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This is really a bad sitch. Bernie probably won the most votes. Pete probably did very well in the delegate count, but can’t prove it yet. Elizabeth probably did ok, but that’s not clear. Joe did badly, and/but we don’t know how badly. So, on balance, this hurts all of us. No conspiracy about that.
You know who got hurt the most? The people working their butts off for a year in a state where retail politics matters. Their moment got stepped on. Oh, also the Iowa caucuses, which really suck and should be done away with. In any case, I expect there will be a lot of unhappy activists. But by Friday (my next APR day), we should know who won, whatever that means by then! (I hope.)
A lot happened, so come with us after the fold.
As of 6 pm, Tuesday, and I am leaving it here so folks can see how this rolled out (the latest update as of now is up to 71% and positions remain Bernie with the voters and Pete with the delegate equivalents):
SDEs are state delegate equivalents, the official winning number. They translate to actual delegates — 41 total delegates for the state. 1% of the convention total.
And the rest of the state? What if it’s different?
Philip Bump/WaPo:
Iowa Democrats are poised to do the one thing that could make the caucus debacle worse
Releasing partial results tanks one of the few positive aspects from Monday’s contest
“The IDP does not declare a winner,” the state party’s “Press 101″ Web page reads, “the party’s role is to present results.” Fair enough.
Then, in the face of withering criticism, the party announced that it would do the one thing that could possibly make the fallout of the caucuses worse: It would release partial results. …
Jeremy Bird, who ran Barack Obama’s field program, criticized the Iowa party for its deployment of a tool intended to make counting the results of the caucuses easier. But he did offer one compliment to how the party was managing the disaster.
The Iowa Democratic Party “smartly did not release inaccurate or partial data,” he wrote on Twitter. “We are going to get accurate results. Patience is a virtue we can cultivate here.”
Another thing – watch how they handle the uncertainty. Bernie Sanders and (even more so) Elizabeth Warren were “wait and see”:
The more aggressive moves: Joe questioning the process is an awful look. And Pete declaring victory before the count was/is in is either smart campaigning or opportunism depending on where you sit. But so far, looks like the count/narrative winners/losers were Pete and Bernie (losers because the hard fought win got smushed by the chaos). Arguably, worse sitch for Pete, because he has the current delegate lead (which is what matters) and could have used the positive buzz while Bernie has what should be a strong NH coming up to take the sting off how IA wound up (including a disappointing turnout overall compared to expectations).
As it is, things didn’t go as well as expected for Bernie:
NH is next, Bernie has a solid lead, and we could all use a break from SOTU and impeachment votes…. and it’s not a caucus!
Still, biggest loser of all has to be Biden, whose campaign might be over and done if NH is another weak showing (traditionally there are “only 3 tickets out of IA”). As it is, Joe is out of excuses and money.
And biggest winner of all could be Mike Bloomberg, who is playing a different game altogether.
What happens next? Do both Biden and Warren fade in NH after disappointing IA showings, making it Bernie vs Pete? Or is one of them the comeback kid? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Alexandra Petri/WaPo:
So I was at a caucus where they had some problems
I went to the Iowa caucuses because I love democracy — well, I’m a fan of its earlier work — and I was excited to see it in action. What I saw instead was people fighting a valiant fight against voter preference cards, and the clock, and losing.
There is no more powerful force than someone with a bright idea for a new way things should go who does not have to live with the consequences. Someone in an office somewhere devises a form or an app, and then on the ground people struggle and strain over a confusingly worded directive, and it makes the difference between receiving a benefit or not, or having your voice heard or not, or being the room where the future of America gets decided.
“There’s certainly room for debate as to whether this is the best way to go forward,” Michael admitted to Ames Precinct 3-1/11. And then he sent the votes off.
By the way, check out this thread for how it worked, from a twitter friend:
We are an impatient lot, but we weren’t the ones that promised results in an hour. Or the ones, like CNN, that hyped the CNN/DMR/Selzer poll that got pulled (we covered that Monday).
Coin tosses? Yep. A few of them.
Dylan Scott/Vox:
Why some of the Iowa caucuses are being decided by coin toss
Some Iowa delegates were decided by coin toss. That means it’s close.
A few times on Monday night, at some of the Iowa caucuses, candidates ended up with the same number of votes. There was a tie when it came time to hand out delegates.
So the Iowa voters resolved it with a time-honored election tradition: the coin toss.
Coin tosses and problematic apps. What a country.
What Iowans are saying:
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Iowa Might Have Botched One Caucus Too Many
The state’s first-in-the-nation primary status has been under fire for years. It’s very possible that this will be the end of it.
Well, that was ugly. As I write, there are basically no results from the Iowa Democratic caucuses, hours after everyone went home. Some campaigns are beginning to release their internal numbers, but it would be wise to wait for the official results. The results are intact, according to officials, but the app that was supposed to deliver them from the precincts to the state party didn’t work.
Ugly.
Caucuses are run by the political parties, not the government. State and local officials are in charge, with volunteers mostly handling work at the precinct level. There are paid staff at the state level, but they aren’t necessarily experts in elections technology. This isn’t exactly a huge surprise.
I get plenty of stuff wrong. But I don’t know that I’ve ever been as correct as this one, from four years ago:
A lot of people are calling for Iowa to switch to a primary after the slow reporting of Democratic results this year and the botched counting of the Republican votes in 2012. Better idea: Keep the caucuses, but have the state, rather than the parties, run them with properly trained poll workers. Surely officials can pay for this by diverting a small percentage of revenue they raise in sales taxes from the business generated by campaigns and the visiting press corps. Yes, the delays and glitches are an annoyance mostly for the press and impatient campaigns, not voters. And the contests where these problems occurred were in races where there were virtual ties, so delays can be explained. Still: Get it right, Iowa.
Dave A. Hopkins/Honest Graft:
It's Time to De-Hype the Iowa Caucuses
The Iowa Democratic Party certainly deserves plenty of blame for the disastrous problems with the delayed tabulation of the results from Monday night's caucus. The all-too-predictable failure of a new, untested reporting app was compounded by the state party's idiosyncratic devotion to a uniquely complex two-stage public preference declaration process that required the chairs of 1,700 precincts statewide to all simultaneously report three sets of distinct but necessarily compatible numbers to state party headquarters. This new mandate for numerical transparency came at the behest of the Democratic National Committee, which responded to widespread suspicions that Bernie Sanders actually received more popular support than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 caucus by requiring Iowa to release raw vote totals for the first time as well as the traditional delegate counts.
Still, there was something a bit unseemly about major media figures taking to cable news and social media to blast the state party for failing to satisfy their curiosity about the outcome on a more personally convenient schedule. For it was the media that turned the Iowa caucuses into a decisive event in presidential politics beginning in 1972, when journalists interpreted George McGovern's third-place finish in a sparsely-attended vote (behind Ed Muskie and "uncommitted") as a game-changing moral victory, and it's heavy media coverage every four years that gives what might otherwise be an obscure and unimportant event its outsized influence on the behavior of voters in subsequent contests, setting some candidates on a path to the White House and driving others out of the race entirely with 99 percent of the national delegates still unselected.
Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight:
Iowa Might Have Screwed Up The Whole Nomination Process
Despite its demographic non-representativeness, and the quirks of the caucuses process, the amount of media coverage the state gets makes it far more valuable a prize than you’d assume from the fact that it only accounts for 41 of the Democrats’ 3,979 pledged delegates.
More specifically, we estimate — based on testing how much the results in various states have historically changed the candidates’ position in national polls — that Iowa was the second most-important date on the calendar this year, trailing only Super Tuesday. It was worth the equivalent of almost 800 delegates, about 20 times its actual number.
Well, it screwed up his model, anyway.
Jeff Greenfield/Politico:
Blame Iowa? Nope, the Democrats Did This to Themselves
The signals were there. The party had a chance to avoid this mess 12 years ago. Here’s why they failed.
As much as this was Iowa’s local failure, it also marked a massive failure of courage on the part of the Democratic Party. Twelve years ago, when Florida began demanding a bigger role for states that better represented the American electorate, the national party pushed back hard, and the candidates—fearful of alienating voters in Iowa and New Hampshire come the fall election—agreed to boycott that state’s primary. (Footnote: had Florida not tried to “jump the line” that year by moving its primary up, Hillary Clinton would have won a landslide victory in the campaign and might well have emerged as the 2008 nominee.) The party did move the dates of Nevada and South Carolina to put more diverse states in play earlier in the calendar, but the fundamental flaw—the enormous attention paid to a state that employs an anti-democratic, unwieldy, poorly attended process—has remained.
As the co-founder 30 years ago (with Joe Klein) of the Committee to Start the Process in Hawaii—a movement intended to blend civic good with personal comfort—I confess to a heart overflowing with schadenfreude at what happened Monday night. Longtime critics of Iowa now feel like Jor-el, Superman’s father, whose warnings to the elders of Krypton about the planet’s instability went ignored.
But there’s a broader issue here. Democrats have, since January 20, 2017, argued that preventing a second term for Donald Trump was a matter of protecting the American system from the most unfit occupier of the Oval Office ever. While it may not prove to be decisive, the party’s refusal to end a deeply flawed process to begin the selection for Trump’s opponent has made it harder for them to achieve that goal.
Or, as Buddha might have put it: Karma is a bitch.
SOTU:
Oh, yeah, and impeachment.
Jill D Lawrence/USA Today:
I used to cover Republicans who are cowering to Trump. I don't recognize them now.
Until Trump, I found something to like or respect about most politicians I encountered, even those I strongly disagreed with. That's no longer true.
For the 40 years I have written about politics, there has been something to like or respect about nearly every politician I've encountered. Even when I passionately disagreed with someone on tax or gun or war policy, there was always at least one thing: They welcomed immigrants, wanted to save the planet or were willing to defy elements of their own party to seek a "grand bargain" on taxes and spending. Maybe they were dishonest and had to resign in disgrace, but not before creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Lately, the Founders have also been top of mind. Many of the most prominent owned slaves, and it's hard to get past that, even considering their times. But they also laid what they hoped was a permanent foundation for an aspirational nation striving toward its ideals. They clearly anticipated and feared someone like Trump, and tried to give us the remedies and protections we'd need.
Those safeguards have failed. Let's hope the union the framers envisioned doesn't fail, as well.
Tom Krattenmaker/USA Today:
Democrats shouldn't be chumps. That's why this liberal is giving up on compromise for now.
The time for give and take has passed
Those days are gone. Our current political impasse runs so deep, and one would-be compromise partner is so recalcitrant, that I've given up hope for the near term that the Democrats and Republicans can work together on the country’s urgent challenges. With the fate of our democracy and planet at stake — sorry, that's not hyperbole — would-be conciliators can't afford to continue extending olive branches only to have them shoved back in our faces.