Who "Won" the Democratic Nevada Caucus? Should We Care?

Marty Lederman

The headlines -- most of them, anyway -- are saying that Senator Clinton beat Senator Obama 51% to 45% in the Nevada caucus contest today. Except that some reports say Senator Obama "won," 13 delegates to 12. What's up? There's a debate going on over at Matt Yglesias's blog (and elsewhere, too, I venture to guess -- especially among the spinners).

Well, there are at least three different metrics by which today's contests could be evaluated.

First, who won the "popular" vote among the 115,000+ voters who participated in the Democratic caucuses? Answer: We don't know, and apparently we won't, because the Nevada Democratic Party doesn't release these raw totals. Exit polls favor Senator Clinton, so perhaps it's fair to assume she received most of the "popular" votes. Nevertheless, the Nevada Democratic Party does not count (or announce) the popular vote. It only announces two different types of delegate counts. See below. Therefore, the common reports that Clinton won the "popular" or "raw" vote appear to be unconfirmed.

Second, who won more delegates to the Nevada state county conventions? Senator Clinton did -- by about 5400 to 4800.

But those 10,000 or so county delegates are unbound -- they can vote for anyone at the county conventions on February 23d.

After the county conventions, there is a state convention on April 23d, at which the Nevada Democratic Party will appoint its 33 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Third, as to those all-important 33 national delegates who will eventually come out of Nevada -- you know, those that actually vote at the Convention in August -- eight are "superdelegates" (federal and state officials and the like), who may vote for anyone they wish. The other 25 delegates are, in theory, chosen in part based on the geographical allocation of delegates in today's caucuses -- and it appears that Senator Obama "won" 13 of those 25 national delegates, to Senator Clinton's 12. (My understanding is that this allocation can, however, change in the next two phases of the Nevada system.)

There are a whole slew of complex rules to determine how Nevada's 33 delegates will be chosen in its three-step process ending on April 23d. I do not pretend to understand them -- I did not bother to read them carefully, although I invite our readers to do so. Perhaps 13 of the 25 non-super delegates will eventually be pledged to Senator Obama; perhaps not.

Why haven't I bothered to figure this out? Because the allocation of those 25 delegates doesn't matter. And the "precinct delegate" allocation and popular vote today matter even less.

Senator Clinton is a smidgen ahead on some counts; Senator Obama wins by a nose on others -- perhaps even on the ultimate delegate count. The contest was, in practical effect, a tie; and any marginal advantages for one candidate or the other will have no bearing at all on who the eventual nominee will be. Why not? Because Nevada's 33 delegates are a drop in the ocean of the 4049 who will attend the national convention and vote on the Democratic nominee.

Indeed, Iowa and New Hampshire, and South Carolina, are small potatoes, too -- and the cumulative delegates coming out of these first four states are likely to be split virtually equally between Clinton and Obama, regardless of what happens next week. One helpful website has the current count as 38-36 Obama with respect to the delegates chosen in the three contests so far, and 217-125 Clinton when one takes into account those "superdelegates" who have already announced who they intend to support. After South Carolina, the two candidates will still be in a virtual dead heat in "elected" delegates, and Senator Clinton will be 80-100 delegates ahead among announced superdelegates.

And none of that will really matter, either (not much, anyway), because both candidates will have at most only about ten percent of the 2025 delegates they will need to be chosen the Democratic nominee. And in two weeks, on February 5th, 2075 delegates are up for grabs. (As this chart shows, after February 5th, only 1796 more delegates will be chosen in primaries and caucuses. The rest presumably are superdelegates.)

So this means that everything turns on February 5th, right?

Well, yes, possibly. But there's unlikely to be a nationwide blowout for either candidate on that date. In most if not all of the states, especially the larger ones, the popular vote split is unlikely to be larger than 60-40 (with possible exceptions in Illinois and New York?), and thus both candidates will likely receive at least 40% of the delegates from each state. In other words, I would not be surprised if both of them receive at least 800-900 delegates on February 5th. Therefore there is a very strong chance that, whoever is declared to have "won" that evening, Clinton and Obama will find themselves on the morning of February 6th separated by only a couple of hundred delegates, at most, one way or the other -- and neither will yet be close to the magic number of 2025. This means that states such as Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Washington, all of which vote after February 5th, might remain very important. And it might also mean that neither Clinton nor Obama will go to the convention with a majority of delegates committed.

That is to say: The press has covered these early contests based on what has happened in previous primary seasons, but perhaps that's the wrong way of looking at it. The real story here is not that Obama "won" 38-29 in Iowa; that Clinton "won" 39-37 in New Hampshire; that either or both candidates narrowly "won" in Nevada; or that one of them will "win" by a narrow margin in South Carolina. The story, instead, is that unlike in almost all recent election cycles, we basically have here a very close race in terms of delegates -- in virtually all of these early states, there is little daylight between Clinton and Obama in delegate counts -- and we are likely to continue to have a close race even after February 5th.

Unless, of course, we don't . . . .
Posted 10:20 PM by Marty Lederman [link]