It's got nothing to do with bigotry , it's about who actually gets out and votes. More diverse Voter participation would even things out, but the youth vote (the largest no show group) would rather bitch on facespace, tumbler and whatever is the cool media these days then inconvenience themselves by going to the polls.

Clinton is the conservative side of democrats conpared to sanders and iowa is a "red" country
But yep, those presidential election arent true direct ones, theres those special "electors" and here... the ones in place since long time, maybe decades are likely more conservative too...

What would happend if usa presidential elections were true direct vote ones ... ,)

This post was edited by Saucisson6000 on Feb 3 2016 02:32pm

...egads...you want them to venture outside in the cold without their mommy's to wrap them in a muffler and find their mittens for them ?

No, Iowa is actually much more white than most of the US. So Hillary would actually do better against him in the average state because of the increased numbers of minorities.

I think it might be a branding thing, maybe we need to label the voting box "democratic participation enhanced safety spaces" .


Willing to wait outside in adverse conditions in front of an apple store for days to get the marginally improved latest iphone, or lose family time on thanksgiving to camp out at best buy/walmart to get a little bit bigger tv then the old one, but cant be bothered to vote!.

... I laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair

That's not how the Republicans caucus, though. They use generally the same system that the Democrats use, it's just (for the moment) not as complicated. The Republicans actually wanted to move towards an even more-complex system of delegate allocation, for the purpose of denying the nomination to someone the establishment of the party detested, but they couldn't make it work this cycle. The current Republican system isn't actually more-accurate, either, as history shows. They have to keep making changes after a 2012 Iowa-style fuckup, because they never can quite get it right on the first try.

Again, you've got to have something. If it wasn't coin flips then it would have been drawing straws. There's no way a state party can control beforehand how many people will vote or caucus, thus the need for tiebreakers. Considering how the tiebreaker wasn't the issue, and how some people/parties will attempt to get around a fair result no matter what, you really do have to prepare for all possibilities.



Not quite. The Iowa Democratic party is overwhelmingly white, liberal, and has an outsized college-age population. It's a natural fit for Sanders (in fact, only New Hampshire and Vermont are better fits for him in the entire country), and the fact that he couldn't even win there shows the limits of his appeal. He will be absolutely destroyed in states that are similar to national demographics, unless he can grow his appeal in a way that he hasn't been able to do over the last year.



There was plenty documentation of coin-flip tiebreakers. They occur more frequently than you think, and that's why there wasn't a big outcry over the practice until now (a win is always a win for people, until the winner is Hillary Clinton). It's easy to imagine how Clinton could win the tiebreakers she won because Sanders was able to win some as well. That's just what happens in close races. The problem here was that some people didn't like the outcome, and that most aren't aware of how the process really works, and most are probably (still) unaware that Sanders, too, needed coin-flip tiebreakers to win in various precincts. The whole issue is being overblown by dumb/uninformed/misinformed people who don't like Hillary Clinton.

There's no demanding a recount, not one that would serve any real useful purpose. There's no real popular vote tally in the caucus and no way to recreate the caucus' viability shift (where candidates who failed to reach 15% had to send their supporters elsewhere). Because of this, the delegates and delegate equivalents are going to stay allotted the way they were on caucus night. Demanding a recount would only make Sanders look small. He's doing exactly what he should be doing.

So it looks like Clinton left New Hampshire with as many delegates as Bernie Sanders did, which is absolutely brutal for the Sanders campaign given their juiced popular vote win there. They at least were able to take credit for big fundraising hauls that came from the excitement generated by the win but now the primaries and caucuses move away from states that are 90% white and where college-educated whites are over-represented. The Sanders people should be thanking their lucky stars that Nevada comes before South Carolina, because they at least have a chance to swipe some delegates and narrow the popular vote gap there.

I'm sure most people are aware by now of the departures in the Republican race. South Carolina will tell us a ton about how long we can expect this race to go on the Republican side. Trump needs to do well in the affluent areas along the coast. There's a big question on whether or not Trey Gowdy's meager political operation can boost Rubio. It's almost universally accepted that Cruz has the best infrastructure among the top 3 candidates (and on the flip side of that, everyone agrees Trump's infrastructure is very poor but that it won't matter) and people want to know how the Bush operation, which also has a great ground game here, will impact things. If he trashes Rubio and continues to trash Kasich he alone could turn S.C. into a two-man show.

Is it really fair to characterize Clinton's delegate count success as a brutal beating of Sanders when it really only came on the strength of super delegates that are pretty much entirely party insiders?

What's brutal wasn't the New Hampshire delegate count (though the overall delegate count is, because she essentially is 30% of the way to securing the nomination after only two states), it was the missed opportunity for a campaign, in this case the Sanders campaign, to post a 20-point win and yet not get anything tangible to show for it other than some money. Usually when a campaign can put together that type of performance it translates into delegates but in this case it just hasn't, and that speaks to how spotty Sanders' operation is. It's very similar to the 2008 Hillary Clinton operation that could occasionally pull off a juiced popular vote win in a state but yet lose the delegate contest to the vastly-superior and better-organized Obama team. In 2016 Hillary Clinton is the infrastructure candidate, while her opponent is the one banking on outsized popular vote wins to try to convince people he's more competitive than he really is.

Clinton's delegate edge isn't just the product of near-universal party backing (and a party elected isn't automatically an "insider.") She overperformed in Iowa in the delegate game not because she had the backing of the Democratic electeds, but because her organization was so strong that she dominated the entire western half of the state and performed strongly in the NE district as well. They understand that just getting out people to vote means nothing on its own if the people don't live in the right precincts, so they sacrificed some margin in SE Iowa in order to lock down additional delegates in the western half of the state. If/when conditions for victory change, the Clinton campaign can flip a switch and focus on sheer turnout at any cost. For now they're focusing on winning every possible delegate, even if they have to lose the popular vote in precincts/CDs/or even states, and that's very impressive.