Iowa’s Democratic Party had four whole years to prepare for last night’s caucuses. It knew there would be a multicandidate scramble to challenge President Trump. It nonetheless proved it was not up to the challenge of making the contest go smoothly.
With any luck, this will be the last time Iowa fails the nation in this manner.
The first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses flopped, producing no results as of 1:30 a.m. Eastern time.
With no results reported out, the candidates all tentatively declared victory (if not in so many words), and they are all moving on to New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. Now, nobody has any reason to care who actually won.
Some people involved with the Iowa Democratic process blamed an app with which results were supposed to be reported. Some people blamed the backup phone-in system for reporting precinct results. As for the state party, it released a vague statement blaming the new requirement that it tally caucusgoers’ initial preferences.
“We have experienced a delay in the results due to quality checks and the fact that the IDP is reporting out three data sets for the first time,” the statement said. In other words, four years was not enough to arrange a simple count of ballots by precinct.
Quality checks? To us, this sounds like they might be afraid of or confused by the fact that the initial preference numbers do not at all line up with the count of delegate equivalents. Having been there on the ground last night, our writers have a few thoughts as to how that happened. Caucuses, it turns out, are a lot more fun than they are democratic.
This isn’t the first time there have been problems. In 2012, on the Republican side, and in 2016, on the Democratic side, there were bitter debates over who should actually be considered the winner.
We have to say that we are in agreement with Julian Castro, who declared what happened in Iowa a “total mess.” As he explained, “People can see with their own eyes tonight the fact that we still don’t have any results. Their process is broken. This is not the way that we should start our process to nominate the most important public service servant in our country and in the world.”
But we’re sure Democrats would do much, much better if we trusted them to run the entire healthcare system for 325 million people.
Castro, along with other Democrats, have complained that Iowa gets too much power in the nominating process for a state so filled with white people given the changing demographics of the country. Conservatives complain typically that Iowa’s inordinate political clout has allowed the state to perpetuate its own addiction to ethanol subsidies. Perhaps the parties will get their acts together and reform their nomination systems so that they don’t begin with this goat rodeo.
