Ah, primary season! That magical time every four years when the press, the candidates, the donors, and the handlers scrutinize each state, one by one, searching for a knockout victory. It’s about sorting states into win and loss categories, looking for the narrative.
From that vantage point, Saturday’s Nevada caucus was something of a disappointment.
Let’s start with the numbers: 51 percent, 45 percent, and 4 percent.
No matter what you’ve read or heard, those are not—repeat, not—the percentages of the Nevada “vote” earned by Clinton, Obama, and Edwards respectively. They’re actually the percentages of delegates that the candidates won to Nevada’s Democratic county conventions after a round of precinct caucusing.
No one “votes” at a real caucus—they just cluster.
Here’s how it works: a bunch of folks show up at a caucus site. Someone counts them. Everyone sorts into groups based on the candidate of their choosing. They do a little math to figure out how big a cluster has to be to earn a delegate—the cutoff varies from site to site, depending on how many delegates the site will pick. Next comes “realignment” when the smaller clusters are eliminated, and their supporters forced to join a leading cluster. This goes on until only qualifying clusters are left.
If a candidate doesn’t earn at least one delegate, he doesn’t get any credit for competing at that site. So at a site picking just two delegates, a candidate could have the support of 32% of the attendees, but leave without a single delegate. (Situations like that help explain why Edwards’s number looks like Kucinich’s usually does, and Kucinich’s number looks like Gravel’s.)
Those delegates will reconvene at county conventions on February 23, when they’ll pick (via cluster!) delegates to the state convention, who on April 17 will, yes, cluster again, this time to pick some national delegates.
Nevada Democrats award rural areas with more national delegates than their population would mathematically merit. (Think how Wyoming and California, with wildly different populations, each gets two senators, and you’ll get the drift.) Obama beat Clinton in the right places, so of the national delegates likely determined by Saturday’s results, he should end up with one more than Clinton, thirteen out of twenty-five.
So you can see that to call those widely-quoted percentages “votes” is flat wrong; they’re county level delegate results. In fact, we’ll never know who got more votes on Saturday, because, again, no one really voted. The closest thing to a vote would be a tally of the sizes of the initial groups, before realignment, at each site. But as with Iowa’s Democrats, Nevada’s won’t make that information public.
Given all that, it’s even possible that Obama had more supporters show up at the Nevada caucuses than Clinton did. At every site (besides the hotly-contested casino caucuses) the number of county delegates available was based on the area’s Democratic Party registration. That would leave independent- and Republican-rich areas under-represented in the county delegate results. In Nevada, Independents were allowed to caucus, and according to entrance polls they broke for Obama.
I’ll be the first to admit that this is extremely complicated; Clinton did win more county delegates than Obama, and that’s something, I guess. But that number isn’t relevant to who’s going to win the Democratic nomination in Denver. (Of course, the fact that Obama eked out just one more national delegate is hardly relevant either, considering that there are 4,049 delegates at stake.)
And as the Clinton campaign was quick to point out on Saturday night, if you include Nevada’s pledged “super delegates” (party officials who get to vote for whomever they please), the two candidates are so far tied at fourteen apiece. Given a delegation of thirty-three, there are still five more Nevada delegates to be divvied-up before Denver. (I await with baited breath.)
In the absence of a vote total, calling what happened in Nevada a Clinton win is a bit of a stretch based on guesswork. It’s certainly false to say she won the state’s “vote” or “popular vote,” even if it’s simultaneously noted that she’s lost the national delegate headcount.
But the press likes a clear winner, with its the attendant story line—“the Big Mo” and all.
The trouble is that finding one can be tricky in a caucus state like Nevada. We should keep that in mind when consuming the coverage of Super Tuesday, when seven of the twenty-four states in play that day—Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Colorado—will cluster, not vote.
