The Iowa results on the Republican side were officially certified on Wednesday, earlier than anybody expected, and with a surprise. Almost every source believed 27 delegates would be decided by the caucus results, but the remaining 3 “automatic delegates” who are party leaders, would attend the convention unbound and able to support whoever they wished. But it looks like those three delegates will be bound by the caucus results as well.
When you do the required math on 30 delegates instead of 27, everything remains the same, except Huckabee gets a delegate too.
Updating the chart showing the “% of remaining needed to win” graph:
And the raw numbers:
Huckabee and Paul have suspended their campaigns, but since these are bound delegates, they keep them unless the candidates officially release them. I haven’t seen a report of that yet, so won’t remove them from the list at this point. Not that it matters much for single delegates. This is a much more important factor when candidates drop out later in the race once they have already accumulated a significantly sized chunk of delegates.
Huckabee’s one delegate makes no difference to the analysis I posted Tuesday or the follow up from Wednesday.
We still have three candidates showing strength going into New Hampshire It is within the realm of possibility that New Hampshire will add a fourth to that list, but just as likely it will solidify the “three way race” picture. And as I outlined in the Wednesday post the specific New Hampshire delegate rules matter a lot. Specifically the rules essentially give extra bonus delegates to the winner, and don’t allow delegates at all for anyone coming in under 10%. This is a recipe to transform a plurality win to a healthy delegate majority.
So if you are watching the polls as they start to include post-Iowa data, watch carefully not only who is in the lead, but exactly who is above or below the 10% threshold, because that will make a huge difference in the delegate counts.
And an 8-7-7 split with only 1.21% of delegates determined is essentially a tie. And a tie that will soon be overwhelmed numerically by the results from New Hampshire and beyond. So don’t get sucked too deeply into the spin from all quarters taking about who is up and who is doomed. It is still too early for that. (Well, at least if you don’t drop out.)
Five days until New Hampshire.
Note: This post is an update based on the data on ElectionGraphs.com. Election Graphs tracks both a poll based estimate of the Electoral College and a numbers based look at the Delegate Races. All of the charts and graphs seen in this post are from that site. Additional graphs, charts and raw data can be found there. All charts above are clickable to go to the current version of the detail page the chart is from, which may contain more up to date information than the snapshots on this page, which were current as of the time of this post. Follow @ElectionGraphs on Twitter or like Election Graphs on Facebook to see announcements of updates or to join the conversation. For those interested in individual general election poll updates, follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for all the polls as they are added.
