Iowa: Indecisive, Ioditic and Incompetent

The first election of the 2020 presidential campaign descended into a farce on Monday, triggering competing claims of victory and stoking doubts about the legitimacy of the eventual outcome.  Widespread reports indicated that the smartphone app for reporting the results of Iowa’s caucuses had become non-functional and calls to the Democratic Party’s backup telephone hotline was swamped with delays.

As a result, nearly four hours after caucuses began, just 2% of precincts had reported results. The debacle prompted Daily Kos to cancel its election-night live blog, the first time in the site’s 18-year history it has ever done such a thing.

Candidates stepped into the void. Pete Buttigieg went first by claiming victory — misleadingly, in the view of Bernie Sanders, whose campaign responded by releasing unofficial figures showing his strength. Amy Klobuchar also joined in by citing unverified results she said demonstrated a robust performance. 

The biggest "winner" might have been Joe Biden. According to the Iowa entrance poll, he was hovering close to the viability threshold of 15 percent statewide. But the questions surrounding the vote-counting served to obscure a potentially poor performance. The former vice president, facing potentially ugly headlines going into New Hampshire and beyond, couldn't get out of Iowa fast enough. 

The disarray dealt a huge black eye to Iowa, which was already struggling to defend its coveted first position on the primary calendar. Democratic campaigns grew more furious as the night wore on with no word.  During the first call between officials from the campaigns and the state party, the party “hung up on campaigns” when pressed for a release time, an aide to one of the candidates said.

Tempers also flared during a second call between Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price and the campaigns early Tuesday morning.  Biden chief counsel Dana Remus repeatedly insisted that the campaigns be allowed into the “auditing process to give us confidence so we can then be your advocates in restoring confidence.”  Brendan Summers, director of state and delegate strategy with the Warren campaign, asked how many precincts the party had partial or full results for. Price replied that he’d “get back to you on that information.”

Elizabeth Warren's campaign and its allies barely contained their fury at the state party’s bungling of the caucuses. The campaign claimed their internal numbers showed a close three-way race between Warren, Sanders, and Buttiegieg, with Biden in a “distant fourth,” according to Lau.

This wasn't the first time Iowa has had trouble tabulating the results of its caucuses.  In 2016,  a controversy surrounding confusion about the voting process, led to a day delay in announcing the results of the Democratic race.  In 2012, final results for the Republican caucuses weren't released for almost two weeks.

This year's election watchers will have to wait until Tuesday morning to learn more, but whether Iowa can still produce accurate and reliable results at this point is an open question. At a minimum, this debacle should bring a permanent end to all caucuses.

Legendary Des Moines Register political reporter David Yepsen said, "If one thing was certain from Monday's debacle, Iowa had just signed its death warrant as the first-in-the-nation caucus state.  This fiasco means the end of the caucuses as a significant American political event. The rest of the country was already losing patience with Iowa anyway and this cooks Iowa's goose. Frankly, it should.”

“I expect Iowans will move themselves to kill it off by holding a primary, and let the state move to someplace behind New Hampshire along with other states.”