Yesterday there were caucuses in Nevada for both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as a Republican-only primary in South Carolina. The Democratic primary in South Carolina is next Saturday. I'll look at South Carolina later when there is more information.
In Nevada Mitt Romney walked away with the Republican delegates, while on the Democratic side Clinton and Obama split most of the Democratic delegates between them. Hullabaloo was in Nevada and made some interesting comments. Edwards essentially did not contest the caucuses strongly, while Hillary and Obama spent a lot of money to influence the national press. Let's look at the Democratic caucuses.
It was a beauty contest held for the national political press.
Nevada was a beauty contest. For the most part, the results of the Nevada caucuses are not much more significant nationally than a witch doctor killing a chicken and spilling the guts to divine the future.
Hillary's camp is claiming a win because she got 4% more Democratic caucus-goers to support her than supported Obama. Obama's camp is claiming a win because Obama gets 13 state delegates to the national convention while, because of the arcane weighting Nevada gives rural counties, Hillary only gets 12 national delegates.
Maybe. Those are "projected" national delegates, not selected delegates bound to a candidate. Those delegates selected yesterday were to the county conventions, not to the national convention. At the county conventions the parties will select delegates to the state convention, where delegates to the national convention will be selected. Delegates to the county and state conventions are not bound to a candidate. So there is no real telling who got how many delegates in Nevada.
Thus, yesterday was a beauty contest that has less real significance than a single, very local poll. Really, no one cares except the Nevadans and the national press looking for something to report before February 5th.
The rest of the Nevada Democratic delegates
Today's reports show that Hillary and Obama are splitting 25 delegates to the national convention between them, but as I posted earlier, Nevada gets 33 delegates to the national convention. That's eight missing. I just rechecked the New York Times, and 33 is what they reported. Where are the other eight?
Super delegates? That's my bet, but I don't know yet.
[Addendum #2 - 1/21/2008 12:39 PM - see Democratic Party superdelegates for a description of who the Democratic Party superdelegates to the convention are.]
Democrats showed they considered the 2008 election to be important.
There is one thing real about the Nevada caucuses. In 2004 about 9,000 Democrats came out to the caucus. This time more than 114,000 attendees showed up. That's more than a 1200% increase.
That means that more than a quarter of the number of Democrats who voted for Kerry in 2004 (397,190) came out to the caucuses, and it is harder and more time-consuming to caucus than it is to vote. Democrats are saying it is time for change in Washington. It is only the exact nature of the change and the person to make the changes that is still in question. [Michael Barone in his “Almanac of American Politics” describes Nevada as a basically Republican state, so comparing turnout across parties probably has little relevance for the national election.]
No evidence of voter suppression.
There were allegations that members of the Culinary Union were trying to coerce voters to support Obama rather than Hillary, but since Hillary got the majority at eight of the eleven special caucus locations on the Las Vegas strip, apparently if there was such an effort it didn't work. Prior to the caucus, but after the Culinary Union endorsed Obama, the educational unions that supported Hillary suddenly suspected that the Culinary Union would be in a position to herd an unrepresentative number of Obama caucus-goers to their "captured" caucus locations or to coerce caucus-goers at those locations step over to the Obama side. (No secret votes in a caucus.) So the educational union sued to prevent those caucus locations. They lost. The national Press loved it, though. It gave them something "sexy" to report. But the caucus results show that there was no "there" there.
Dday observed a lot of passionate disagreement on the candidates, but has no evidence that there was any voter suppression or manipulation . Such rumors make good, shocking news reports that will be widely printed, but those reports should be considered highly unreliable. Wait for any official investigations before they become believable.
It doesn't look like any investigations will occur. That's probably because there was no coercion. For someone with a conspiracy turn of mind an alternative explanation is that because the stakes in Nevada after the press leaves are so low that it isn't worth raising such very negative issues in what is an entirely internal Democratic Party process. My bet is that nothing remarkable happened. The Press hates that kind of result.
The Poor showing of Edwards.
Edwards got no projected national delegates at all. But as he points out, he did not advertise, while both other candidates spent heavily to get a good result that would influence the Press. Edwards didn't have the money to waste on a beauty contest.
If Edwards were to show a strong result on super Tuesday and after, nothing stops the Nevada Democrats from supporting him at the National Democratic Convention. So, except for the national press reports that Edwards did poorly, Nevada doesn't matter to Edwards. If his message starts resonating between now and the national convention, that won't matter, and Edwards has enough financial support to run all the way to the convention. His message should get more traction as the economy gets worse, and the Democratic Party is moving away from supporting corporations and towards supporting American workers largely because of Edwards. His message is the one that Democratic candidates running in Republican congressional districts in 2006 won on, and it is only because the national Democratic leadership and the national Press don't have a clue what his happening outside of Washington, D.C. that the Democratic generally are still running on the corporate K-Street dominated status quo. Edwards is changing that, and he is bringing his message at a time the nation is finding it appropriate.
Anything else?
The Nevada witch doctors have killed the chicken and spilled the entrails. This is as much as I can divine from the process so far, but I'm sure there will be more to read in the next few days.
Addendum 5:08 PM CST
dday has a good report on the accusations regarding voter suppression and vote stealing. This is not a definitive guarantee that nothing untoward actually happened, but it describes why such reports have been spread.
As I say, don't take any accusations seriously until a real investigation is started, and even then check to see of that is a PR move. So far there is nothing but a few unsubstantiated rumors caused by clearly understandable administrative errors and decisions that were perceived as unfair but were not. If Obama is half the politician I think he is, he'll have a statement out shortly that he has had the issue looked into and there was no significant problem.
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