For those of you who vote strategically (i.e. – if your first-choice candidate “can’t win”, then instead of voting for your first-choice candidate, you instead vote for a less-choice candidate that may have a greater chance of winning.) Note that this type of strategy is only beneficial in a winner-take-all situation. Such rules may be applicable in the November election (although I personally discourage this practice), since most states (NE, ME excepted) allocate their electoral votes based on the state-wide popular-vote winner.
However, in the primaries, most delegates are awarded proportionally – and often by Congressional District. For example, in tomorrow’s New Hampshire Primary, there are seven delegates awarded proportionally to the candidates in each of New Hampshire’s two congressional districts. An additional eight delegates are awarded proportionally to the candidates based on the state-wide primary vote totals. A minimum of only 15% is required to receive delegates. So, a candidate receiving 23% state-wide and in each congressional district would receive five delegates out of 22 total. You should think of the primaries, not like the general election, but more like the Tour-de-France. A contestant need not win any states to obtain the nomination.
I have performed a major site update today. Most of the old html files have been replaced by a database-driven set of scripts. Overall, this provides a signficant enhancement to the content, allowing for greater viewing choices and more flexibility (see, for example, the ability to sort state-level data according to margin of victory, vote percentages, etc.). Additional features also appear – such as home state maps. Also note that some of the vote totals have changed slightly. This is due to continuing research and adjustments to individual state and/or county totals. Such changes entered into the database now cascade through the entire site seamlessly (as opposed to the old method of updating every individual html page in which that piece of data was incorporated). If you discover any problems (broken links, strange appearance, etc.) please consider entering a bug in the new bug tracking database.
The (almost complete) results of the Iowa Caucus are available in the 2004 Primary pull-down option of the Election Results section. The county-level map is not yet finished (I’m having difficulty finding complete and accurate results – the Iowa Secretary of State does not run the event – If you have a site suggestion, please leave a comment.)
The race dynamics shown in the pre-caucus polls proved accurate in the rising support for the campaigns of John Kerry and John Edwards. It appears that the negative campaigning took its toll.
Also, any visitors that attended the Iowa Caucus and would like to share their experience, please let me know. I’d like to highlight the event (in a weblog entry) from the perspective of a participant.
The 2004 Democratic Primary and Caucus results infrastructure pages are now available (from the “Primary” pull-down menu in the Election Results section). These will be updated as the campaign progresses (generally the day after the results are available).
Only two days before the Iowa Caucus, instead of keeping my eyes glued to CNN or the computer screen, I found myself hiking in the wilderness of Southern California! A magnificent place – just to the south of Palm Springs is Mount San Jacinto Wilderness State Park. An airial tramway (with quite a large gondola) whisks passengers up about a 2 mile cable to the mountain station, some 8,500 feet above sea level. Here is a beautiful high forest with large pines – and about 2 inches of snow with a temperature of 39F (and to think I go hiking in the snow in California after leaving the icebox in Boston!).
I didn’t stay in the “cold” long, and soon I was back in the desert below for a quick lunch in Palm Springs. Next was a visit to Joshua Tree National Park. The park is another national treasure, a beautiful desert landscape filled with, yep, Joshua Trees – essentially a rather large Yucca plant. The landscape was filled with huge rounded boulders of granite, flat plains, and mountains. One small hike was through the “hidden valley”, a lowland area surrounded on all sides by rocky uplift (with spires) – it was blasted into in the early part of the 20th century in order to allow cattle to access some vegetation to feed on. Overall, a very enjoyable outing.
The District of Columbia held its presidential “primary” yesterday. However, the event was nothing more than a political “beauty contest”, and not a very comprehensive one at that. Only four of the leading nine candidates were on the ballot (Howard Dean Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun, and Al Sharpton). The remaining candidates did not participate (pressure was applied from the national Democratic party because the DC primary date violates party rules). No delegates were awarded from the results of the primary.
The preliminary results of the DC primary (from the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics) show a very-low turnout of 16.3% (42,318 cast ballots out of 259,322 registered Democrats). Howard Dean captured the most votes, 17,584 (42.8%) followed by Al Sharpton with 14,090 (34.3%), Carol Moseley-Braun with 4,776 (11.6%), Dennis Kucinich with 3,408 (8.3%), and perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche Jr. with 498 (1.2%). Other candidates garnered about 1.8%.
I’m back from a bit of vacation. Hope that everyone enjoyed the holidays. Its now only 15 days until the Iowa Caucus and the kick-off of the 2004 Presidential Contest. The site will, of course, be following each of the primary and caucus contests and present results. The site was also just upgraded to a higher-bandwidth server (I bought more bandwidth to accomodate the anticipated increase in traffic).
On a slightly different note, I was very entertained by the creation, on the atlas forum, of a forum fantasy election. Quite a fun idea, with some fine posts and intelligent wit. I have moved all of these topics to their own section (appropriately named, Atlas Fantasy Elections).
I’ve seen some chatter about the article at CommonWealth Magazine titled Beyond Red and Blue – The New Map of American Politics. The analysis divides the country into 10 political regions that cross state (but not county) boundaries – with all ten regions having approximately an equal number of voters (based on ballots cast in the 2000 general election). The article presents an interesting angle on the politics of the 2004 campaign based on the results of past Presidential Elections within these geographic regions. The article is long, but certainly an interesting read.
I have rebuilt the Election 2004 user predictions scripts. The process is now entirely web-based and requires signficantly less effort than the first version. The software now calculates electoral votes automatically and – most importantly, the scripts generate the user maps.(no more headaches calculating electoral vote totals, trying not to fill the EV labels with the paint bucket, or frustrating yourself with the upload problems). I have also added a “most-recent” link in order to view the most recent predictions and will soon add a search feature as well as other ways to view the submissions. Please let me know if you run across any bugs or have further suggestions.
I’ve completed some more refinements on the Electoral College Calculator (found in the 2004 section). Map polygons are significanlty refined. Also added image-mapping and mouse-over descriptions text box (clicking on a state brings up the results of the 2000 election in that state). Work has also begun on integrating this feature into the user prediction section and it will likely be available in the coming days. Please feel free to forward more comments and suggestions.
A magnificent place – just to the south of Palm Springs is Mount San Jacinto Wilderness State Park. An airial tramway (with quite a large gondola) whisks passengers up about a 2 mile cable to the mountain station, some 8,500 feet above sea level. Here is a beautiful high forest with large pines – and about 2 inches of snow with a temperature of 39F (and to think I go hiking in the snow in California after leaving the icebox in Boston!). 
I didn’t stay in the “cold” long, and soon I was back in the desert below for a quick lunch in Palm Springs. Next was a visit to Joshua Tree National Park. The park is another national treasure, a beautiful desert landscape filled with, yep, Joshua Trees – essentially a rather large Yucca plant. The landscape was filled with huge rounded boulders of granite, flat plains, and mountains. One small hike was through the “hidden valley”, a lowland area surrounded on all sides by rocky uplift (with spires) – it was blasted into in the early part of the 20th century in order to allow cattle to access some vegetation to feed on. Overall, a very enjoyable outing.