Krylov said:
As a foreigner to your politics, I found it quite surprising to see the difference in totals between Democrats and Republicans. Does any of you have an idea of why so few Democrats decided to vote in this caucus, or am I missing an obvious point? Judging by the marginal difference between Sanders and Clinton, one would perhaps expect a higher turnout.
Or is the population of Democrats in Iowa simply very, very small?
Iowa has a very convoluted system for Democrats. The numbers reflected in the earlier post don't show how many voted for each candidate, but the number of voters is small simply because it's hard to vote (relative to a primary). You have to be available for the full evening and you have to interact with other people at the caucus, etc.
What the numbers from the previous post do show is how many delegates for each candidate move on to the next phase. That's a pretty good indication of how the candidate did, but delegates don't have to vote for the candidate they were selected to represent. There's various reasons they might change their support to a different candidate, with one being their candidate may no longer be in the race by time the delegates meet (which is in March).
After the second phase, a final phase is done to divvy up who gets how many out of 44 delegates.
Besides the delegates that were voted on, there are 8 superdelegates (party office holders, etc) that can vote how they feel. They're not officially committed to any candidate until the convention late in the summer, but most will have at least verbally committed to one candidate or the other. This year, 5 of the superdelegates have already committed to Clinton. Assuming they honor that commitment, she wins Iowa simply by matching Sanders in the delegates "voted" on.
Which partly explains why Clinton is proclaiming victory even though the vote totals look like a tie to the average person.
The actual winner won't be known with 100% certainty for months (at which point it won't matter anymore).
This is somewhat similar to how most states selected delegates in the old days, when the party leadership pretty much selected the party's nominee. TV has made the process more democratic simply because primaries can be exciting and suspenseful and make for good ratings on TV. And lots of TV viewers generates excitement for a party's candidate, which improves his/her chances in the general election.
As to who won, there were about 5 victory speeches between the two parties, so it looks like there were lots of winners. Cruz definitely won. Coming out of Iowa, he holds a commanding lead of 1 delegate over Trump and Rubio. Clinton definitely is winning Iowa, since I think she leads by about 4 or 5 or 6 (you never know for sure until they're actually selected) with only 3 superdelegates left to make up their minds.
, followed by 24 other candidates; those guys must have been write-ins.