

While the race in Iowa had tightened in recent weeks, her aides had appeared to draw some confidence from a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg politics poll over the weekend that showed Clinton with a three-percentage-point lead over Sanders among likely caucus-goers. They stood alongside her instead, with Bill Clinton wearing his campaign logo badge upside-down.Īides removed the TelePrompter at the last minute, supporters at the Drake University rally told Reuters, in a further indication of last-minute changes in plans. He said after winning: “Here I am reselected by a way that I don’t think anybody would agree with, but that’s the law.With no clear victory to announce, Clinton’s campaign scrapped a plan to have her daughter Chelsea and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, introduce her. The humble coin toss, however, is not only used to decide candidates in the US – in May 2007, Conservative candidate Christopher Underwood-Frost only held on to his English council seat by winning the toss of a coin after tying with his Liberal Democrat rival in Lincolnshire. Pettygrove won the toss, and so the town was named Portland.Ī copper 1¢ piece minted in 1835 and now dubbed the Portland Penny, is on display at the Oregon Historical Society museum. Asa Lovejoy and Francis Pettygrove each wanted to name the new town after their respective hometowns of Boston, Massachusetts and Portland, Maine. Portland, in Oregon, was given its name in a process that involved a coin toss. Wilbur won the toss, although his attempt was only partially successful and as a result Orville’s later flight was considered the first example of its kind. Other significant coin tosses through the ages include the Wright brothers flipping a coin in 1903 to see which one of them would make the first ever powered flight. Now we refer to the two possible outcomes simply as heads and tails, as these represent opposite body parts. The Romans knew this game of chance as navia aut caput, translated as “ship or head”, as some coins had a ship on one side and the head of the emperor on the other.Ĭross and pile was a coin-flipping variant in medieval England: with the cross being the major design on one side of the coin, and the pile the mark created by the hammer used to strike the metal on the other side. A Clinton supporter called “heads” on the quarter flipped in the air, winning her a fifth delegate.Īccording to some accounts, the historical origin of coin flipping is the interpretation of a chance outcome as the expression of divine will.
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The numbers were plugged into a formula that determines delegate allocations, with Clinton receiving four delegates and Sanders three – leaving one delegate unassigned.Ī Democratic party hotline was called to advise on how to decide between Clinton and Sanders, and party officials recommended they settle the dispute with a coin toss. Those figures added up to just 424 participants, leaving 60 apparently missing. Yet when each candidate’s preference group was counted, Clinton had 240 supporters, Sanders had 179, and Martin O’Malley had five and was declared out. The coin tosses did not affect the overall result in the state.ĭavid Schweingruber, an associate professor of sociology at Iowa State University, explained to the Des Moines Register how a total of 484 eligible caucus attendees were initially recorded at Ames. Sam Lau, the Iowa Democratic party spokesman, noted that the coin tosses were used to determine county convention delegates, which make up only a fraction of the state delegates awarded to candidates.

In total, the Clinton camp won six out of six coin tosses. Unbelievable coin toss decides a dead heat in west Davenport! wins! /CtsvYJllBf- Andrew Tadlock February 2, 2016
