The political press screwed up badly by calling Iowa for Trump when Iowans were not done voting.
The political press screwed up badly by calling Iowa for Trump when Iowans were not done voting.
T he Associated Press and other media outlets interfered in the election last night in Iowa by calling the state for Trump while Iowans were still casting votes in the caucus. Trump’s win wasn’t close, so any effect was on the margins. But that’s no defense. It’s happened before; there are predictable ways to avoid doing it, which were ignored; and there are real reasons to worry about the destabilizing effects in this climate if it happens again in a closer election.
The caucus began at 7 p.m. Central, 8 p.m. on the East Coast. The cascade to declare Trump the winner began at 7:31, when the outcome was called by the AP, for reasons it attempted to explain:
The Associated Press declared Trump the winner of the Iowa caucuses based on an analysis of early returns as well as results of AP VoteCast, a survey of voters who planned to caucus on Monday night. Both showed Trump with an insurmountable lead.
Initial results from eight counties showed Trump with far more than half of the total votes counted as of 8:31 pm. ET, with the rest of the field trailing far behind. These counties include rural areas that are demographically and politically similar to a large number of counties that have yet to report.
AP VoteCast also shows Trump with sizable leads among both men and women, as well as every age group and geographic regions throughout the state.
AP VoteCast is a survey conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research of more than 1,500 voters who said they planned to take part in Monday’s Republican caucuses in Iowa. . . . So far, Trump is significantly outperforming his second-place 2016 caucus finish.
(Full disclosure: National Review sent out a push alert about the AP’s call when it happened.)
Even if one defends the methodology here — not an unreasonable one in an election decided by 30 points — the reality is that the caucus process doesn’t have a formal poll-closing time, and everybody who covers the caucuses understands that the process of having surrogates give speeches beforehand means that many places were still voting at 7:31. Reporters and activists on the ground across the state — by no means all of them Republicans or supporters of Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley — recounted examples of places still voting, and worried that voters could see the news on their phones while still deciding for whom to vote. Patricia Murphy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution tweeted after NBC called the race, “I’m sorry — this is crazy to call it at 7:40. Nobody in Boone has even voted yet. Why would they stay if they saw this?” Kyle Lamb, who works for DeSantis, tweeted a screenshot of CNN calling the race at 8:12 p.m. Central time while people were visibly still organizing to vote.
That’s a plain violation of the stated policies of the media. The AP’s own policy states that “AP does not declare a winner in any race before the last polls are scheduled to close in the contest.” As Jim Geraghty observes, “Was that policy followed? If people were still voting in the caucuses, then no, the AP violated its own policy and called a race before the polls had closed.” The NBC News policy states, “NBC News will not project a winner in a race until after the last scheduled poll-closing time in a state.” Nate Silver notes: “Caucuses started at 7 CST and races were called by 730. I guess you can pedantically argue 7 was ‘poll closing time’. But if you’ve ever covered a caucus, you know they can take 1+ hours since there are speeches. Most people hadn’t voted. Clearly violated spirit of the policy.”
Even if it didn’t and couldn’t affect the lopsided outcome, that’s still bad. Iowa allocates delegates proportionally, so the margins matter just as much as the winner does. And everybody understood that a lot of narrative bragging rights — with implications for fundraising and press coverage — rode on the DeSantis–Haley race for second place. Turnout was down by a third last night, with some 60,000 fewer votes cast than in 2016; the drop-off in turnout was larger than the total number of votes cast for Trump. At this writing, DeSantis outpaced Haley by a little over 2,000 votes, so the delegate allocation will be Trump 20, DeSantis nine, Haley eight, and Ramaswamy three. Would that have been different if a winner wasn’t publicly announced before the voting ended? We can never know.
Unsurprisingly, the DeSantis camp — which has a deep mistrust of the press and its tendency to elevate Trump — was especially livid. At 8:05 Iowa time, Team DeSantis communications director Andrew Romeo issued a statement: “It is absolutely outrageous that the media would participate in election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote. The media is in the tank for Trump and this is the most egregious example yet.” The DeSantis campaign was almost certainly mortally wounded last night, and even a few thousand extra votes in its column would not change that, but they are right to be angry nonetheless.
Premature calls have been controversial before, as was the case with Fox News calling Arizona for Joe Biden in 2020 well before the vote count was really certain. (I thought, and still think, that call was too early, but it ended up correct.) But at least the voters in Arizona weren’t still voting; the question was just a matter of whether the methodology for projecting an outcome was certain enough to justify not waiting for a final tally.
Similarly, some older Democrats remain bitter that the networks called the 1980 presidential election for Ronald Reagan while the polls were still open in western states, helping depress Democratic turnout. Among the twelve states wholly or partly in the Mountain and Pacific time zones with senate races that night, Republicans ended up winning ten races, gaining Democrat-held seats in South Dakota, Idaho, Washington, and Alaska along the way to an overall twelve-seat pickup. That’s a slightly fairer complaint, but it probably couldn’t be helped: The networks were calling the states in the Atlantic and Central time zones as the polls closed in those states, and Jimmy Carter won only four of the 26 states east of the Mississippi, and just one of the eleven states in the center column that runs north from Texas and Louisiana. Given Reagan’s western base of support, it would have been comical to pretend that they hadn’t already called enough states to make the outcome obvious.
Far more controversial and consequential was the notorious Fox News call of Florida for Al Gore in 2000, while the polls were still open in the Panhandle — the reddest part of the state, which extends into the Central time zone. There were reports at the time of voters going home when they saw the news — votes that could have mattered in saving the nation from a six-week disputed recount won by George W. Bush by 537 votes.
The Iowa caucus has also had its share of screwups. In 2012, a close finish on the Republican side meant that Mitt Romney was widely reported the winner, robbing Rick Santorum of the benefits of his victory. In 2016, Bernie Sanders supporters fumed at the structure of the caucus that allowed Hillary Clinton to win in spite of Sanders possibly having had more votes. In 2020, the Democrats took days to count the votes.
What happened last night is a shame and a scandal. And for what? A “scoop” in a lopsided race? A chance to dance a little earlier on the grave of DeSantis? If the national political press had any rules or sense of fairness or decency at all, it would institute real reforms to prevent this from happening again. Don’t hold your breath. Next time, it could happen in a situation that matters a lot more than the race for one or two delegates and some bragging rights.