It would have been malpractice if the AP had called who would get second and third when it called Trump the winner. It was much too early to know that.
Unlike many others, I’m not bothered by the AP and other media outlets calling Donald Trump as the winner of the Iowa caucuses as early as they did. I mentioned this on the liveblog last night, and Dan McLaughlin argued the opposite view. He has now written a full piece (read it here) laying out his argument as to why the AP should not have called the race when it did. I remain unconvinced.
It’s important to note that Dan is not making the accusation that the media did this with some kind of political agenda. Dan quotes from the AP’s explanation of its methodology, which was entirely reasonable as a matter of statistics.
Think of it this way: The FiveThirtyEight final polling average for Iowa had Trump in the lead by 34 points over second place. All that a race call means is who will get first place. Even if the polls were way off, and Trump was actually, say, ten points worse than expected and all of those voters went directly to the second-place candidate (highly unlikely), Trump would still win Iowa by 14 points. It simply wasn’t a close election. It made perfect sense for the AP to see a few initial results, see that nothing was significantly different than polling predicted, and call the race for Trump, which is what it did. There was no conceivable way that any candidate other than Trump would get the most votes.
Dan’s objection is not to methodology or to the correctness of the call, but to the act of calling a race “where people are still voting.” He, along with Jim Geraghty and others, argues that networks did not abide by their stated policies to not make race calls before polls close.
But as Dan notes, “the caucus process doesn’t have a formal poll-closing time.” Iowa has a doors-closing time at 7 p.m., after which caucus organizers take varying amounts of time to listen to surrogate speeches, cast votes, and report results. From an organizational perspective, there is no way to know whether people are still in the act of caucusing until the results are reported. That means that, in practice, waiting to make sure that no one was still voting would mean waiting until every single caucus in the state reports its results.
Last night, that would have just been delaying the inevitable. Again, barring something absolutely crazy, which the first 30 minutes of results did not portend, there was no conceivable way anybody except Trump could have gotten the most votes last night.
Had the AP waited until every caucus reported to make a race call, everyone else looking at the lopsided results would have instead been wondering, “Why isn’t the AP making a race call yet?” Various election analysts on social media would have demonstrated the mathematical impossibility of anyone other than Trump winning the most votes. The AP would have been the bad guy for waiting too long, and the Trump campaign would have been angry today instead of the DeSantis campaign. (The Truth Social post writes itself: “The biased, FAILING media has ALWAYS hated Trump and wouldn’t say how popular MAGA is. . . .”)
Dan notes that Iowa is not a winner-take-all election like a general election, and the proportions that other candidates win matters for delegate allocation. That’s true, but as he admits, there’s little evidence that calling the race for Trump changed the delegate math. As Audrey Fahlberg reported on the liveblog last night, the people who were angry about the race call were people who worked for non-Trump campaigns. The voters she talked to weren’t surprised.
They shouldn’t have been surprised. If DeSantis and Haley supporters went into the caucuses believing that every single poll was not only wrong, but wrong by 30+ points, they weren’t that bright to begin with. On the contrary, DeSantis and Haley supporters were smart enough to know their preferred candidate wasn’t going to win Iowa but that a second-place finish would be important to his or her chances of winning the nomination. Knowing that Trump took first, something they expected to happen anyway, doesn’t change the importance of voting to try to secure second.
It would have been malpractice if the AP had called who would get second and third when it called Trump the winner. It was much too early to know that. But the AP did not do that. It merely affirmed what was certainly true, that Trump got first.
If we were to truly uphold the standard that states should never be called while people are still voting, it would make presidential general-election nights totally different. Polls close in Hawaii at midnight ET. That would mean the AP shouldn’t make any race calls until midnight ET at the earliest. But that would just be a formality, as everyone else watching the results throughout the night would already know who won most states anyway.
Dan mentions Democrats who whine about the media calling the 1980 election for Reagan before polls closed on the West Coast, and that’s what it was: whining. There was no reason for the press to pretend it didn’t know Reagan had won in 1980, and there was no reason for it to pretend it didn’t know Trump had won last night.
The actual mistake, as Dan mentioned, was Florida in 2000. That was dumb because it was a close election. Iowa last night was not.
The media should call a state when the winner is known. The winner in Iowa was known when the AP called it last night. That might hurt non-winning campaigns’ feelings, but they should have made it a more competitive election if they didn’t want the race to be called so quickly.