Clinton and Sanders in Dead Heat!

Clinton: 49.8

Sanders: 49.6

SHE WON A PRECINCT BY A COIN TOSS!!


http://theweek.com/speedreads/602890/hillary-clinton-wins-iowa-precinct-by-coin-toss

How is that democratic lol??

FAAAAK

EZ

Nigga what? That just makes me hate her even more.

It's one delegate out of over 2k for the national election. Caucuses are pretty weird, though.

Edited 2/2/2016 05:20:31

Clinton has won 3 precinct delegates by coin toss to Sander's zero(This is still statistically valid), which count towards state delegates, which count towards the nomination. While it may be insignificant, it could possibly become important depending on where those precincts are located.

Odds are it's not going to flip the election since Clinton's leading by multiple state delegate equivalents; the coin flips only got her county delegates.

But the caucus system is all sorts of broken, as you can see here.

Fun fact: historically, whoever wins has a 57% chance of not being the nominee.

It's still interesting to watch though, and Clinton is not actually winning by multiple state delegate equivalents(it's .3% or .2%) when ignoring super delegates, which we probably should, as they have the right to change their vote.

Iowa and New Hampshire are important this election mostly due to the fact that if Sanders loses both, the momentum is gonna die, but win both, and we see another Obama-esque scenario on the horizon.

Let me clarify the terminology a bit:

There are something like 1.2k state delegate equivalents that are used by the Iowa caucuses rather than direct votes. Currently, Hillary is leading by 3 state delegate equivalents- or a 0.2% - 0.3% margin over Sanders. These are determined based on county delegates to some extent (they're the lowest level, right above the actual votes).

Right now, Hillary is getting one more national primary delegate than Sanders from this due to her lead by 3 state delegate equivalents. 3 county delegates would not have swung the caucus results unless the margin was significantly narrower.

It's a shame that coin tosses were involved, but blame that on the caucus format.

Another implication of this: We don't know who got the most actual votes in Iowa. We won't ever know, since it's just not reported. Hillary isn't winning by 0.3% of votes- she's winning by 0.3% of state delegate equivalents, which are two levels removed from actual votes. For all we know, she could be winning by a larger margin (likely due to polling) or Bernie could be ahead when it comes to actual votes, although of course they don't directly count here.

Edited 2/2/2016 06:19:06

I agree to this statement, Both you and I failed at communicating the same idea(whoops!).

Well, I'm curious as to what will happen to O'malley's delegates, he currently has 8, which is enough to tip the balance, and if divided according to poll(2 Sanders:1 clinton), we could have a tie or Sanders victory.

Doesn't he just keep them? I mean, they're still delegates that were selected for him; even if he's suspending his campaign, at worst that puts him on the level of a write-in candidate, and those don't normally have to split their votes with their voters' second preference.

Hillary got 6 delegate by winning 6 coin flips in a row. That's a 1 in 64 chances..

And she won by 3 delegates

Doesn't he just keep them?

Well he suspended his race after the Caucus night so I don't think those delegates get redistributed. The bigger implication is 1) does O'Malley throw his support behind Clinton they were good friends before the election or does 2) O'Malley not give an endorsement and Bernie/Hillary going running after his votes (which by polls usually split 50-50)?

Iowa isn't that big a deal for Democrats, anyway. It's pretty white, tbh.

6 coin tosses, she won them all. Pretty shady to me.

They did coin tosses because in those precincts the two literally tied.

@Hitchslap:

Hillary won 6 precinct delegates through coin flips.

The way Iowa works is:

- voters vote and precinct delegates are appointed to represent them

- precinct delegates vote for county delegates based on their precincts

- county delegates vote for district delegates based on their counties

- district delegates vote for state delegates based on their districts

- state delegates are the "votes" we actually see and used to determine national primary delegates

The coin flips happened at the precinct delegate level. Hillary won by 3 state delegates (3 levels away) and got 2 more national delegates (4 levels away) as a result.

The coin flips happened because they weren't important enough (even 6 of them) to change the outcome outside extremely odd scenarios.

I don't believe it impacted them this time around, but someone please check.