Monthly Archives: February 2020

Winnowing Out???

By tmess2 | Published February 12, 2020

Historically, the main role played by the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary is to narrow the field.  While, for different reasons, they are not necessarily representative of what it takes to win the nomination or the general election, they are both small enough that even candidates not well-known to the general public have a chance to make their case to the voters.  (Of course, for all of its flaws, the party-sponsored debates are eliminating some of that aspect of Iowa and New Hampshire.)  And candidates who fail to show any signs of life in these two states tend to lose their supporters (both financially and vote-wise) who begin to look for somebody who has a chance at making it to the convention.

This year seems like it might be a bit different than in the past.  In part due to the chaos that was Iowa, nobody dropped out after Iowa.  Last night, when it was clear that the results were not going to be there for them, Senator Michael Bennet and Andrew Yang announced that they had reached the end of the road.  And Governor Deval Patrick is apparently taking time to consider if he still has a path forward.  Bu that seems to be the extent of the winnowing that we will see for now.

With the possible exception of Representative Tulsi Gabbard, the remaining candidates each seem to think that they have a path forward that, at least, justifies staying in the race a little bit longer.  Both Vice-President Joe Biden and Tom Steyer have invested heavily in South Carolina.  Biden still leads the polls in South Carolina and Steyer is either second or third depending upon which poll you credit.  If they can hold onto that support, South Carolina would breathe new life into their campaign.  As the last remaining person of color in the race, Governor Deval Patrick apparently hopes that he can become the second choice of South Carolina voters in Biden’s support collapses. Continue Reading...

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How to Win in November

By DocJess | Published February 12, 2020

The most important thing that happened yesterday was NOT the New Hampshire primary. It was the unconscionable meddling by Bill Barr and his thugs on the Roger Stone and Mike Flynn legal cases. However, that has great impact on what we must do to insure that we win in November. Because every time you think they can’t go lower and more dangerous, they find a way. It’s what they excel at. And our only hope is to win back the Presidency….and a few other things.

There’s a lot of pain coming out of New Hampshire as people’s pick fave candidates drop out, or are on the verge of dropping out….as establishment Democrats and Movement people consider their options and our party schisms further.

So here’s my simple solution: as I see it, there are only two candidates who have a believable path to victory against the Orange Menace – we should all pick one, and get on that train, but commit to supporting the other if our pick isn’t successful — because we eat our young, and we will lose in November if we don’t. Continue Reading...

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Dem convention looking for 15,000 volunteers

By Matt | Published February 10, 2020

The 2020 Democratic National Convention needs a lot of volunteers:

The aim is to sign up 15,000 people to help with the convention and the crush of 50,000 delegates, media and tourists that will come to Milwaukee, July 13-16.

There’s a minimum age of 16 to volunteer during convention week, but there will be opportunities for all ages to participate at events in the coming months, organizers said. Continue Reading...

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Iowa Delegates Final (for now)

By Matt | Published February 9, 2020

The Iowa Democratic Party has released a new set of caucus results, and it seems like they will stand, regardless of any errors that still remain. Here is the breakdown:

BidenButtigiegKlobucharSandersWarrenTotal
CD1220217
CD2020327
CD3130228
CD4121105
At-large130329
PLEO120115
Total614112841

This does not include the 8 Iowa superdelegates who can not vote on the first ballot (unless the nomination is already decided)

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The Importance of Having Candidates

By tmess2 | Published February 9, 2020

As I am drafting this post, the Irish are counting the votes in yesterday’s election.  The exit polls published last night showed a neck-and-neck race between the top three parties.  Despite the closeness of the vote, one party is not in contention to be the leading party in parliament when the count finishes sometime on Monday or Tuesday.   And the reason for that has to do with how many candidates that party had running.

As discussed several days ago, Ireland uses a “single transferable vote” system to elect its members of parliament from multi-member constituencies.  (Constituencies — depending on population — elect either three, four, or five members).  If you look at the candidate list for each constituency, the two traditional “major” parties run two or three candidates per constituency.  When you run multiple candidates, any excess vote from your main candidate goes to your other candidates.  If you have a strong performance in a constituency, you can elect two or three members from that constituency.  Fianna Fail is running only one candidate in six constituencies, two candidates in twenty-three constituencies, three candidates in eight constituencies, and four candidates in two constituencies (both five-member constituencies).  Fianna Gael is running only one candidate in four constituencies,  two candidates in twenty-seven constituencies,  and three candidates in eight constituencies.  By contrast, for Sinn Fein, there is one constituency in which they have no candidates, thirty-four constituencies in which they only have one candidate, and four constituencies (three of which are five-member constituencies and one of which is a four-member constituency) in which they have two candidates.

If the exit polls are true, Sinn Fein would have had a good shot at picking up a second or third member in multiple constituencies in which they only ran one member.  Because they only ran one member in these constituencies, we will never for sure know how many seats they could have won.  (Projections — based on partial counts — are giving Sinn Fein between 30-40 members. which will put it behind Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael.  But assuming that most transfers would have gone to a second Sinn Fein candidate, Sinn Fein would have been contending for another 5-10 seats.) Continue Reading...

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Delegate Math 2020 — New Hampshire

By tmess2 | Published February 7, 2020

With Iowa’s vote earlier this week, the winnowing process has begun.  However, it is still early enough that there is a good chance that more than two candidates will reach the 15% needed to win delegates.  And that will complicate the delegate math with fractional delegates.

(Normally, the early states — starting with Iowa — perform a winnowing function.  Candidates who finish at the bottom of the pack in Iowa tend not to survive for much longer.  And candidates who do well in terms of finishing near the top of the pack tend to survive for several more rounds.  With the delay in reporting results, it is unclear if Iowa will have its usual impact this year.  But even if it does, it would not be unusual to have multiple candidates getting 10% or more of the vote in New Hampshire. Starting in 1976, five of nine primaries have had at least three candidates getting 10% of the vote, and three primaries have had three candidates getting over 15% of the vote.  Since three of the remaining six primaries occurred in races that were perceived — at least heading into Iowa — as only having two candidates who were viable, about half of the races that had more than two “viable” candidates resulted in three candidates winning delegates in New Hampshire.  In short, Iowa only starts the winnowing process.  And this year, that means that more than two candidates have a legitimate shot at winning delegates in New Hampshire.)

Now back to the basic rules that apply to all states.  A candidate needs to get 15% of the vote (either state-wide or in a district) to be eligible to win delegates. If there are enough delegates available, every eligible candidate gets a delegate even if that reduces the number of delegates that another candidate gets.  If there are more eligible candidates than delegates, delegates are awarded in the order of finish.  Generally speaking, the formula for calculating delegates is the share of qualified votes (i.e. only the votes cast for candidates who got 15%) times the number of delegate available.  Since that typically will result in a fraction (say 2.3 delegates for candidate X), you start by giving out the whole numbers and then the remaining delegates are assigned in fractional order (i.e. .7 is ahead of .6 for getting the next delegate).  Technically, the rules say round up and round down initially, but the ranking then comes into play if round up and rounding down results in the wrong number of total delegates. Continue Reading...

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Single Transferable Vote and the Presidential Primary

By tmess2 | Published February 5, 2020

While everybody is digesting the results from Iowa and guessing how it might impact next Tuesday’s vote in New Hampshire, it is a good time to take a brief look over at elections in Europe — specifically the Republic of Ireland which will vote this Saturday.  What makes Ireland different is that it is one of a handful of countries that use the Single Transferable Vote.

The Single Transferable Vote system is a hybrid of proportional representation and preferential/ranked-choice voting.  Currently, the Democratic Party uses proportional representation to allocate delegates to presidential candidates.  As an initial caveat, both proportional representation and single transferrable vote require multi-member districts.  For the Democratic Party, delegates are allocated in multi-member districts — on both a state-wide and congressional district basis. (Typically, the congressional districts have between four and ten delegates.  State-wide delegates range from a low of two party leader delegates in Wyoming to ninety at-large delegates in California.)  For Ireland, the members of its parliament are elected in thirty-nine constituencies with the constituencies electing between three and five members to parliament.

There are three basic questions that a proportional representation system has to answer. First, how to decide fractional members?  In any system, after all the votes are counted, there is a set number of votes that exactly equals a certain number of delegates/members of parliament.  But, the odds that all of the candidates/parties will end up getting exactly the right number of votes is very, very slim.  Instead, it is likely that some candidates/parties will be  100 or 1,000 votes show of the number needed to win the next delegate/seat, and that other parties will have 100 or 1,000 votes more than the number need to win the previous delegate/seat.  This process is easy when you have two parties/candidates, you simply round up any fraction over .5 and round down any fraction under .5.  But when you have multiple parties, rounding may give you too many or too few seats.   Thus, a system using proportional representation needs to have a system for deciding which parties/candidates get the leftover delegates/seats once you are down to fractional seats. Continue Reading...

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Notes from your Doctor: Good News on 2019-nCoV

By DocJess | Published February 4, 2020

In tracking the numbers of the epidemic, there is some good news flying under the radar. While the number of infections is increasing, and could potentially increase exponentially in the next couple weeks, the number of recovered patients, and the rate of increase of recovery is much quicker than the increase in the number of patient deaths.

These numbers are order of magnitude, since they change at least hourly. But in a broad stroke, the number of worldwide infections went up from about 15,000 on Sunday to about 20,000 on Tuesday (ET, China is a day ahead) with 13% in serious condition.  Deaths over the same period increased from about 360 to 425 (20% increase), while recoveries increased from about 450 to about 725 (60% increase).

This, combined with the number of infections outside of China that are mild or asymptomatic lead to two conclusions: yes, it’s spreading and community based transmission is likely, BUT it’s likely that it will end up with a mortality rate of under 0.5%. In simple terms, this means while the probability of infection is increasing, the chances of the disease being survivable and potentially mild is also increasing.

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The Iowa Caucuses: The Two Takeaways

By DocJess | Published February 4, 2020

There are only two things to say. First, Shadow, the company that coded the web app, also provided it to Nevada for use at their caucuses on the 22nd.

Second, this was the greatest thing that could have happened to Joe Biden. Every campaign had workers at every caucus site, so they all knew the counts from both alignments. The only thing they didn’t know was the math that would determine who got how many delegates. As the candidates made their speeches before departing for New Hampshire, only the Biden campaign sent a letter to the Iowa Democratic Party basically challenging the results. Clear sign that he under-performed.

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Who Wins Iowa?

By tmess2 | Published February 3, 2020

No, this post is not about which candidate I believe will actually win Iowa.  Rather, it is about how the networks will report the result in Iowa this evening.

As discussed in last week’s post on delegate math,  the delegate selection plan for Iowa has the Iowa Democratic Party reporting three separate counts from tonight’s caucuses.  And it will be interesting to see how the media treats these numbers in assessing the results.

The first count is the initial preference votes from the precinct caucuses.  This vote is the vote that most accurately reflects the support that each candidate has and is the closest thing to the votes in other states (excluding those with ranked-choice voting).  In years past, this number has not been available to the media.  There are strong arguments for using this number in determining who “won” Iowa. Continue Reading...

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