It's going to be close in Iowa. According to
Zogby, it's a dead-heat with John Kerry taking a slight lead.
But most people don't realize how the Iowa Caucus works. It's not a straight
vote. It's really a series of meetings to pick delegates.
Each precinct has a different number of delegates to pick based on the number
of registered democrats in that precinct.
And the rule is that a candidate must get 15% of the delegates to be viable.
So let's say there are 10 delegates available at a given precinct. Let's say the
vote was based on the current poll. It would work out something like this:
- Kerry would get 2
- Dean would get 2
- Edwards would get 2
- Gephardt would get 2
The others would be sharing 4 delegates. This is where things get
interesting.
At that point, representatives from the top 4 would try to get those people
who voted for "unviable" candidates to switch their vote to one of the above 4.
So in a race this close, you can't really tell who is going to come out the
winner because it's not just a matter of the polls being inaccurate by a few
percent, it's that the polls have not included who the second-choice would be
for most of those candidates.
What would have been helpful would be to know who Clark voters would choose
as their second favorite candidate, for example.
So who comes out on top could be very surprising. This is where having a good
"on the ground" campaign network really matters. Incidentally, this sort of
behavior will be modeled in The
Political Machine strategy game. 