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"They hung up on me"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-cnn-sebastian/

Joe Biden flopped in Iowa. And so did the Democratic party's reputation
Nathan Robinson, The Guardian, Tue 4 Feb 2020 08.00 GMT

If you’re the type of person who thinks the Democratic party is a creaking, incompetent entity whose leadership needs overthrowing, the Iowa caucuses certainly validated your point of view. None of us knew who would win, but we had at least expected a result. We didn’t get one, at least not on caucus night. State Democratic party officials announced that due to “quality control” issues, release of the result would be indefinitely delayed. On a conference call with representatives of the candidates, party officials hung up the phone when asked when the totals would be released.

So what do we know? Well, one thing we can say confidently is that “frontrunner” Joe Biden flopped. There were places where Biden didn’t even meet the 15% threshold needed to maintain viability from the first round to the second round – at one caucus site, the attorney general of Iowa had to switch from Biden to Buttigieg when Biden was disqualified. It explains why Biden’s surrogate John Kerry was heard on the phone the other day asking whether it would be possible for him to enter the race at the last minute to save the Democratic party from being conquered by Sanders.

Internal numbers released by the Sanders campaign, showing results from 40% of caucus sites, showed Sanders winning with approximately 30% of the vote, Pete Buttigieg coming in second with 25%, Elizabeth Warren third with 21%, and Joe Biden a very distant fourth with 12%. If those numbers match the ultimate totals, they are great for Sanders and absolutely horrific for Biden. Sanders will have kicked the crap out of the frontrunner, Barack Obama’s former vice-president and the man most favored to win the nomination. It would be a stunning upset.

But Biden caught a lucky break. With the party not releasing the actual result, his campaign sent a letter demanding that the result be suppressed until such time as the “quality control issues” were resolved. If it takes long enough to get the official count, Biden may hope that Iowa is old news, or that the issues surrounding the caucus are discussed far more than the actual result. (That’s one reason we need to make sure we don’t get bogged down too much in talking about the procedural issues rather than the actual outcome.)

So what went wrong? It’s still not quite clear, though there were reports that a special app used to transmit vote totals had malfunctioned. Questions were immediately raised about who built the app and how it had been deployed. Ironically, it was introduced in order to “get results out to the public quicker” and had been “hastily put together” over the last two months. There had been security concerns from the start, and when NPR questioned the state party chairman, he “declined to provide more details about which company or companies designed the app, or about what specific measures have been put in place to guarantee the system’s security”. Ironically, it was apparently developed by a firm literally called “Shadow”, partly funded by the Pete Buttigieg campaign.

If you’re a Sanders supporter, you have reason to be suspicious. We had already seen the Des Moines Register suppress the results of its “gold standard” poll on the eve of the election, after a complaint from Buttigieg. And with 0% of caucus results in, Buttigieg declared himself “victorious”, praising the “incredible result” and saying Iowa had “shocked the nation”. The only thing that had shocked the nation at this point was Iowa’s total inability to perform the relatively simple task of counting people’s votes. But Buttigieg, good McKinseyite that he is, was getting a head start on deploying the PR spin.

For Sanders supporters, being denied a rightful victory in Iowa gives feelings of déjà vu. In 2016, Sanders may well have won Iowa, possibly by a lot, but the state party did not release the vote totals. Instead, it only released delegate numbers, which showed Bernie narrowly losing the state “701-697” to Hillary Clinton. The delegate numbers are calculated strangely (this time around, in one precinct, Sanders beat Buttigieg 111 votes to 47 votes in the “first alignment” but both ended up with two delegates). If the vote totals had been known in 2016, it might have been clear Bernie had won. With his New Hampshire victory shortly after, Clinton would have been seen as losing the race, and the whole election might have turned out differently. That’s why, this time around, the Sanders campaign ensured that the vote totals would be released (and took a count of its own for good measure). This time, if he wins, everyone will know … eventually.

It's not a big deal. The media hype has turned a minor event along the road to the nomination into a do-or-die spectacle of political self-indulgence. If this makes people think twice about the whole primary/caucus system, good.

Why Did Iowa Make the Caucuses So Complicated?

LOCK HIM UP!

Putin's Puppet!

John McCain came in fourth in Iowa and secured the nomination.

If you count "none of the above" (which if I recall correctly, came in second place), Bill Clinton came in fourth place too.



The winners are the people who get the delegates. The delegates are the numbers that count.

President Donald Trump is exonerated

He may be exonerated from Impeachment but the voters will give him their thumps down. He may be a one-term President.

Mr. Trump will be reelected.

I don't know if it's a typo, but just in case it's not the expression is thumbs down, not thumps.

https://twitter.com/emmajthatcher/status/1224301836569583617

https://twitter.com/emmajthatcher/status/1224538846819508224


LOL! 50,000 likes (so far).

It climbed by 1,000 just as I was typing this.

There might be a silver lining in the distant future in terms of doing away with an antiquated caucus system, but short term, it looks like the Dems can't be trusted, are not transparent, can't get their act together, etc. The optics are disastrous.

This screw-up belongs squarely to the Iowa Dems electoral big shots and has nothing to do with "progressives".

On the contrary. It shows that progressives are not competent to run the nation. It's an argument for reelecting Mr. Trump.

There is nothing wrong with caucuses. By all accounts they are a lot of fun. I wish Michigan would start having them regularly.

No, it shows that the Iowa Dem party officials are incompetent. If anything, the lesson most will derive on the left is: the centrists in the Dem party are entitled, incompetent and opaque, while the progressives are not.

It's okay for jobless folks, I guess.

If someone can't make the effort to take time off work to engage in politics one day every four years, then maybe they shouldn't be engaging in politics.

Progressives are progressives are progressives. It doesn't matter which specific progressives screwed it up.

Anytime you put progressives in charge of anything, it's going to be a train wreck. That's just the nature of progressivism.



People on the left are delusional. That's why they cause screw-ups like this to begin with. We don't want these people actually running our government. It would be a disaster.

Hmmm. We haven't heard from blatham yet this morning. I wonder if he thinks the same thing that some other person thinks about this Iowa debacle.

I don't think it's that much about the Democratic candidates as it is about the state party's botched attempt to address problems in the way caucuses function. It's impractical. The Republicans had similar problems in 2012:

source


That would be dumb. It has nothing to do with ideology.