The Command Post
2004 US Presidential Election
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January 15, 2004
| Iowa Dems Want Poll Results Delayed

[AP]

In a letter to members of the National Election Pool, an exit poll consortium, Jean Hessburg, the state party's executive director, asked that reporting of entrance poll results be delayed at least 30 minutes after the caucuses are under way Monday night.

"Your plan to release the results of your entrance polls at 7 p.m. CST places the results at the most critical point in the precinct caucuses -- the point where participants enter the first phase of alignment," Hessburg said in the letter. "We fear the premature release of your findings may jeopardize or handicap the outcome in the first-in-the-nation caucuses."



Posted by Michele at January 15, 2004 07:26 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Hmm, let me see if I understand this… they think people will change their minds based on poll results, and are worried about it? If those people are going to change their minds, then they probably had a poor line of reasoning to begin with and probably shouldn’t even be involved.

Please correct me if I misunderstood, I’m not a caucus-savvy person.

Posted by: Alex Dale at January 15, 2004 03:09 PM

the answer does lie in the fact that iowa has a caucus instead of a primary. unfortunately, i won’t be very good at explaining this.
the caucus method is set up so that it will encourage you to vote truly for exactly who you want.
suppose candidates A and B are tied for the lead in the polls, you don’t mind B, but really prefer C (who does poorly in the polls). in a primary, you might consider voting for B because you don’t like A and figure C is a lost cause. in iowa, your vote is not ‘wasted’ if you vote for C, because you can still support B at the next stage. only candidates that get 15% of the vote count. so after the initial voting is concluded, the caucus starts and horse trading of votes for the unpopular candidates occurs, so all the votes (less than 15%) for candidate C can be shifted to B to help break the tie between A and B. this is why a ‘winner’ in a caucus is one that does better than expected - you get a measure of who people want and who they will settle for. generally, you would shift votes to a “like” candidate that best mirrors your favored candidate, but information travels so fast now that complex strategies can develop.
with an “anybody but dean” movement in the budding stages, a lot of votes may get shifted to gephardt, or another candidate such as kerry or edwards (even clark who’s not even on the ballot) depending on the strategy of each campaign. if an accurate poll is available to help these guys, a strategy may develop like - first shift just enough votes to whoever is in second to barely exceed dean’s total, then shift to the true second-favored candidate.

i really am not that certain about caucuses other than they are strange animals, so please don’t state any of this as fact to anyone else.

Posted by: wafflestomper at January 15, 2004 04:39 PM

Wow, and the Iraqis think they can just jump into elections…

Posted by: Alex Dale at January 15, 2004 07:48 PM

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