Democrats So Excited By Hillary, They Chose Her With A Coin-Toss

Iowa confirms Dems' lack energy for 2016



February 3, 2016

Monday was an historic night for Iowa's Republican Party. In all of Iowa, 188,000 Republicans showed up to caucus, a huge new record and a rare sign of health within the party.

Before Donald Trump tries to take credit for this, note that turnout would still beat the old GOP record of 122,000 (from 2012) even if you left out all of Trump's supporters, both habitual and first-time caucusgoers. Even so, Trump deserves credit for bringing out many new participants to vote for him, and for bringing out perhaps just as many new participants to vote against him.

Another noteworthy fact, and the more important one going forward, is that in a year with no incumbent president on the ballot, the Republican caucuses drew more participants than the Democratic ones. This anomaly fittingly heralds the end of the Obama era, a period of Democratic victories that history might end up attributing to one man's magnetic personality and nothing more. Only about 171,000 Democrats showed up on Monday night for the extremely competitive race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. That's not a bad number, but it falls far short of the 240,000 who showed up in 2008 to nominate Obama.

Between the turnout and the result, Iowa's caucuses provide an early indicator that Republicans are more excited and Democrats less enthusiastic than usual about 2016. Iowa Democrats' tepid embrace of Clinton, who at one point led in the Hawkeye State by more than 50 points, depended on her winning an improbable six out of six coin tosses in various deadlocked precincts to assign the county delegates. (In fact, because of the way Democratic caucuses work, there might have been more Sanders caucusgoers than Clinton supporters, even though Clinton won more delegates.)

Another telling number about Democratic enthusiasm for Clinton is that among the 24 percent of caucusgoers who said the most important quality in a candidate is that they were "honest and trustworthy," Sanders beat Clinton 83-10 percent, an astounding 73-point gap.

Iowa isn't the only place where Democratic enthusiasm seems to be waning as Obama exits stage left from the theater that is American politics. As the Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard noted earlier this week, Republican pollster Ed Goeas has detected an 11-point enthusiasm gap in favor of Republicans, a gap larger than the Republican advantages recorded for the elections of 2010 and 2014.

Other polls show similar forces at work. A CBS/New York Times survey in January showed 73 percent of Republicans and only 65 percent of Democrats were "very enthusiastic" or "somewhat enthusiastic" about the 2016 election. Also in January, Rasmussen asked a slightly different question and found that only 50 percent of Democrats looked forward to the 2016 election and 44 percent had "had enough." On the other side, 71 percent of Republicans looked forward to this November's contest, with only 25 percent being over it already.

America is about to get a big test of whether the Obama revolution is lasting. When Americans elected him in 2008, did they fall for progressivism, or did they vote for an unusually talented and attractive politician? Assuming Republicans nominate an electable candidate, the 2016 election will provide an answer.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/iowa-confirms-dems-lack-energy-for-2016/article/2582256

 

Stupid thread...

 

Stupid response...

 

Riiiiiiiight. Because Democrats went out in droves in Iowa and beat back the Bernie threat, crushing him into the dirt and proclaiming to the world in no uncertain terms that Hillary was their overwhelming choice? LOL! OK. Whatever gets you through the night.

 

No, it's because you're an idiot.

Attention media: You do know you made up the whole 'won on a coin toss' story, right?
By Laura Clawson
Wednesday Feb 03, 2016 · 9:53 AM CST



A few Iowa precincts that ended their caucuses with the flip of a coin have led to an avalanche of terrible coverage, much of it outright false. Raise your hand if you’ve seen coverage claiming that Hillary Clinton’s narrow Iowa Caucus win was determined entirely by coin tosses, which her camp somehow won every single time they happened. If you have, you’ve seen some of this bad reporting.

Maybe you saw Chuck Todd claiming that “Basically we're talking a coin flip may have decided the presidency.” Maybe you saw an outlet like Fox News making similar claims, but then, that’s Fox News. Maybe you saw a Bernie Sanders-supporting outlet angry that the caucus results could supposedly have gone the other way with a different call of the coin. In most of these cases, reporters were confusing county-level delegates for state delegate equivalents, but county delegates and state delegates are two very different things, with the county level being worth much, much less when it comes to finally awarding Iowa’s national delegates, the ones that decide who will be the Democratic presidential nominee. The Des Moines Register explains:

The delegates that were decided by coin flips were delegates to the party's county conventions, of which there are thousands selected across the state from 1,681 separate precincts. They were not the statewide delegate equivalents that are reported in the final results.

The statewide delegate equivalents that determine the outcome on caucus night are derived from the county-level delegates, but are aggregated across the state and weighted in a manner that makes individual county delegate selections at a handful of precincts count for a tiny fraction of the ultimate result.

You may also have seen the widely repeated claim that there were six coin flips Monday night and Clinton won them all (a claim almost always included in pieces that confused county delegates and state delegate equivalents), but also in pieces attempting to explain the delegate differences. But here's the reality: No one knows how many precincts were decided by a coin toss.

[Iowa Democratic Party spokesman Sam] Lau said seven coin flips were reported statewide, and Bernie Sanders won six of them.

The Des Moines Register has identified six coin flips through social media and one in an interview with a caucus participant. Of those seven, Clinton was the apparent winner of six. It's unknown if there is any overlap between the coin flips identified by the Register and the coin flips the state party confirmed.

Monday yielded an incredibly close outcome, and it’s alluring to think it came down to chance in the most literal sense. But that allure doesn’t excuse the terrible reporting and outright misrepresentation that’s been so widely repeated.