Bear with me for a thought exercise.
The rules of the Iowa caucuses is that at the precinct level a candidate must have at least 15% of the attendees to be viable, and for any candidate who has less, s/he is unviable and her/his supporters have a choice of moving to a viable candidate or going home.
But what if in one or more precincts NO candidate has 15% on the first go around?
It is of course mathematically possible.
Even were there only ten candidates, in theory everyone could get only ten percent.
And as the number of candidates goes up ….
at 20 candidates, each could have only 5%
at 25 4%
Of course we do not expect that to happen. We should expect as of now that both Biden and Bernie should have sufficient support (and organization?) to e comfortably over the 15% threshold in most precincts.
But what it, even if not in all caucuses, it is conceivable that in some, perhaps a fair number, no candidate gets to the threshold. Who then gets elected as delegates to the next level, the county conventions?
This COULD get interesting …..