Check The Weather
The Iowa Caucuses take place on Monday night. There is no absentee balloting – to be counted you have to show up at the appointed location, at the appointed time, to support your choice for your party’s nominee for President.
The polling gives people jobs, and fascinates political junkies, but it is no guarantee. Right now the weather may determine who wins. It isn’t important how many people say they will support any candidate, the important number is how many people are willing to show up in the cold and wet on a Monday night.
The most consistent voters are the senior citizens, the people who like to drive at night the least. If it is cold and the roads are slippery, a lot of people are going to stay home. The winners are going to be the candidates who can get their supporters to show up.
4 comments
Looks like on the Democratic side it ended up a tie. Which is actually good news for Hillary Clinton, because in the majority of states the black community is the swing vote that determines the nominee, and over 80% of the blacks who caucused in Iowa ended up voting for Hillary. The fact that this was less than 10% of the Democratic voters in Iowa and she *still* came in ahead of Bernie Sanders means that in states like South Carolina where the majority of Democratic primary voters are black, Bernie is toast. He had to start decades ago to get the trust of the black community, like the Clintons did. Either that, or he needs to come out as African-American like Obama did, which is going to be a hard sale given his lack of pigment :).
A shame, his ideas really would be better for the black community than the cautious pragmatism of the Clintons. But that’s the problem with deciding at the last minute to run for President as a protest candidate — there are communities where personal connections, not policy statements, are what gets you votes. And Bernie, as a white guy from a white state with no reason to do so before now, doesn’t have those connections.
– Badtux the Politics Geek Penguin
Apparently Bernie won the youth vote going away, so new voters are his key. Primaries are a bit better than caucuses, but the entire process is broken, and has been for years.
Yeah, new voters are Bernie’s key, but he can’t win the nomination with just new voters. The Democratic Party is now majority minority so you can’t win without the minority vote, which at this point is all going Clinton.
To really figure out who is being supported in the Democratic party, there needs to be an actual primary in a Democratic state, or a swing state. The primary schedule is front loaded with conservative states and the parties intend to keep it that way.