Iowa Caucus Results: Cruz Wins While Sanders and Clinton End in a Virtual Tie With Clinton Winning by Three Flips of a Coin

by Scott Creighton

After much hoopla and weeks of “nothing but Iowa” from the MSM news networks, the Iowans held their caucus last night. The results were tabulated with a new bit of software given to them for free from Microsoft. Bernie has already said he wont challenge the results. He’s the same guy who said he was “sick and tired” of hearing about Clinton’s illegal email scandal way back when.

Hmm.

As expected, voter turnout was higher than in 2012 for both parties. Though the Sanders campaign was not able to generate the excitement of the Obama marketing campaign of the year in 2008 (beating out Apple, NIKE and Coors), they were still able to motivate a large number of young people to get out to the caucus locations and they essentially scored a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Three caucus sites had to flip a coin for their odd state delegate equivalents since they were tied. Clinton won all three of those.

Here’s the voting results from Iowa.

Republican voter turnout Iowa caucus:

• 2016 – 180,000 Republican Iowans voted
• 2012 – 121,000 Republican Iowans voted

Democrat voter turnout Iowa caucus:

• 2016 – 171,109 Democrat Iowans voted
• 2012 – 25,000 Democrat Iowans voted
• 2008 – 239,000 Democrat Iowans voted

Iowa Democrat Party State Delegate Equivalent counts from last night:

BuzzFeed News ‏@BuzzFeedNews 1h1 hour ago

State delegate equivalents awarded tonight, per Iowa Democratic Party:

1. Clinton: 699.57 (awarded 29 delegates)
2. Sanders: 695.49 (awarded 21 delegates)
3. O’Malley: 7.68
4. Pending: 2.28

If you factor in the coin flips going the other way, Hillary loses. If you factor in the fact that O’Malley is basically “Sanders Lite” and cast his votes for Sanders, Hillary loses. If you factor in the pending votes, the O’Malley votes and the coin flips, Sanders beat her handily. So as far as the referendum on the morality of the Democratic Party that I wrote about yesterday is concerned, looks like we still have a slight pulse when it comes to that moral center we’ve been missing since “CHANGE”

O’Malley has now ended his run for the presidential nomination.

Of course, the Dems don’t report on the popular vote, just the number of State Delegate Equivalents they assign.

Sanders and Clinton didn’t respond last night to the numbers. They just came out about an hour ago (writing this at 4:45am eastern).

Sanders is saying this is a validation of “our” political revolution and says it is now clear that a socialist can win in the United States in 2016.

Sanders is expected to win in New Hampshire next week. I just saw him (6:16am eastern) on the back of a pick-up truck in the middle of some massive crowd in New Hampshire somewhere. They are definitely motivated.

On the Republican side, televangelist Tea Partier Ted Cruz won convincingly:

Donald Trump immediately came out and said all his people told him to forget about Iowa from the start because “they told me I couldn’t win it” so of course, he’s touting this loss as a major Trump Victory even after the polls had him way out in front just prior to the opening of the caucuses. Cruz was actually trending down in the weeks leading up to last night’s voting.

In spite of the large turnout and Trump’s leading in the polls by a considerable margin over the past few weeks, the New York Times has already come out with an explanation of why Trump lost Iowa. It’s not hard to imagine the increase in voter turnout was largely due to Trumpmania, yet somehow he came closer to finishing third than he did winning. Much closer.

There was even talk about a number of people crossing the artificial political divide to vote for Trump. Yet here we are.

In the loss, Trump turned into Mr. Nice Guy:

“We finished second, and I want to tell you something: I’m just honored. I’m really honored. And I want to congratulate Ted, and I want to congratulate all of the incredible candidates, including Mike Huckabee, who has become a really good friend of mine, so congratulations to everyone.” Trump said to his supporters Monday night, with some of the kindest words about Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) he’s uttered in weeks. Huffington Post

Mocrosoft’s BING program said that Trump and Hillary would win. It takes the internet of things and predicts the outcome. So far it’s batting .500

I wonder how BING predicted the coin-flips because without them, BING is 0 and 2.

My guess is you are going to start hearing some websites start talking about vote rigging on the Republican side in the next few hours. Trump is hailed as the first anti-establishment multi-billionaire in the history of mankind, so expect “shenanigans!” to become the call to action very soon.

I don’t doubt they rigged it. Trump was never supposed to be the leader at this point, just the court jester. He himself has made that perfectly clear. Trumpmania is an unintended consequence of the right-cover he is providing the “responsible” republican candidates throughout this long primary season.

For that matter, Trump didn’t sound much like Trump last night when he conceded his loss. In fact, he sounded like one would expect someone to sound who was just there to serve as cannon fodder for the next anointed president.

In the Republican caucus, the distance between 3rd and 4th place is huge with Ben Carson receiving less than half the votes of Rubio.

Mike Huckabee officially suspended his campaign late last night after receiving 2% of the vote. Christie and Kasich will probably drop out after New Hampshire.

Jeb Bush spent 14 million dollars in Iowa which turned into a 6th place finish. That’s roughly $2,800 per vote. You could triple his votes and Ben Carson still beat him and Carson’s could be doubled and he would still have lost to Rubio. Bush has been focusing on Iowa for the past month or so, practically conceding the state to the Moral Majority candidates. He’s already done twice as many campaign stops in the state as he did in Iowa. Perhaps that’s because it’s the first to utilize electronic voting machines to tally the votes and we all know how much those things love the Bush clan.

Rubio is spinning his 3rd place finish as some kind of anti-establishment victory. So is Cruz. So is Trump. So is Bernie. So is Hillary (somehow)

In short, this is all much ado about nothing. The delegate divides between 1st and 2nd place finishers on both sides are nominal at best. Barely a blip on the radar compared to what they need to win the nomination.

The pleasant distraction these primaries serve as is over for the time being and the people of Iowa get to get back to living their lives without a bunch of overly made-up talking heads sticking microphones in their faces every-time they step out of their homes.

The circus is leaving town and the rest of the country can get back to not giving a shit about what happens in Iowa for another 4 years until the next freak-show rolls into town.

You would think with the massive increase in turnout Trump and Sanders would have won handily in both caucuses. The fact that they didn’t may just fuel some speculation about Microsoft tampering with the results.

I don’t know about all of that but I do know for an hour leading up to the opening of the caucuses last night, MSNBC (Microsoft) and CNN both spent almost the entire time explaining why the election results would not match entrance polls or the other polls that were held leading up to the caucus. It seemed like getting out ahead of the story with their spin was of an unusual level of importance last night, way before a single vote was cast.

Hmmm.

There you have it. The first official “election” results of 2016.

UPDATE: Now there is a cell phone recording of Sanders saying they don’t know if they are going to contest the results.

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