Saturday were the county conventions in Iowa.  On the Republican side,  the national convention delegates were allocated by the preference vote in the precinct delegates; so the county convention is merely about who will go to the state and congressional district conventions to choose the actual delegates (which might matter if the Republicans end up with a deadlocked convention).  On the Democratic side, the results of the precinct meetings (as reported to the media) are an estimate of what will happen at the county meeting, and the county meetings can change things.  While there appear to have been some changes at the county level, it appears that the bottom line has not changed.

Last week, I looked at the results of the precinct conventions and identified fourteen counties in which (primarily due to O’Malley and uncommitted delegates), the final delegate count was ambiguous.  Based on the results posted by the Iowa Democratic Party, in addition to these fourteen counties, there appear to have been nine other counties that gave a reminder on Saturday that delegates are technically free to change their preferences between each round of the process.  (By my original estimate, a total of eighteen projected delegates changed hands, but it is possible that my counts of the delegates to the county convention included some mathematical errors.)The most interesting of these nine counties was Mills County.

In Mills County, after the precinct meetings, Clinton had twenty-three delegates to the county convention and Bernie Sanders had twenty-two delegates.   With the county convention electing five delegates to the state convention, the projected split was three Clinton delegates to two Sanders delegates.  However, after the county convention, Clinton emerged with two delegates, Sanders with one, and Martin O’Malley and uncommitted also got one delegate each.  It would be interesting to hear news reports out of Mills County on how this happened.  Given that it takes seven delegates to be viable, it is theoretically possible that the Sanders delegates decided to split up 8-7-7 to “steal” a state convention delegate.  There is also the possibility that in some of the precincts, O’Malley or uncommitted voters “got” a county convention delegate in exchange for joining one of the other candidates when the O’Malley/uncommitted groups were too small to be viable. and reverted to their original preference (but it is hard seeing that many delegates having secret preferences). Continue Reading...