realthog

NOTE: I initially posted this as a comment to a thoughtful piece about the Iowa caucuses that eglady  had posted in her journal. When I looked at my comment there on the screen I thought, "Hot damn! I was going to write something about this for my own journal!" So here it is, copied across, with only trivial editing. For a more complete discussion of the caucuses and the media's role in the primaries, I do recommend you to that original piece by eglady: http://eglady.livejournal.com/25896.html.

One thing that concerned me was that the Dem race in the Iowa caucuses (I didn't follow the Repug one as closely) showed what I'd regard as a crystal-clear example of the availability of earlier results influencing later ones.

I was at my desk until late last night working on a new story, and was logging on to the relevant CNN page pretty frequently all evening. (I'll admit it: The reason I was going online so frequently was to keep track of the current cricket match between India and Australia. I checked the caucuses at the same time.)

Up until about 40% of the caucus results had been declared, you really could not have laid a sensible bet between Obama, Edwards and Clinton: the three were neck and neck, spread over at most 2 percentiles and often exchanging the leadership.

Between about 40% and 50%, the situation looked much the same at a glance, but it was evident that Obama was by now consistently the one who was just slightly in the lead.

Thereafter, very suddenly, Obama's lead began increasing dramatically, so that by the end there was about an 8% gap between him and the other two. This means that, among the second half of the announced results, Obama was consistently polling about 15% more than Edwards or Clinton -- an astonishing change from consistently maintaining at best just a 1% lead.

My deduction was that the later-deciding caucuses were hearing the results of the earlier ones, and hence their decisions were being skewed in the manner well known to happen in elections if later voters learn what earlier ones have done (which is why most democracies ban the announcement of any results, even exit polls, until the final vote has been cast).

I discovered this morning from Alternet that, indeed, at about the 50%-reported mark the networks called the Dem result for Obama, even though at the time his advantage was so extremely slender. It's my guess that this was the main reason why Obama's win was by such a wide margin.

In other words, yet again the decisions of the media have affected the functioning of this democracy. In a sense, this example isn't too important, because it looked as if Obama was going to win anyway; on the other hand, heading into NH with an 8% Iowa lead is a bit different from heading into the next primary with a 1% Iowa lead, no?