The Risk of Media Confusion About the Iowa Results

As if the Iowa caucuses were not confusing enough, the Democratic Party will report out three different measures of the result. But on top of that, the campaigns have an incentive to try to manipulate the perceptions of “the” result, because perceptions matter so heavily about Iowa’s first-in-the-nation test. The bottom-line result that matters in terms of actually winning convention delegates is the third of the three measures I’ll flag below. And this is the result the main media organizations are committed to reporting out.

BUT the risk in our social media age is that campaigns that do better with the first metric, for which unofficial results will be available before all three official results are reported together, will flood twitter and the blogs with the unofficial count on the first metric in an effort to convince the media that the “winner” in Iowa is whomever wins on that first metric — even though that person might not be the person who actually wins on what the candidates are actually competing for, which is delegates after the final votes have been calculated. Publicizing these initial counts prematurely on social media could actually affect the results themselves if those first-stage numbers come out while voters are still deciding who their second choices are at the “realignment” stage of the Iowa process.

I’ll just identify those three different metrics here, then send readers to the good explanation Elaine Kamarck (at Brookings, and an experienced DNC delegate) provides of how they work. I’ll include an excerpt from a Politico piece on the concerns about efforts by the campaigns to manipulate media and public perceptions of how has “won” Iowa. Let’s hope journalists understand all this before tomorrow evening.

The three different “results” that will come out of Iowa are:

  • The “first expression of presidential preference”
  • The “final expression of presidential preference”
  • The “state delegate equivalency”

Here is Elaine’s explanation of these different measures. And here is an excerpt from the Politico piece on concerns the campaigns have about possible confusion and manipulation:

Sanders and his team have made clear their intention to tout the results of the first round of caucus voting Monday, even though the Iowa Democratic Party stresses that the only number that matters is the final delegate count.

Aides with two top-tier campaigns told POLITICO they worry the Sanders campaign or other pro-Sanders forces — which will be receiving unofficial precinct results from allies in real time — will disseminate that information through social media or publicly claim victory after the first vote, an act that could distort the eventual results in a variety of ways.

A claim of victory after the first vote could encourage supporters of weaker candidates to leave the caucuses early without realigning with another candidate. Or it could create an artificial bandwagon effect by encouraging some caucus-goers to jump to Sanders’ side under the belief that he will be the victor.

Either scenario stands to hurt the campaigns that are more reliant than Sanders on the realignment round that happens after the first preference vote is cast. During realignment, supporters of candidates who failed to hit a 15 percent threshold in the first vote are freed up to switch to another candidate.

Tensions about this are high. Consider this quote in the piece:

“Everybody is playing by one set of rules except for Bernie,” said an aide with one of the competing campaigns. “They don’t really care if they disrupt it. They hate the Democratic Party. They hated them from four years ago, and they hate them now.”

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