Cleaning up some loose ends:
First, I chatted with Chuck Todd, the inimatable editor of the National Journal's "Hotline," at both the Gephardt event in Pella and later at a Kerry event in Newton. (You may recognize Chuck's name, and face, from Monday editions of Inside Politics with Judy Woodruff, on CNN, on which Chuck is a weekly guest.)
Chuck is probably the most wired person in America. And one thing he told me is that the supposed 120-125K turnout figure from way back in the 1988 caucuses that is used as the benchmark for trying to predict what the total turnout (the "denominator", as I discussed earlier) is inflated. Jean Hessburg, then and still the Iowa state Democratic Party's executive director guesstimated that number on caucus night in 1988 and, like Gore's supposed claims to have invented the internet, it has been repeated again and again as bible. (Including by fools like me.) In fact, the actual turnout that year was around 95K.
Having said that, it is highly improbable that the turnout tomorrow will be 150K. But 120K or 130K is possible. So scratch my earlier predictions, based on the faulty 1988 baseline.
As for the stream that followed my earlier post, there seems to be some confusion, and the thread often compounds the problem. Let me make clear: When the rumor is that 60-65% of Dean's hard "ones" are first-time caucus-goers, that means that, of say an expected 40,000 hard counted deanies (and who knows what the real number is, but let's just use that for math's simplicity sake), 60% percent of these, or 24,000, are committed Dean ones who have never caucused before -- with the remaining 40% having some caucus experience.
But Chuck Todd also warned me of something else: All "first-time" shares will be high by definition, in part because most Iowans thought Gore/Bradley was a foregone conclusion (or "Goregone" as I like to say), and Clinton's re-elect in 96 and Harkin's cruise in 92 were too. So, with population shifting into and out of the state, newly age-eligible voters, and so forth, there simply are just a whole lot of Iowans who haven't had a reason to participate since, at earliest, 1988.
And hence that 95K has meaning both temporally, as the only available (if outdate and crude) baseline.
Hope the math is not boring everyone out there.
But hey: give me some FEEDBACK dKos'ers on what you want to know and hear about. OK? Tell what sux about the posts and what's good.....
....meanwhile, I'm posting right now from the high school gym teacher's office (sweaty sneakers nearby) at Jefferson High School in Cedar Rapids, where Gov. Dean will be appearing shortly. I'll post from here afterwards, or after this and the event to follow (with Joan Jett and Jeanine Garofalo) at Iowa City.
Hang with me, folks.
