I feel sorry for Iowa, although, obviously, they did it to themselves by over-reliance on an app.

This is a screw-up of fairly epic proportions, by today’s standards, but no animals or small children were hurt and Democracy in America, flawed as it is, will probably survive.

I’m happy to repeat my argument that I make every four years, that allowing the same two states to go first every four years is stupid and indefensible. My own proposal, which I’ve also made before, is that a group of states should go first and that states in that group should not be the same every time, so that, over time, all states would have a turn at being in the first group.

It hadn’t occurred to me before, but another advantages of the Black Ink plan is that, if one state in the first group screws up and can’t report its results in time, we’d have four others on which to obsess.

Maybe, by the time this gets posted, the Iowa results will have been reported, and we can start obsessing on New Hampshire, which spent about a century as the “first-in-the-nation” primary. Under my plan, no state would always go second either.

Luckily for me, I had a bunch of half-decent old movies stacked up on my DVR for occasions such as this, so I didn’t have to watch for hours the various news commentators who had little about which to commentate. But on one of my 87 check-ins from the old movie to CNN to see whether they had results yet, I heard former senator and former presidential candidate Rick Santorum describing the horrors of a delayed announcement of who won Iowa.

Santorum actually won Iowa, on the Republican side, in 2012, but the margin was so small that he wasn’t declared the winner until Friday night. Part of the tragedy, Santorum said, is that the winner of Iowa usually has a great fundraising day the day after the caucuses, but now this will be screwed up for whoever is eventually declared the winner. This happened to him.

I feel his pain, but not really. We can get through this, America.

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55 Comments

  1. I hope you are right, Eric, and America can overcome this. Of course, in my heart, I feel that we can. It does look dark though – and you know, of course, that President Trump is reveling in the fact that the Iowa Caucus had a major melt-down, and then with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell crowing over the probable victory of the Republicans over the Democrats in this impeachment process for President Trump, my heart grows faint, to say the least.

  2. One certainly sympathizes with all the dedicated Dem volunteers in Iowa who did their best and had the whole thing collapse beneath them because of some stupid (untested?) “app”.

    But as a threat to democracy, the failure of the 2020 Iowa caucus is several light years behind the Trumpist movement—that is the true threat to the nation. And of course the divisive cult leader Trump would be out spreading uninformed nonsense and reveling in the caucus embarrassment.

    To the extent this can upend the ridiculous current primary method of selecting presidential nominees, the debacle may have a silver lining. Now it’s on to the next absurd location for an oh-so-critical Dem primary, the tiny, mostly white state of New Hampshire.

    At some point someone needs to sit down and draw up the pluses and minuses of the new world of internet dependent democracy. It’s looking pretty shaky as a “benefit” to me.

    1. “At some point someone needs to sit down and draw up the pluses and minuses of the new world of internet dependent democracy. It’s looking pretty shaky as a “benefit” to me.”

      Yesterday there was an interesting interview on the radio of a journalist from the Phillipines about how new technology has simplified the task for an autocrat like Duterte to control messaging. The guest was advocating for tech firms to better police their content for facts, but they are motivated primarily by the bottom line. There can be a disincentive for them to do comprehensive fact checking, if it negatively effects revenue.

  3. I was just told that Iowa has law in place that requires them to be the first, if anyone changes the dates they just push theirs forward. Apparently New Hampshire has the same deal for second place. If that’s the case, the only way to lock these state out of first would be for Parties to skip them entirely until they repeal these laws and agree to submit to a rotating status.

    1. Each party needs to stop this nonsense. Regardless of IA law, the party can state NO delegates will be seated at their convention for any state holding a primary prior to March. Simple and clean. Let all the states that care to set their Primaries for Mar 1st.

      We must be in tune with the times and be prepared to break with tradition.

  4. A modest proposal:
    Eliminate caucuses altogether — they’re a hangover from the days before modern communications.
    Have one national primary day — no state has a privileged status. Might be hard on the media, ‘tho.
    Have all ballots (both primary and election) done by mail, as in Oregon.
    Eventually, shift to complete electronic balloting. Right now we seem to be stuck in the 18th century.

    2. Electronic balloting can be hacked. There needs to be a paper ballot for every vote.

      1. I totally agree that paper ballots are necessary as a back-up if there needs to be a recount or if any shenanigans are suspected.

  5. This reminds me of a $500M/yr company I worked for ~ 30 years back. We went live with a new enterprise system and the entire booking-manufacturing-billing etc. blew up! Brought us to our knees, everything went back to paper for 6 months, yes the company survived and is still prosperous today. Whats that term, sh-t happens.

  6. ” I feel your pain.”

    With the Des Moines Newspaper failed poll, the screw up for the caucuses, and the extremely weak field of candidates, – maybe there is a deeper reason for this chaos. The Russians???

    However, take heart! Eventually the establishment Dems will choose the right nominee.

    1. Maybe they can choose Hillary again, and then we can go through another four years of blaming Russia, Bernie Bros, Bernie, deplorables, misogynists, racists, etc anything but Hillary and the Dem Establishment.

      1. So true, so true. Doesn’t matter what happened in Iowa. Dem’s will go down in flames come November because they’re being held hostage by their far left socialist wing of the party. Even Pelosi is scared of these socialists. The Dem’s are a complete mess. With record low unemployment, record stock markets, 401’s, higher wage growth, lower taxes, no wars, and on and on, there’s absolutely no way independents are going to go in the booth and say: I wonder what a socialist can do for me”. No chance. No how. Trump wins in a landslide come November and may even help GOP take over the house. As of now, not a single Democrat candidate could win against Trump, and the media will do the same exact thing as 2016. They’ll report Trumps down, losing to each and every Democrat candidate. Even on election day they’ll be proclaiming Trumps done. But come election night, it’ll be 2016 all over again. Votors will tell the exit pollers what they want to hear, but in reality, will have pulled the “red lever”. Going to be interesting to see what excuse the left comes up with for their losses this time.

        1. “Votors will tell the exit pollers what they want to hear, but in reality, will have pulled the ‘red lever’.”

          Why?

          I thought Trumpsters were no longer ashamed to proclaim their support of the IMPOTUS. Why would they find it necessary to lie to “pollers” about the truth of who they voted for?

  7. Was this merely incompetence? Or did the app stop working when it became clear Bernie would win, to push back the announcement so that his win would get buried by the State of the Union and tomorrow’s vote in the impeachment trial? Either way it is very bad for the party, indeed.

    I know, I know…you can’t criticisize Dem party leadership without being accused of being a Russian stooge or a conspiracy theorist. Seriously though, the party has been so distracted by Russiagate and impeachment, actually winning elections seems to have been either forgotten, or democracy is thrown out the window in the name of control by party elite to get the result they want.

    1. And now we know how conspiracies theories start and flourish, just like mushrooms.

      1. When people respond to any narrative that does not fit their own, with the pejorative “conspiracy theory!” I usually respond, many “conspiracy theories” labeled as such are merely what most people do not want to believe or refuse to believe.

        Still waiting for Iowa results, btw. It is like it never happened. If I hear Bernie’s name in the media at all, it is usually in the context of, Bernie asked for these changes, if he hadn’t this would not have happened!

        Is it a conspiracy theory to say elite Dems, Repubs, the media, corporations, banks, billionaires and the war profiteering complex are united against Bernie Sanders, while acting like they are the foundation of Democracy and have no bias?

    2. Um, nope. The app didn’t “stop working”, it appears that it never worked at all.

      1. I’m not sure incompetence is necessarily better than the alternative. Although these days, malfeasance and incompetence in elite leadership are nearly one and the same.

    3. I don’t think this really had anything to with Bernie suppression. Bernie won the vote on the first and second round an no-one is disputing that. Delaying the results doesn’t help Biden or Klobuchar, nor does it inspire confidence in the Party establishment. This is a disaster.

      What this might be telling us is that it’s time to cut the last vestiges of Clintonism loose, everything they touch seems to turn to crap. This was in many ways a microcosm of neoliberal incompetence. They thought they had win-win if they could develop and deploy a complex app in two months… and make a profit doing so. Their approach to “data driven” campaigns was a fiasco in 2016. The problem is they’ve been spending so much time and energy finding someone and something else to blame for their defeat that they STILL haven’t recognized the failures right in front of them. They thought they could entrepreneur their way into a spectacular victory but all we’re left with is magical thinking, and since there’s no such thing as magic the app crashed and the “connected” Democrats behind the app need to face the music now.

      1. I agree with most of your second paragraph. As to it not being about Bernie suppression, now that the DNC is taking the lead on the count, my guess is they announce the winner, if it is Bernie, Friday or Saturday late. The media is not talking about Bernie now, though I hear a lot about how well Buttigieg did (but not much talk about his connection to the app). It does help Biden, insofar as the media does not have to talk about how bad he did.

        1. Absolutely, the media by and large continues to marginalize Sanders, and we can expect that to continue until and if he amasses an undeniable position as the front runner. But THAT’S just a reflection of the status-quo establishment pushing back against liberalism, it’s not a DNC conspiracy to squash Sanders’s in Iowa.

          It is interesting to watch this continued media reticence towards acknowledging Sanders success. If Biden were performing like Sanders we would be swamped with reports detailing his financial and political genius. We’d being hearing about his inevitable march towards victory and his accumulating momentum. You can see how eagerly they’re trying to pivot towards Buttigieg and even Bloomberg rather than cover Sanders. If Sanders had a 1% lead over Biden we’d be hearing about how close Biden is to taking the lead for the last few days. Whatever.

          Whatever, nothing wins like winning they say eh? If Sanders keep winning they’ll have to recognize that fact at some point.

        2. Its a good thing if no one is talking about Buttigieg’s connection to the app because there isn’t one. It means the misinformation from the Sanders campaign is being exposed.

          1. Dude, the NYT’s and LA times uncovered Buttigieg’s business with Shadow Inc. curing the course of their investigation, that information didn’t come from Sanders’s or his campaign. No one has claimed Buttigieg had anything to do with promoting the company, it’s simply been noted that he purchased services from them.

      2. When ‘winning’ means getting one quarter of the total vote, it’s not too impressive.
        The question is how votes will be redistributed when people drop out. Biden could easily be a lot of people’s second choice, and end up first.

  8. Meh, as far as any lasting impact with the modern news cycle. This will be a very tiny blip long before November. Partly the way the news has evolved with many more sources all trying to be clicked on or listened to. And partly because of the great leader who has the attention span of a third grader but who always has the attention on him and so on we go to the next crises, accomplishment, lie, deregulation, scandal, etc. If video surfaced of any other president acting like the great leader did at his Super Bowl party during the National Anthem there would be a national outcry. Might be covered on late night TV but we’re already on to the state of the union tonight and the impeachment vote tomorrow and soon to New Hampshire.

    I’m much more concerned about the circular firing squad the Democrats seem to be forming between the progressives and just plain old liberals than having to wait a bit longer for Iowa results. That’s the dysfunctional message that will have an impact.

  9. We’re all forgetting how low the presidential bar has been set by the election of Donald Trump!

    Any one of the 26 Democratic candidates–or have there been more than 26?–would be light years more qualified than Trump. so it really doesn’t matter which candidate comes out first, second, or third or fifth in Iowa.

    The Iowa-first problem can be fixed with a national primary day, with ranked-choice voting to assure that someone gets a solid plurality or a majority vote for their party’s nominee. Iowa will be one of the states included; if you’re in the total pack on the first day, you’re “first,” right?

    A note to all techies out there: the only way Iowa’s caucus is going to be legitimate at all is if they followed the Minnesota rule: go digital, but for God’s sake, have a paper backup! Our national election in November will be questionable, too if there’s no paper backup for all those new voting machines that really never seem to work right.

    1. I completely agree. Many years ago, I had one computer programming course. (It was FORTRAN, so that’s how long ago it was.)

      But the notion of algorithms (the description of what you want the computer to do) is the same, no matter which computer language you use.

      With my one barely-passed computer programming course, I can think up two algorithms for cheating that are undetectable without a paper backup.

      1. Suppose Candidate A and Candidate B are running for the same office. The programmer of the voting machines favors Candidate B, but the polls suggest that Candidate A is expected to win. Essentially, this algorithm says “If A is greater than B, then reverse their totals.”

      The total number of votes remains the same, and the cheaters just say, “Well, polls can be wrong. Even exit polls can be wrong.”

      2. Suppose Candidate A and Candidate B are too close to call, according to the polls, but you want Candidate B to win but not by so much that people get suspicious. You set up a program that says “Every nth vote for Candidate A is sent over to Candidate B’s column.” What number “n” is depends on the size of the expected turnout. The aim is to give Candidate B a plausible within the margin of error. Again, the total number of votes remains the same, so cheating is hard to detect, again “because even exit polls can be wrong.”

      I attended my precinct caucus in 2016 and volunteered as a teller for the straw poll after they called for representatives of each candidate’s supporters. Each pile of ballots was counted four times, twice by representatives of each candidate. I was not pleased with the result, but I knew that it reflected the actual preferences of my precinct.

      Here is a friend’s account of how the ballots were passed along: “Yes, I was DFL Precinct chair and convened several caucuses. Ballots were counted as was your experience and at the end of the evening those totals were put on a tally sheet that I hand carried to a central location and reported the results. Ballots were kept and turned in in case someone had questions.”

      The results for the entire state were on the secretary of state’s website before midnight.

      The Iowa mess is just another example of how attempts to be all modern and electronic cause more problems than they solve. (I could tell you about a British university laundry room that required users to download three apps and had no workaround—like coins or a smartcard purchase–when the phone signal didn’t reach the basement where the laundry room was located.)

      If it (a system using hand-counted paper ballots) ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

  10. The problem isn’t so much that the same states are always first, so much as it is that there is always a first state. Iowa and New Hampshire get way too much coverage not because of the states themselves but because for three and a half years they are the only games in town. This is a media driven problem.

    Consider what is happening today. Iowa is a caucus state, and as anyone who has attended a caucus in an important election can tell you, they are a mess..Mere chaos is what everyone aspires to. Now the fact is, the messiness of caucuses isn’t that big a deal in terms of what caucuses are actually supposed to do. Iowa will eventually count it’s votes, and Iowa will decide who goes to the convention with months to spare. So what”s the big deal? The big deal is that media didn’t have the story it wanted to have. After three and a half years of waiting it wanted real numbers to report, and last night it didn’t get them. So they are mad, and they are taking it out on everyone besides themselves because they are committing the fundamental journalistic error of covering the story they want to cover instead of the story that actually happened.

    Nobody owes candidates a vote. Nobody owes journalists a story. What is owed here is that Iowa voters should have an accurate count of their vote and once that is done, then it is time for candidates, and the media to make what they will of the results.

    1. The fact that LinkedIn says that some of the Shadow people worked (in some way) for Clinton’s campaign (not necessarily for Clinton herself) doesn’t mean a whole lot — just that they worked for Democrats. Surprise! And given your source ….

      1. It’s not Linkedin, there are several stories now, one in the LA Times, and the other in NYT’s that connect HRC and her campaign to Shadow Inc. If you read Clinton’s book about the 2016 election she discusses her firm conviction that technology and data like this are going to be the salvation of the Democratic Party.

        And it’s not just the Clinton’s personally, it’s the machine they built over the decades, and in particular they’re consolidation of power during the Obama years. Perez is one of their people, and the Democrats who decided to resurrect a failing tech firm to create their new app are members of the old Clinton machine. You look at this fiasco and it’s just a mirror image of the fiasco’s that plagued HRC in 2016.

        I almost feel sorry the Clinton’s sometimes, it just seem like almost everything they touch turns to crap.

        At any rate, Democratic leadership is a catastrophe and needs to be replaced.

  12. Political parties are run by old people. And old people don’t understand how apps work. I think anyone who did, would have known not to rely on them. There is that.

    1. There was also the failure of the phone backup system. I’ll bet they were using smart phones–i.e., cell phones–and not land line phones Who ever heard of land line phone systems jamming up? They don’t. Only digital phones jam and crash (sorry, kids).

      I rest my anti-tech-uber-alles statement.

      1. I think they probably just didn’t staff the phone for this scenario. Why staff up for the old system AND the new system simultaneously? The app was supposed to be more efficient, why would they prepare for it failing?

    2. I’m old enough to have been writing apps 50 years ago, unless you restrict the use of the term ‘apps’ to the computers known as ‘cell phones’, which of course refers to the system that links them (cellular networks), not to the phones themselves.

  13. Now that some results are in (while the rural precincts drift in rather haphazardly), we can see that the app is not the only thing that failed—the Iowa caucuses also failed of their essential role: to determine a consensus front runner. Iowans essentially split their votes among 5 candidates, and God only knows how the (very small share) delegates will be awarded.

    As sensible Americans watched with disgust and horror as the loathsome political criminal Trump turned his State of the Union Address into one of his divisive, hate-filled Trumpenberg rallies, one can only hope that the American left does not engage in its favorite pastime of internecine struggle while an American fascist movement consolidates its (democratically-illegitimate) hold on power.

  14. The real problem with Iowa’s first in the nation status is that it, like the other “first” state, New Hampshire, is not representative of the American electorate any more. Both states are more rural than the rest of America, and their populations are overwhelmingly non-Hispanic and white.

    The idea of several states having a primary (not a caucus) on the same day is a good one. It’s not so great for the hospitality industry in Iowa, but their loss is the rest of the country’s gain.

  15. By the way, regardless of app failures and other problems the numbers reveal that both of the remaining “moderate/centrist” candidates, Biden and Klobuchar, failed. Their message of “moderation” and status quo comfort clearly did not resonate in Iowa. And frankly, if couldn’t resonate in Iowa it will likely not resonate elsewhere.

    We should also note that the polling before this caucus was WAAAAY off. Biden’s numbers are nearly half of what he projected to win prior to the caucus. If THAT trend continues he’s toast.

    This looks like it’s narrowing to a three-way race, and none of the three contenders are establishment moderates.

    1. Putting aside that a lot of people don’t base their votes in your strict ideological distinctions, it looks like slightly more people voted for “moderates” (Biden/Buttigieg/Klobuchar) than the “progressives” (Warren/Sanders). Again, not everything boils down to your progressives/good vs. moderates/bad distinction.

      1. Pat, the vote totals are public, we can all see the results and Klobuchar tanked, Biden crashed. That’s a trend that will likely determine who gets the nomination. You can complain about liberalism and try to characterize popular candidates as some kind of extremists simply because they don’t conform to your expectations, but rest of us will just count the votes. Clearly, candidates who promise to as little as they can for as few people as possible and promote unpopular policies cannot compete in the face of alternatives. Only 38% of the voters say they’d rather keep their private insurance instead of switching to a MFA and Klobuchar is campaigning to keep people in their private insurance… and she walk away from Iowa with ZERO delegates.

    2. I’m not sure we know enough about Mayor Pete to know if he’s progressive. So far it’s allot of careful rhetoric and soaring prose. He reminds of Obama that way. I was excited about Mayor Pete’s candidacy the first few times I heard him, but once you start looking for specifics you realize there are none. I think that’s by design: triangulation.

  16. Sorry Eric but this was a big deal. This was either record-breaking incompetence or an attempt to game the results. Those are the only two options. it’s inconceivable that Bernie’s internal numbers had him with a “comfortable” 5 point lead with 60% reporting and he’s down in the “official” numbers. That’s not a thing. There is no discrepancy that large that can be logically accounted for.

    1. Sorry Jim, polling paid for by candidates is notoriously optimistic. The pollsters are in it to make money, after all.

    2. I certainly hope that you are making a Princess Bride joke and being sarcastic in using the word “inconceivable.” Because discrepancies in candidate internal numbers are common and easily explainable. The idea that logic dictates some conspiracy occurred based on those number discrepancies is absurd and laughable.

  17. Eric. NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOO Let Iowa go first! Where else could voters be convinced to go to a meeting in a gym or barn or school classroom and go to their corner without doing anything wrong? And stand up or raise their arms, in front of their neighbors, to show non-secretive votes for a socialist, man with a husband, etc etc.. Candidates benefited greatly as they flew into Iowa, and drove to seemingly endless coffee meetings, bar-b-q discussions, corn roasts, and stranger, gatherings attended by those in suits and coveralls. Candidates for president were forced to answer actual questions and develop campaign slogans and better speeches. OK, so Iowa democrats totally screwed up any possible benefit to the candidates by not having a system that actually could give results in time. When people still cared about how Iowa stood. An app glitch. Good example to all states that they should invest in, and test, a secure system before November when I understand that Iowans will be able to vote in secret. But, what fun will that be?

  18. “Votors will tell the exit pollers what they want to hear, but in reality, will have pulled the ‘red lever’.”

    Why?

    I thought Trumpsters were no longer ashamed to proclaim their support of the IMPOTUS. Why would they find it necessary to lie to “pollers” about the truth of who they voted for?

    1. There may be problems with exit polls but voters have no idea what pollers want to hear, and there’s not a lot of reason to believe that the lie about who they voted for in any significant numbers.

  19. This is not hard:

    5 Regions: Pacific Coast, Mountain West, South, Rust Belt, East

    5 Primaries, Third Saturday of month, January thru May

    Rotation on order after each Presidential year

    Balanced by electoral votes in each region, 110 or so

    1. I like the idea of several primaries on the same day, but if the idea is to find candidates who will run well nationwide, grouping the primaries by region is not the way to go.

      Perhaps the four states that go first now – Iowa, New Hampshire Nevada, and South Carolina – should all have their primaries or caucuses on the same day. This gives geographic and political balance. It would also allow voters in the next rounds to gauge how a candidate does nationally, and not just in a niche market like Iowa or New Hampshire.

  20. Good news for Democrats, in another week or 2 you will have a winner in Iowa……

    1. Too bad the Democrats are not a personality cult, and are allowed to have more than one candidate vying for the nomination!

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