Why Did Iowa Make the Caucuses So Complicated?

Blame 2016.

A lot of reasons contributed to the fiasco Monday, chiefly a breakdown of the process by which caucus leaders were supposed to report results to the Iowa Democratic Party.

But one factor was baked into that process from almost the moment the caucuses ended four years ago.

Historically, the party had focused on highlighting only one caucus result: the number of delegates each candidate had earned for the state convention. The winner of the Iowa caucuses was the person who earned the most state delegates, which translate into national delegates, which determine the nomination. This year, however, the state party chose to release four results from the caucuses.

That’s because in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton edged Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the state delegate count by a quarter of a percentage point, earning roughly 700 to Sanders’ 697. That meant 23 national delegates for Clinton and 21 for Sanders — an inconsequential difference between the two rivals.

Sanders’ 2016 campaign fought for an audit in Iowa — comparing the reported results with the papers on which caucus leaders had recorded voters’ preferences — and accused the state Democratic Party of a lack of transparency.

Largely because of Sanders’ objections, the party decided to release additional numbers in 2020 that it had always logged but never made public: the number of supporters each candidate had in the first round of voting and the number he or she had in the second round, after nonviable candidates were eliminated and caucusgoers realigned.

The idea was that all this data would provide a fuller picture of each candidate’s strength.

Under the old reporting system, for instance, a candidate who received 14% support — just below the threshold for earning delegates — would be indistinguishable from a candidate who received 1% support. But in the raw vote totals, they could get credit for the support they had in the first round — and in a state where perceptions of strength and political momentum matter much more than delegates, that sort of credit can be crucial.

So the caucuses go: They have always been more about creating momentum (or the perception of it) for candidates than about the number of delegates they award. Iowa’s contribution to a candidate’s total number of delegates is trivial. But the state’s contribution to popular conceptions of political viability is immense.

What matters most is how voters across the country view the outcome in Iowa. Having four sets of results from the 2020 caucuses, as opposed to one set of results in 2016, was widely seen as possibly providing more opportunities for candidates to cite the most favorable set of data as evidence of political momentum.

Another consideration for Sanders in 2016 was that, because of the realignment process and the arcane rules by which delegates are allocated, it was possible that he might have actually received more support than Clinton in the first round’s raw vote. But because only the delegate count was released, there was no way to know.

Once the results from Monday night are confirmed and released, we will indeed have a more complete map of how the candidates did than we have in any previous election cycle. But the need to report four sets of results instead of just one was a major factor in the debacle, as the state party struggled with what it called “inconsistencies” in all that data.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .