In a piece published early Tuesday morning, prominent statistician and political analyst Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, explained why the Democrats’ debacle in Iowa “might have screwed up the whole nomination process.”
“In trying to build a forecast model of the Democratic primaries, we literally had to think about the entire process from start (Iowa) to finish (the Virgin Islands on June 6),” Silver begins. “Actually, we had to do more than that. Since the nomination process is sequential — states vote one at a time rather than all at once — we had to determine, empirically, how much the results of one state can affect the rest.”
So what do the “delayed” results in Iowa do to the process? Far more than most people might surmise, Silver explains.
Despite the Iowa delegates accounting for only 41 of the Democrats’ 3,979 pledged delegates, “based on testing how much the results in various states have historically changed the candidates’ position in national polls,” Iowa has historically been “the second most-important date on the calendar this year, trailing only Super Tuesday,” Silver explains.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s number-crunching, rather than being worth a measly 41 delegates, Iowa’s influence is “worth the equivalent of almost 800 delegates.”
FiveThirtyEight calculated that the Iowa “bounce” would amount to about a magnitude of 23 points as a result of “all the favorable media coverage that winning candidates get” — the most significant bounce of any of the individual states and only seven points less than the combined impact of Super Tuesday (March 3).
Though Silver notes that things were “a little weird in Iowa this year,” with multiple factors indicating that it would have a little less impact than normal, what transpired was something even FiveThirtyEight could not have predicted:
[W]e weren’t prepared for what actually happened, which is that — as I’m writing this at 3:15 a.m. on Tuesday — the Iowa Democratic Party literally hasn’t released any results from its caucuses. I’m not going to predict what those numbers will eventually be, although early indications are that Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and perhaps Elizabeth Warren had good results. The point is that the lead story around the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses is now — and will forever be — the colossal s***show around the failure to release results in a timely fashion.
“Maybe there will eventually be a decent-sized Iowa bounce despite all of this,” he writes. “But there’s a good chance that the candidates who did well in Iowa get screwed, and the candidates who did poorly there get a mulligan. … Iowa is all about the media narrative it produces and all about momentum, and that momentum, whoever wins, is likely to have been blunted.”
Silver then offers some thoughts on who this might end up helping by presenting a newly created model providing FiveThirtyEight’s guesstimate on candidates’ chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates. The big winner, by far, is former Vice President Joe Biden.
Before the Iowa “sh**show,” FiveThirtyEight gave Biden a 43% chance to win, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) 31%, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) 4%, and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg 4%. With no “Iowa bounce,” the statisticians give Biden 50% (up seven points), Sanders 24% (down seven points), Warren 5% (even) and Buttigieg less than one (down more than three points).
“The presence of Iowa was helpful to Bernie Sanders, whose chances of winning a national delegate majority would have been 24 percent without Iowa — as compared to the 31 percent chance that he had with Iowa, as of Monday afternoon,” Silver explains. “Iowa was hurtful to Joe Biden, however, whose chances of a delegate majority would have been 50 percent without it, rather than 43 percent with it. And Iowa was extremely helpful to Buttigieg, whose chances of winning the delegate majority were fairly low even with Iowa — keep in mind that he had slipped to third in polls of Iowa and fifth in national polls — but would have been virtually nonexistent (less than 1 percent) without it.”
Omitting Iowa would also increase the chance of “an unstructured race and a potential brokered convention,” Silver notes, rising from a 17% chance of no candidate gaining a majority to 20% without Iowa.
Silver concludes by stating what many non-statisticians have declared already: The disaster in Iowa is “not a good situation for the Democratic Party” and “it’s already too late for the damage to be entirely undone.” (Read Silver’s full analysis here.)