Absolutely even-steven 50%-50%, within, if I recall correctly, about a dozen actual votes of each other. So, of course, Mrs. Clinton received three more assigned delegates than Weekend Bernie. Because she's The Empress.
No wonder he's contemplating demanding a recount. And good luck with that, as Captain Ed explains this morning:
How does one recount a caucus? Even on the Republican side that would be difficult, as was discovered in 2012 in the razor-thin outcome between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. On the Democrat side, it would be all but impossible, thanks to the multiple-round system employed. In each precinct, voting takes place initially to figure out where the candidates stand; candidates are then eliminated if they cannot get to 15% and another round of voting takes place to see where those freed-up votes will go. Even though Martin O’Malley was in most precincts easily eliminated, the existence of multiple votes would still foul a recount process.
Why else does Sanders think the Democrat "establishment" made it so convoluted? Remember who their candidate is - and it ain't him.
The big takeaway from the Jackass side of the Iowa Caucuses is that, as the Cylons like to say, and as we here have been saying for the past three years, "All this has happened before":
Iowa wasn’t just supposed to be a tentative first step in [Mrs.] Clinton’s "inevitable" march to the Democrat nomination, it was meant to be the cornerstone of a rebuilt political persona – and her national team was built from Iowa outward, with a foundational goal of winning here, and winning big.
But nothing is ever easy with Hillary Clinton – especially not here — and her inability to ride a first-class ground organization to triumph underscores the candidate’s weakness and the lack of a message that resonates with primary voters. For months, the Republican side of the aisle has been filled with drama and uncertainty – yet in the end it was a seventy-four-year-old, wild-haired socialist who has muddied a contest that was supposed to be predictable. …
In 2008, [Mrs.] Clinton’s ambivalence about Iowa resulted in a muddled strategy and a flawed field operation. This time she had the best operation money could buy and experience could muster: The hundred-plus staffer operation was built by [Mrs.] Clinton’s thirty-five-year-old campaign manager Robby Mook, [Mrs.] Clinton’s best field organizer eight years ago, and he devoted the bulk of the candidate’s time and the campaign’s resources to the first four voting States, with an extreme focus on Iowa over other States where the campaign’s presence was bare-bones.
But [Mrs.] Clinton suffered from the same structural disadvantage here that hurt her in 2008. Her appeal was limited, mostly, to older frequent caucus goers – with a goal of maximizing turnout and pulling from a poll of about twenty thousand Democrat voters who never participate in the labor-intensive caucus process. Sanders, who attracted big crowds on college campuses and high schools, had a much larger reservoir of young people to draw from – and he apparently did just that on caucus night, according to initial estimates.
Even purportedly learning her lessons from last time around, being much better prepared and equipped, "tanned, rested, and ready," and not having to worry about being submarined by another big-eared, mom-jeaned, wunderkind savant, or even a Marxist revolutionary heroine like Elizabeth Warren, the result was still pretty much the same: She underperformed, even with a state-of-the-art GOTV ground game. This cycle, once again, is proving above all else that 2008 was not a fluke, not because Barack Obama was better, had nothing to do with "lightning" or where it struck, but plainly and simply that Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate who is incapable of winning the Democrat nomination, much less the presidency.
And that doesn't figure her myriad scandal baggage into the equation. On which there are fresh updates:
U.S. intelligence officials say "top-secret" emails Hillary Clinton kept on her private email server when she headed the State [Commissariat] include the real names of CIA spies serving undercover overseas — a violation of federal law that has put the agents in harm's way, the Observer reports.
And, the Observer's John Schindler writes, those emails also include the names of foreigners on the CIA payroll, possibly endangering their lives. "At a minimum, valuable covers have been blown, careers have been ruined, and lives have been put at serious risk. Our spies' greatest concern now is what's still in Hillary's emails that investigators have yet to find," Schindler, a former National Security Agency analyst, says in his report.
He also quotes a senior intelligence community official as saying the security breach is a "death sentence."
"If we're lucky, only [foreign] agents, not our officers, will get killed because of this," the official says.
One more direction from which Ed Klein points out that the FBI is closing in on the Ugly Dutchess, and at the worst possible time:
After six long months of investigation — hundreds of interviews, tens of thousands of documents, and untold hours retrieving deleted emails from Hillary's home-brew server — Comey and his team of more than one hundred agents are finally closing in on Hillary and her closest advisers.
Prosecutors at the [Injustice, Revenge & Coverup Commissariat] and managers in Hillary's presidential campaign tell Ed Klein Confidential that the FBI has zeroed in on three people in Hillary's inner circle.
These three — Huma Abedin[-Wiener], Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan....
The top Hillary lieutenants who did the cutting & pasting of top secret emails from State's classified, protected and encrypted government network to the unprotected "in the clear" one to send to her private email address - for her "convenience" - you'll recall. Hence, the conspiracy part of Emailgate.
....have been notified by the FBI that they should prepare to testify under oath about their involvement in the handling of classified national security secrets on Hillary's home-brew email system.
Hillary is going to get massacred next week in the New Hampshire primary anyway, and as Dick Morris has pointed out, only one Democrat candidate in the past half-century has lost both Iowa and New Hampshire and gone on to win that party's nomination. Mrs. Clinton is supposedly an exception to that rule, but with a criminal indictment breathing down her neck - or at least the horrid publicity of an FBI public recommendation of same - joining all the other headwinds against which she's trying to tack, that may be one gale force too many, to reach a general campaign in which she'd be doomed absent Donald Trump's presence in the race in one way, shape, or form - no matter how much the entire system may be rigged in her favor.
Right, Bernie?
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