Sanders declares Iowa popular vote victory, but party says it’s not what matters most
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont claimed victory in the Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses on Thursday following days of counting delays, citing a lead in the popular vote totals.
“I want to thank the people of Iowa for the very strong victory they gave us at the Iowa caucuses on Monday night,” Sanders wrote in a message to supporters on Twitter. “Some 6,000 more Iowans came out to support us than any other candidate. With eight strong candidates competing, that is a decisive margin of victory.”
Before the caucuses, the Iowa Democratic Party cautioned against relying on the popular vote total as a metric for who won. That’s because at each precinct around the state, raw votes get translated into state delegate equivalents, or SDEs, according to the party — and the person who wins the most votes doesn’t necessarily earn the most SDEs.
The Iowa Democratic Party defines state delegate equivalents as “the projected number of state party convention delegates the candidates will receive based upon results of the precinct caucuses.”
With 97 percent of precincts reporting Thursday afternoon, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg narrowly led with 550 state delegate equivalents to Sanders’ 547, according to the party’s results page.
State delegates numbers ultimately determine how many Iowa delegates each candidate will have at the party’s convention this summer in Milwaukee, where the nominee to take on President Trump will be selected.
The Iowa Democratic party doesn’t declare a winner of the caucuses, instead presenting results in terms of raw supporters at each caucus (the number where Sanders leads) and how those translate into state delegate equivalents (where Buttigieg has the edge) — but the party said before the caucuses that it “encourages outlets to use the reported SDE number to determine a caucus winner.”
This phenomenon might sound familiar to anyone who remembers the 2016 presidential election: Hillary Clinton won millions more votes across the U.S. overall, but President Trump won a substantial majority in electoral college votes, which determine the winner.
“This is possible because of how (state delegate equivalents) are distributed,” NBC political correspondent Steve Kornacki said on Twitter of Buttigieg’s lead. “Basically, rural areas tend to get more bang for their buck at the expense of college-heavy areas.”
Sanders also spoke about what he called a “decisive victory” in Iowa at his New Hampshire campaign headquarters, just days before that state votes in the first-in-the-nation primary on Tuesday, USA Today reported.
“We are holding a press conference that should have occurred three nights ago in Des Moines, but for the inability of the Iowa Democratic Party to count votes in a timely fashion,” Sanders said, according to USA Today. “That screw-up has been extremely unfair to the people of Iowa, it has been unfair to all of the candidates and all of their supporters. So what I want to do, three days late, is thank the people of Iowa for the very strong victory they gave us Monday night.”
On Twitter, Sanders chalked the strong showing up to grassroots organizing.
Some material in this story appeared in an earlier article by the author.
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 4:29 PM with the headline "Sanders declares Iowa popular vote victory, but party says it’s not what matters most."
