The Daily Background

Turnout

• Despite some early media reports that suggested that only as few as 130,000 Democrats might caucus this year in Iowa, all signs point to a record turnout on the Dem side. Republican turnout looks to be similar to what it was in 2000 (between 80K and 90K).
• For my part, I predicted the following about turnout:
  

  I think turnout on the Democratic side will be higher than many bloggers anticipate, with it ranging between 150K and 200K, with 160K being about the sweet spot. There is the potential for turnout being significantly higher than that however. The weather is not bad, and all signs point to record turnout. On the Republican side, I anticipate turnout will be less than or around 100K.

• Marc Ambinder provides a solid guide for what turnout could mean for the various candidates:
  

  150,000 — if turnout is significantly above that figure for Democrats, then Democrats say a victory for Barack Obama is almost assured. If it’s 150,000 to 135,000, Democrats think that Clinton will win. If it’s at 135,000 or lower, then Edwards is the man…

  80,000 — High turnout on the Republican side benefits Mike Huckabee; lower turnout benefits Mitt Romney.

Results

• Right now only about 30% of precincts are reporting on the Democratic side, with all the candidates tied. John Edwards took an early lead, but that has now vanished with the Big Three all tied up. This was expected because the precincts that report their results earliest are in small rural areas where he does the best. The precincts that are likely to favor Obama and Clinton are in the more populated, urban areas of the state which have more delegates, but return their results later because caucsing takes longer due to turnout.
• Also of note: the IA state Democratic Party’s dedicated results website is holding up much better under the load than its Republican counterpart, which has been devastated by a high volume of visitors. It is likely that the two sites are experiencing a similar level of traffic, but the Dem site relies on a higher-tech AJAX system which refreshes results dynamically (without the user having to manually reload the page), thus saving valuable bandwidth.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog