The Iowa caucuses are over. Lucky for me I didn't make any real wager, since I guessed wrong.

I also didn't get my wish — that the three leading contenders would finish so close that the media couldn't portray it as a "win" for someone. They probably would have gotten their way regardless. The reporting has gotten wildly out of hand. The Edwards campaign has been pronounced dead, and several commentators are acting like Obama has already won the nomination.

I like Obama, so if someone had to "win", I'm glad it's him, but it's pretty striking how far the horse-race reporting has strayed from reality.

Let's look at what Obama really won. Here's the count of pledged delegates to the Democratic national convention:

• Obama: 16
• Clinton: 15
• Edwards: 14

Whoopee, that's quite a landslade. Even if Obama goes on to win New Hampshire and South Carolina, he still doesn't have the nomination locked up by a longshot. This is just the political commentariat (they would be the "out-of-town jaspers", I suppose) getting carried away.

Even that count isn't accurate because it ignores the "superdelegates". Here, then, is Benzene's primer on the Democratic Party's nominating process, for those who aren't familiar. The process is quite convoluted, so even though this might seem detailed as you read it, I'm actually leaving out quite a bit (including all the parts I myself don't understand).

Each state sends a certain number of delegates to the national convention. As a result of the state's election or caucus, those delegates will be pledged to a certain candidate. If that candidate drops out, the delegates are freed of their pledge. The candidate might throw his or her support to a certain other candidate, in which case most of his or her delegates will probably follow (but are not bound to). The number of delegates from each state is based on a formula that reflects that state's support for the Party, so it doesn't match the ratios of the electoral college, though it does roughly correlate to population.

In addition to the pledged delegates, there are a large number of "superdelegates", who also get a vote in the convention but aren't sent by any state. These superdelegates include every Democratic member of the U.S. Congress (including the shadow members from D.C.), every member of the Democratic National Committee, plus several more I haven't identified.

The DNC membership is the chair and vice-chair of each state plus 200 elected members plus a few ex-officio, totaling a bit over 300. Democratic members of Congress currently total 314. According to Wikipedia, the total number of unpledged delegates this year is 852. The remaining ~250 are the ones I haven't identified, but I'm pretty sure they really exist and aren't just my arithmetic error. The total number of delegates to the convention is 4,049, so the unpledged delegates make up more than 20% of that.

Among the members of Congress, 135 have publicly endorsed a candidate (again, per Wikipedia). Since they aren't pledged, they still might change their mind. If we add these unpledged delegates who have made endorsements, and we further assume that the three current members of Congress still in the race will cast their votes at the convention for themselves, the tally looks like this.

• Clinton: 14 + 78 + 1 = 93
• Obama: 16 + 34 + 1 = 51
• Edwards: 14 + 16 = 30
• Richardson: 7
• Kucinich: 1
• Undeclared: 3,867

So as you can see, there's still plenty of race left.

The alert among my readers may have noticed that my list of pledged delegates shows Clinton above Edwards. No, that's not a typo. The results you saw on TV were counting delegates to the state convention. In that count Edwards barely edged out Clinton, resulting in the story line that he placed second and she placed third. Although it isn't a perfect projection, since there are various oddball ways in which delegates might be replaced and/or change their votes, one can get a pretty accurate read of how these local delegates to the state convention will translate to state delegates to the national convention. Because of the way Clinton's delegates are distributed in the state, she actually projects to get one more delegate to the national convention than Edwards, in spite of having fewer delegates to the state convention.

Update (Jan. 5): Wikipedia won't hold stilll. Just a few hours after I posted, I see the delegate chart on Wiki's main primaries page now shows several more superdelegates declared. The numbers on the separate endorsements page still match mine, so either it hasn't been updated or these new superdelegates are non-Congressional ones. Also, The delegate chart also shows 17-14-14 for Iowa's pledged delegates, though elsewhere on the page it still shows as 16-15-14.

Also, I notice the newly reworded paragraph treats the term "superdelegates" as if it refers only to the members of Congress, excluding DNC members and other unpledged delegates. I gather "superdelegate" is a coined word, so there's probably no official definition. DemConWatch's list of superdelegate declarations does include a few DNC members and other non-Congressional delegates. They also have a simple chart on the left, which may be a more convenient reference than the Wikipedia pages. If you're bookmarking, you can link to the front page.

Oh, and it's not clear to me whether that 4,049 total includes the disenfranchised delegates from MI and FL. In case you missed it, the Democratic Party, in an effort to control the calendar of the state primaries, passed a rule saying that if any state moves its primary to a date earlier than Feb 5 (excepting those four states already scheduled for January), that state's delegates won't be allowed to vote at the convention. Michigan and Florida moved their primaries to January anyway, so their delegates won't count. That's why none of the Democratic candidates are campaigning in those states.

2:08:10 PM  [permalink]  comment []