Round 2 for Iowa delegates could shift race

ByABC News
March 14, 2008, 6:08 PM

DES MOINES -- Jan. 3's caucuses were only the beginning for Iowa's Democrats.

On Saturday, representatives at 99 county conventions choose 358 delegates to the state's district and state conventions.

Usually, these conventions are pro forma. But with Barack Obama narrowly ahead of Hillary Rodham Clinton in an all-out scrap for national delegates, the county conventions now have new meaning and could put one candidate on course for a greater share of Iowa's 57 delegates than projected on caucus night.

"It's like we're running the caucuses again, just with a smaller number of people," said Tom Henderson, chairman of the Polk County Democratic Party.

For the first time, candidates have hired staff to whip up turnout.

Obama, an Illinois senator, won the caucuses 2½ months ago, capturing the equivalent of 38% of Iowa's national Democratic delegates, ahead of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards with 30% and Clinton, a New York senator, with 29%.

The Iowa Democratic caucuses stamped Obama as a national contender. The caucuses also forced Clinton to campaign as a challenger and weakened Edwards, who had been an early favorite in the caucuses and quit the race in late January.

But the delegate score in Iowa is much closer than immediate analysis of the caucuses suggested.

Obama now has 20 Iowa delegates while Clinton has 18. Those numbers account for the percentage of pledged delegates they earned on caucus night and the number of superdelegates who have endorsed them. Iowa has 11 Democratic superdelegates, a select group of elected officials and party leaders who will be seated at the Democratic National Convention in August in Denver.

Saturday marks another step in the process of determining Iowa's final delegate count, which will be decided this summer. Until then, delegates who advance in the process are not bound by decisions they make along the way.

Only Nevada Democrats have had their county conventions so far this year. Iowa's are significant in part because Edwards has more delegates here, 14, than anywhere else, a majority of the 26 he collected.