knows what she's doing. Selzer polls Iowa for the Des Moines Register, and she took a lot of flak for the latest Iowa poll, which had Obama at 32%, Clinton at 25, and Edwards at 24. The Clinton and Edwards campaigns had both slammed Selzer's poll for its turnout model: the poll's sampling proportions were based on the assumption that a large number of independents and first-time caucusers would turn out. Both of those campaigns argued that such a level of turnout was totally unprecedented, which it was, and that it wouldn't happen, which it did - as Rob pointed out, over 220,000 people turned out for the Democratic caucuses, an improvement of about a hundred thousand people over the 2004 caucus. Moral of the story: Ann Selzer knows Iowa.

Patrick Healey at the New York Times calls it a rebellion against the party establishments and suggests that the "inevitability" narrative cultivated by Clinton and (perhaps to a lesser extent, given his mediocre showing in national polls) Romney simply didn't work out. In the Democratic race, Healey also suggests that Obama's victory in Iowa, whose population is 95% white and largely rural, and where women supported him in greater numbers than they supported the female candidate, could show good things about his electability.

The Times' Matt Bai on Bill Richardson's spin of the final results:

Until last night, I thought the most creative spin I’d ever heard from a losing candidate came from Joe Lieberman, who declared, after finishing fifth in New Hampshire: “We’re in a three-way tie for third!” But then I got the e-mail from Bill Richardson in which he exulted, after garnering 2 percent of the vote: “We made it to the Final Four.”

Well, yeah, I guess that makes sense, if the Final Four consisted of Duke, North Carolina, Florida and the Maharishi University of Management. Sometimes it’s just better to say you lost and move on.

On a yay-Democrats note, Group News Blog (via Blue Hampshire) points out that each of the top three Democratic candidates did an awful lot better than Mike Huckabee:

Percentage of total vote 24.5% Obama 20.5% Edwards 19.8% Clinton 11.4% Huckabee

In less-publicized election night news, David Schraub covers the special election for the Minnesota State Senate, in which the eight precincts in Northfield, home of Carleton College (great school), St. Olaf College (great choirs), and a Malt-O-Meal factory (great Marshmallow Mateys), collectively made it a landslide for the Democratic candidate.

Finally, my earlier prediction was totally off-base: Kansas beat Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl last night, 24-21. Incidentally, let me just express my utter amazement that on the night of a major bowl game, only one television in the entirety of Uno's bar area was showing the Orange Bowl; the rest were showing caucus results.

As promised, none of my own analysis - but I am quite curious for comments on Iowa, especially from those of you in non-Obama camps. Does Hillary need New Hampshire to take the nomination? Will Mike Huckabee go anywhere, or will Romney come back in New Hampshire, or will McCain play Romney's weakness to his advantage? And what cabinet positions are Chris Dodd and Joe Biden going to get?

Have at it, and for those of you involved in the various campaigns, I'll see you in New Hampshire.

Nooooooooooooooo.........

Politico is reporting that Chris Dodd is poised to drop out of the race following his disappointing sixth-place finish in Iowa. May his complete failure of a campaign rest in peace.

I was going to end this post with a funny video of Chris Dodd, but I couldn't find any. So I'll leave you with Dennis Kucinich singing.

Update: It's official. And Biden's gone too.

A victory for grassroots

Over 220,000 people went to the Iowa caucuses for Democrats tonight. How many people went to the Democratic caucuses in 2004? 120,000.

We're talking about not quite doubling the participation here folks. This is a victory of campaigns in general. I'm sure all of our friends who are working on the Obama campaign are very energized tonight, as they well should be. However, the campaigns in general should all be exceedingly proud of themselves for the tremendous job they did involving people in the process of choosing our next leader.

This has been your general, feel good post of the evening.

For those who love numbers, check out the exit polling data over at MSNBC.

p.s. I already talked about my feelings on Huckabee.  That said, I can't help but love Romney getting trashed in Iowa.  Sorry for the negativity, but sometimes its nice to see a bad guy get hit hard.  Everyone reset your countdown clocks.  103 hours and counting...

Obama, Huckabee Win in Iowa!

Well, it appears Obama has edged out Clinton and Edwards (who are in a dead heat for 2nd) roughly 37% to 30% to 30%.

A huge influx of first-time caucus participants, of independents, and even a few Republicans handed Obama the victory, along with the fact that he was the #2 choice for many Richardson, Biden, Dodd, Kucinich supporters.

For those who aren't familiar, the way the Iowa Caucus works on the Democratic side, if your candidate does not get 15% of the votes in the precinct, he/she fails to meet the threshhold and then you can switch to vote for someone else.  That Bill Richardson and Joe Biden faired so poorly in the caucus is not reflective of their actual support.  In most precincts they failed to meet the threshhold and so their supporters switched to support another candidate, probably Obama in large numbers.

But the real story of the night is why Howard Dean, who I just saw on MSNBC, looks exactly like Howard the Duck now.  Did anyone else see that?  I'll post a video when I can find it.

Obama in Iowa: I'll Believe It When I See It

UPDATE (January 4th): I see it and I believe it. Yeah, the Register poll was right, and I was completely wrong; Obama got his 80,000 first-timers (more like 100,000 actually), in what has got to be one of the most remarkable GOTV accomplishments of all time. So kudos to the Obama campaign (as well as Selzer and the DMR), and read below if you'd like to enjoy my complete and utter wrongitude. See you all in New Hampshire! --------

Well, the Iowa caucuses are less than two days away now, so I thought I'd poke my head out of my Canadian hole for a minute to talk about the polling situation there. (Disclaimer: as most of you know, I'm a pretty fervent Edwards supporter. I try not to let it colour my analysis; judge for yourselves.)

So the polling we have on the Iowa caucuses right now is a great big horrible clusterfuck:

Look at that mess. Every day there's three different polls saying three different things; I wouldn't be surprised if we woke up tomorrow morning and Zogby had Mike Gravel in double digits. (My theory is that Iowans, tired of being called up and interrogated all day, are engaged in a mass conspiracy to mess with pollsters' results until they all either quit or go bonkers.)

Let's focus, then, on one in particular: the Selzer/Des Moines Register poll, which was dead-on in 2004 and is widely respected across the field. They call it the gold standard of Iowa polling (which is a complicated business, for all sorts of reasons, and easily screwed up by amateurs). DMR this year has, rather surprisingly, Obama out in front with 32% to Clinton and Edwards at 25% and 24% respectively; this lead is entirely due to what the Register calls a "dramatic influx of first-time caucusgoers", 60% first-timers to be exact.

"Dramatic" is not quite the word I would use. I would choose something more like "fucking insane."

...60% Are they serious? The Iowa caucus is an obscure, ritualized, often intimidating process that requires you to spend upwards of an hour in a gym or (worse) a living room with total strangers at 7 PM on a cold January night. Generally less than a tenth of the electorate shows up. And for this they expect, what, like 80 thousand people who have never done it before to appear and vote en masse for Obama? Get off my lawn.

Yet Obama's strategy is banked entirely on getting these new faces (as well as large numbers of independents, hardly the world's most reliable demographic) out into the caucus rooms. Clinton is more focused on the traditional electorate, though she's still been trying to pump up turnout (especially among women); Edwards has run the most old-school campaign and trained his considerable organizational power mainly on caucus veterans (predominantly older and rural voters, who form the bulk of his base).

So victory in Iowa depends on who shows up. And this DMR poll suggests that Obama's ambitious (dare I say, "audacious") strategy is paying off; now, given the seismic shift it'd take to bring 60% new caucusgoers out on Thursday night, Occam's Razor suggests it's more likely this is just a crap poll. But assume for a moment that the Register is right and Obama really does pull it off. If he can seriously make this fundamental a change in the recalcitrant Iowa electorate, then -- regardless of whatever personal beef I or you might have with his candidacy -- that's a massive political accomplishment that has to be respected in its own right, and it'd be his best argument yet for the nomination.

That's the way I see it. We'll know more on Thursday, of course, and the entrance polls will tell us all we need to know about whose turnout models really paid off. (Less so the final results, which will be affected both by second-choice movements and the Party's disproportionate weighting, though that certainly doesn't mean we should ignore them.)

...And now for some BASELESS AND IRRESPONSIBLE SPECULATION: I don't think Obama's going anywhere. This strategy reeks of bullshit. No, I say Edwards wins Iowa with a strong margin, say 5-6% over Clinton with Obama trailing, and his resultant bounce from undecideds and disillusioned Obama supporters pulls him almost even with Clinton in NH. She gets a narrow win over him there, Obama gets another embarrassing third and drops out (maybe he fights to SC but I doubt it). Edwards then gets a big boost in SC, where his numbers have been lower than they should be (voters there still aren't really paying attention), and the result is a dogfight between Edwards and Clinton all the way through Feb. 5 -- when, in all honesty, Clinton probably wraps it up off New York and California, though a man can dream (and if Edwards' press is good enough, you never know). That's how I see it playing out, anyway -- anyone else want to roll the dice?