First, I want to correct an error from my previous diary on the caucuses. I noted that the winner in Iowa is the person who gets the most state delegates, not the most raw votes. In the past, there have been 3,000 state delegates up for grabs. However, Drew Miller over at Bleeding Heartland pointed out that this year the Iowa Democratic Party's central committee decided to reduce that number to 2,500 for next year's caucus. That means the numbers I gave for delegates allocated to each county were off.

Drew was kind enough to recalculate how many state convention delegates each county will assign. Click through if you want the list for all 99 counties.

Here are the correct totals for the eleven largest counties in terms of Democratic Party state delegates. I put the main population center of each county in parentheses. These eleven counties will account for more than half (1,336) of the 2,500 "votes" in Iowa next January.

County - Delegates
Polk (Des Moines) - 357
Linn (Cedar Rapids) - 202
Scott (Davenport and Bettendorf, the Iowa side of the Quad Cities) - 142
Johnson (Iowa City, University of Iowa) - 137
Black Hawk (Waterloo) - 117
Dubuque (Dubuque) - 90
Story (Ames, Iowa State University) - 76
Woodbury (Sioux City) - 68
Pottawattamie (Council Bluffs, across the river from Omaha, Nebraska) - 55
Clinton (Clinton) - 46
Cerro Gordo (Mason City) - 46

Next, a clarification. In the comments to my last diary on MyDD, Iowa City-based blogger John Deeth pointed out something I neglected to mention. The delegate counts I just listed are delegates to the state convention. They are not actually elected on caucus night. Voters attending precinct caucuses on caucus night are choosing delegates to send to their county's convention.

Within each county, delegates are allocated to precincts based on Democratic voting in the previous presidential and gubernatorial elections. So, my precinct in the Des Moines suburbs will assign six delegates, but those are not six of the 2,500 state delegates--those are six delegates to the Polk County convention.

On caucus night the news media will report estimated state delegate totals. That's because even though the state convention will be held later, once the precinct totals are in it will be possible to calculate how each county's state delegates will be allocated among the candidates.

See how confusing the Iowa caucuses are? It's been almost 20 years since I attended my first caucus and I still couldn't explain it right the first time...

Now, I want to call your attention to a great post by Geraldine over at Iowa Progress on The Inequalities of the Iowa Caucus. We know that the caucus system makes it much harder for some groups to participate, such as people who work nights and people who can't or won't drive at night. But Geraldine shows that those who do show up on caucus night do not exercise equal political power, because it takes more voters to assign a state delegate in some counties than in others.

During the last presidential race, 122,193 Iowans came to their precinct caucuses to elect county delegates, who in turn selected 3,000 state delegates. It works out to almost 41 voters per state delegate.

But in "the People's Republic of Johnson County," where Iowa City and the University of Iowa are located, turnout was very high; there were 79 voters per state delegate assigned by Johnson County.

Meanwhile, there were more than 30 counties in which it took fewer than 30 voters to elect one state delegate. At the low end, it only took about 22 caucus-goers to elect a state delegate in Fremont County in western Iowa. Geraldine lists the figures for all 99 counties, so click through if you are interested. All you really need to know, though, is her conclusion:

When one looks at the number of caucusgoers that it takes to elect a delegate in each county, there is a clear pattern. Caucusgoers in small, rural, Republican counties wield disproportionate power compared to those in more urban Democratic counties. In fact, the people who are most disadvantaged by this are students. Of the four counties where it required the most caucusgoers to elect a delegate, three of them had significant student populations: Johnson, Poweshiek and Story. It is a system that favors the old over the young, the rural over the urban, Western Iowa over Eastern Iowa. It is a method that of selecting a candidate that has a clear bias and to be successful, presidential candidates have to spend a disproportionate amount of energy on less populous rural areas.

I want to underscore this point: three of the four counties where it required the most caucusgoers to elect a state delegate had large student populations: Johnson (University of Iowa), Poweshiek (Grinnell College) and Story (Iowa State University). The other county in the top four was Jefferson County, home to Maharishi University and a large contingent of progressives and Greens (not only Dean, but even Kucinich did better than Kerry and Edwards in that county).

You can add this to your list of reasons why Dean's perfect storm failed in Iowa.

Look at the 2004 Iowa caucus results by county: several of Dean's strongest counties happened to be those where the caucus-goer/state delegate ratio was the highest.

Like I said in my first diary on the caucuses, you don't want pockets of deep support in Iowa. Dean turned out hundreds of supporters in crowded precincts, but it didn't translate into as many delegates as he needed.

If I were Barack Obama, this aspect of the caucus system would worry me greatly.

Also, you can add this to your list of reasons why Iowa is difficult to poll. Polling firms may contact 600 or 800 people geographically dispersed across Iowa. But are they weighting their results to account for the fact that it might take twice as many voters in one county to elect a state delegate as it does in another county nearby?

Upcoming installments in this series will go into more detail about "caucus math," which determines how many delegates the candidates will win at the precinct level. (If you love political hackery and just can't wait to learn more about caucus math, check out this diary by Drew Miller on this subject. He has even made a spreadsheet explaining the whole messy system.) I'll also say more about who's there and who's not there on caucus night, and why volunteer precinct captains are particularly helpful in Iowa.

(cross-posted at Daily Kos)