WASHINGTON — For the Republican Party, the Iowa caucus determined nothing. And when Democratic voters head to the polls in Florida later this month, they will bear the same electoral weight: zero.

Neither election awards delegates to the nominating conventions in late summer, where each party’s candidate ultimately will be chosen.
Iowa, whose Republican caucuses were nonbinding, and Florida, whose delegates have been stripped by the Democratic Party, represent two of many quirks in a delegate process that, while already a mystery to many voters, is even more complicated in 2008 than in past election seasons. And as the presidential campaign in each party turns national, the cold counting of delegates will become far more important than the volatile swings of momentum that define victory in the early primary fray.

Delegates are the party representatives that elect the nominees, and the rules for allocating them vary both by party and by state. At the top of each campaign playbook are the magic numbers — 2,025 for Democrats, 1,191 for Republicans — that signify the delegate total a candidate must reach to clinch the party nomination.

On the Democratic side, state caucuses and primaries determine about 80% of the delegates to the convention, and more than half are up for grabs in the 22 states that vote on February 5, including New York, New Jersey, and California.

The remaining 20% — nearly 800 nationwide — are unpledged delegates commonly known as “superdelegates.” Under a system designed in the 1970s to give party leaders a greater say in selecting the presidential nominee, superdelegates include Democratic governors, members of Congress, and national committee members from each state. They also include a select group classified as “distinguished party leaders,” which includes former presidents, congressional leaders, and party chiefs. Senator Clinton, for example, can count at least two such delegates in her column: her husband, and her campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Superdelegates have never been a factor in determining the party nominee, but analysts say that is yet another precedent that could fall in an election that has shaped up unlike any other in memory. The Democratic primary set-up contributes to that possibility.

Unlike the Republican rules, in which a candidate can capture the nomination by picking up hundreds of delegates with narrow victories in a few large, winner-take-all states, the Democrats award delegates proportionally in every state.

A thin margin of victory in votes would likely mean only a small delegate advantage, adding to the likelihood that the closely-matched Senators Clinton and Obama would split the delegates nationwide.

The Obama campaign, for example, is signaling that it will make a push in New York and New Jersey, which total 239 pledged delegates, calculating that even if the Illinois senator cannot win those states outright, he can at least cut into the trove of delegates she had banked on collecting there.

“In her base of New York and New Jersey, we’re going to get a lot of delegates,” Mr. Obama’s national delegate director, Jeffrey Berman, said in an interview. They are especially hopeful about the Garden State, he said, because independents can vote in the Democratic primary and because delegates are awarded by smaller state legislative districts rather than congressional districts, making for a “flatter distribution” of delegates.

Mrs. Clinton will appear in New York City today, and officials with both campaigns said no decisions had been made about how much time or money each will spend in New York and New Jersey.

One of her top New York backers, Senator Schumer, was bullish about her prospects in the state. “I will tell her, ‘You don’t have to come to New York. You’re going to win big,'” he told reporters in a conference call last week. A campaign spokesman said she had an extensive operation statewide, including 20,000 volunteers.

Analysts say that if superdelegates become key to the Democratic nomination, Mrs. Clinton would likely have the advantage. “The conventional wisdom is that Clinton has more of the apparatchik support and that Obama is more of an insurgent candidate,” a professor of political science at Franklin and Marshall College, G. Terry Madonna, said.

While Mr. Obama leads Mrs. Clinton, 25–24, in pledged delegates after Iowa and New Hampshire, she has more than double his total when superdelegates are included, 187–89, according to a survey conducted by the Associated Press as of last week.

The Republican Party does not have “superdelegates,” and many of the 123 national committee members who can vote at the convention are bound to support the candidate that wins the primary.

The party gives more leeway to the states to decide how they allocate delegates, and several large states, including New York and New Jersey, have chosen winner-take-all systems that award 100% of the delegates to the statewide victor. Other states, including California, award delegates by congressional district, and some allocate them proportionally.

The Iowa Republican caucuses were unique in that despite the months of campaigning and the millions of dollars that candidates poured into the state, no delegates “were selected, elected, or allocated” on January 3, according to party officials. While a majority of Iowa delegates, 17, are expected to go to the caucus winner, Michael Huckabee, the state party officially selects delegates at a convention in June, and even then they are not legally bound to a candidate. For that reason, Mitt Romney can claim a delegate lead at the moment, owing to the eight he picked up from the lightly contested Wyoming election and the four he collected for finishing second in New Hampshire.

Both the Republicans and Democrats have also altered delegate totals and the electoral map by penalizing states for flouting party rules by scheduling early primaries and caucuses.

The Republicans have taken half of the delegates away from New Hampshire, Michigan, Florida, South Carolina, and Wyoming, while the Democrats have stripped all delegates from Michigan, which votes tomorrow, and Florida, which holds a primary January 29.