Iowa makes the case for ending its ‘first in the nation’ caucus

For those of you tuning in last night for the results of the Iowa Caucus, the “carnival of democracy was fun and bewildering to watch until it all went sour.” Iowa a carnival of democracy for media — until it went sour:

The failure of authorities to produce results meant no one knew as bedtime came what it would all mean to the matter at hand: picking a Democratic candidate to challenge President Donald Trump in November.

Reporters swarmed to sites where voters, for the first time in the 2020 campaign cycle, were making their voices heard. Yet their findings were only anecdotal.

“It’s most unfair to the voters, the caucusgoers who came out today, when now they have a question mark hanging over the results,” said CNN’s David Chalian.

Candidates gave speeches to their supporters with no real idea of what it all meant, and their campaigns let reporters know of their unhappiness.

We were treated to hours of cable news talking heads speculation and anecdotal analysis with nothing much to say except to repeat the mandatory mantra about how “Iowa is all about momentum going forward” in the campaign, even though this is not true. Please stop repeating this.

There’s an App for That

The Des Moines Register reports, Iowa caucuses 2020: Delayed results, app glitches mar the caucus process:

App glitches and reporting inconsistencies delayed Iowa caucus results Monday night. Here’s what we know about the race so far.

Campaigns workers for Democrats reported glitches with the new reporting app they were supposed to use to report caucus results Monday night.

But Mandy McClure, communications director for the Iowa Democratic Party, said the delays were the result of quality checks and the fact the party was reporting three sets of data for the first time.

App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequately Tested: The app was quickly put together in the past two months and was not properly tested at a statewide scale, according to people briefed on the matter.

McClure said the party did find inconsistencies in the three data sets: the first round, the second round and the overall delegate numbers.

Iowa Democratic Party told reporters early Tuesday morning that they were manually verifying results.

“We expect to have numbers to report later today,” chair Troy Price said on a 1 a.m. press call.

A Mockery of Democracy

In an op-ed at the Des Moines Register, retired journalist Kevin Cooney writes It’s time to dump the Iowa caucuses. There. I said it.

It’s time to dump the Iowa caucuses.

There. I said it.

The Iowa caucuses are the greatest PR event ever. They draw the world’s attention for the better part of a year. Images of quaint cafe chats and hay bale babble bring White House wannabes and journalism’s elite, not to mention the hundreds of staffers and volunteers all convinced their candidate is the second coming of a savior.

The trouble is the Iowa caucuses are a sham.

This mockery of democracy wasn’t always a bad joke. There was a time when Iowans gathered in Mr. Hogan’s living room in Beaverdale and discussed politics, had some cookies or beer, elected a couple of delegates to the county convention and went home. They did NOT express presidential preferences.

After the disastrous 1968 national convention, Democrats looked to open up the process. Iowa grabbed at the chance!

The result was a prejudicial, convoluted, secretive system of expressing a “presidential preference” without actually calling it a primary, because that would upset New Hampshire, a place that actually understands the concept of “one person, one vote.”

Until this election cycle, results have been in the form of “state delegate equivalents.” Huh? This time the Democrats pledged to release the “equivalents” along with specific numbers on attendees’ final and initial preferences “as soon as practically possible.” (Just don’t make ’em mad in New Hampshire!)

It takes the Iowa Democratic Party 77 pages to explain the caucus procedure in its Delegate Selection Plan, which includes elaborate formulas for translating caucus raw numbers into county delegate equivalents.

Then there’s the infamous 15% minimum threshold of “viability.” Candidates who get 14.5% support at a precinct actually get nothing. It’s like they don’t exist!

Note: This is a form of voter suppression. Voters are forced into a mandatory ranked choice system to either join caucus goers for another candidate who was not their first choice, or to go home disenfranchised and disillusioned. In the usual primary election where a ballot is cast, no one would be disenfranchised of his or her vote.

I’m going to stop with the formulas right here. Or maybe I’ll call Andrew Yang.

Shortly after the Iowa Democrats jerry-rigged their Rubik’s Cube of a selection process, Republicans acted like typical whining political-children and demanded attention as well. But instead of reinventing the wheel like the Democrats, the Republicans decided to actually allow everyone to cast paper ballots for presidential candidates. They then would be counted! What a concept.

But the Republicans apparently decided their process needed to be screwed-up even more than the Democrats’. They decided all those votes don’t mean a thing. It’s a non-binding, popularity contest straw poll. A caucus could go 99% for one candidate and then select delegates to the county convention for a completely different candidate.

Here’s an example: In 2012, Ron Paul garnered third place with 21.5% of the Iowa GOP non-binding caucus night straw poll vote. But hey, that’s OK, because after this straw-poll-caucus-night-joke-of-a-vote, most people go home. Ron Paul’s backers knew how to play the game and stayed until the real work got done. In effect, they commandeered not just the caucuses, but the state party, and by the time the GOP national convention came around, Paul would get 82% of the Iowa delegation votes. Democracy! YAAAY!

As they say on the late night infomercials “But wait! There’s more!”

Have to work caucus night? Have a night class? Going to be on vacation? Tough! Although, under pressure from the Democratic National Committee, Iowa Democrats have come up with a new system of “satellite” caucus sites. For the most part these were at the same time as the regular caucuses: Monday night. Some were out of state or the country. But unlike an absentee ballot you can send in anytime, you must be at your satellite caucus location at a specific time.

This is also a form of voter suppression.

Finally there this: Want to know who won? Good luck. I’m still waiting on the GOP Santorum/Romney results from 2012 and Reagan/Bush in 1980. The caucuses are run by the parties and their volunteers. There’s no oversight like in a primary election.

The bottom line:

Iowa’s political wizards of the past made a political preference deal with the devil. The state and its politicians get all this great publicity and wonderful reviews from Fox News to the Washington Post, endless hours of beauty shots of cornfields and skylines and countless stories about Iowa’s political savvy-ness, inquisitiveness and, on occasion, ridiculousness. The world also showers millions of dollars upon our hotels and Pizza Ranch restaurants.

In exchange, all we Iowans have to do is create a facade of democracy that doesn’t remotely reflect true support, representation or any sense of fairness. In no way can the present system be above-board or egalitarian.

Does Iowa have the courage to walk away from the limelight in exchange for honesty and fairness in the presidential selection process?

I didn’t think so.

See ya in 2024, suckers!

Ah, but there is a solution: simply refuse to play Iowa’s game. Michael Tomasky writes, It’s 2020. Time for Democrats to Ignore These Two States.

Iowa and New Hampshire. Here they come again, reliably in grim tandem, like the flu and gastroenteritis. Two small, unrepresentative states will set the terms of the Democratic presidential campaign, exerting far more influence over the nominating process than states that rank 32nd and 42nd in population have any right to.

This must end for Democrats. Everyone knows it. Everyone argues it. But then, everyone throws up their hands. Iowa has been first for nearly 50 years now, a position to which the Democratic Party has given its tacit assent. And New Hampshire — why, New Hampshire has a law stating that it must be the first primary. So there.

To which I say: So what? What the Democrats must do is simple. Stop giving the assent, and break the law. We need a little Democratic Party civil disobedience.

* * *

As is often observed, the Democratic National Committee can’t do much about [primary] dates. It’s the Constitution itself (Article I, Section 4) that says that states “shall” decide on the “time, place and manner” of their elections. So the committee can’t change the dates.

It can, however, do something else. It can ignore the two states.

That’s right. Let Iowa and New Hampshire hold their caucus and primary, but don’t participate. Make all the candidates agree that they won’t seek a spot on the ballot.

* * *

Some traditions are oppressive, and some laws are bad. Democrats and liberals admire the Americans who’ve challenged them. I’m not saying the committee chair who takes on Iowa and New Hampshire will go down in history with Rosa Parks. But she or he will be lauded as the person who ended an anachronistic duopoly and brought the nominating process into the 21st century.

Iowa Should Not Matter to You

As for last night’s ‘Systemwide Disaster’ in Iowa, Paul Waldman of the Washington Post explains Why you should ignore the results of the Iowa caucuses:

Every four years, I write one column after another explaining why the Iowa caucuses are an abomination, with dramatic headlines like “The presidential caucus needs to die” and “The Iowa caucuses are a crime against democracy” (last August I even opened up a can of hurt on the Iowa State Fair). And yet the caucuses survive. So with the event happening Monday evening, I make another plea, in particular to Democrats not fortunate enough to reside in the Hawkeye State:

Whatever the outcome of the Iowa caucuses, you should ignore it.

I don’t mean you should turn off your TV and toss your WiFi router in a Faraday cage. What I mean is that when you’re deluged with hot takes and somber assessments of What It Means, you should try as much as you can to not let it affect the decision you make in your own primary, whenever that will be.

* * *

[W]hen you think about it, it’s ludicrous to end your campaign because of the results in one state with less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. The reason candidates feel they have no choice is that it becomes very difficult to gain support when the news media has written your obituary.

Once again, who are they to decide? The media is supposed to report the news, not decide for us the outcome of an election.

This is not a new phenomenon. In a 1983 book about coverage of the 1980 campaign, political scientists Michael J. Robinson and Margaret A. Sheehan identified a phenomenon they called “deathwatch coverage,” in which struggling candidates are covered in the press only so reporters can say that their campaigns are just about dead, focusing on what was done wrong and why voters rejected them. Once that coverage begins, it becomes impossible to raise money or garner new adherents, because all anyone asks is when they will drop out.

One of the seldom-spoken rules of campaign coverage is that we in the media are always looking for reasons to write off candidates, so we can stop paying attention to as many of them as possible and get down to a one-on-one conflict that has the key elements of drama out of which storytelling is built.

But, as a voter, you don’t have to submit. You have free will. If the candidate you like comes in eighth in Iowa Monday night, you aren’t required by law to switch to a different candidate.

[I]f your candidate has been written off, vote for them anyway to show that you think people should still take them seriously. If enough people did that, the post-Iowa verdict wouldn’t be binding on the electorate, and more candidates would feel they could continue to make their case.

There’s another key reason why we shouldn’t let the Iowa results determine what happens afterward: By all accounts, they’re going to be very close. According to polls, four candidates are bunched within about seven percentage points, which means that the order in which they finish shouldn’t mean all that much.

Let’s imagine this scenario: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wins Iowa, with Biden trailing by one point, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and former South Bend, Ind., former mayor Pete Buttigieg behind Biden by four. The headlines the next day will say “Sanders wins! Biden close behind!” Everyone will then proclaim that it’s a two-person race, and Warren and Buttigieg — along with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and everyone else — are toast.

But what if we move a few thousand votes around and get this result: Warren’s vaunted ground game comes through and she sneaks ahead of Sanders by half a point; Buttigieg comes in third and Biden falls to fourth. In that case, the headlines will say “Warren roars back! Biden falls flat on face!” We’ll then be told that it’s a two-person race between Warren and Sanders, and Biden might as well pack it in.

Those two radically different results are based on moving around just a few thousand votes. Some are predicting record turnout this year, which could mean as many as 250,000 Democratic caucus-goers. That would mean a 1-percent difference is just 2,500 votes. And it could be smaller than that. In 2012, Mitt Romney was announced as the winner of the caucuses, but a few weeks later it turned out that Rick Santorum actually won, by 34 votes.

Did those 34 votes mean that one or the other was a better campaigner or was more in tune with the desires of their party’s electorate? Of course not. It was practically a coin flip, and the fact that Romney came out ahead on election night meant that he got all the benefit of everyone putting “winner” next to his picture.

Once the results come in Monday night (or Tuesday morning … or whenever), it will be awfully hard [for the media] to resist summing them up in a neat little narrative that casts the one in first as the glorious victor, maybe one other candidate as a half-winner for “exceeding expectations” (another meaningless idea), and everyone else as a pathetic loser who ought to slink off so we don’t have to look at them anymore. You’ll see it said, but you don’t have to believe it. It’s up to you.

So screw the media’s Iowa narrative reporting, and end this “mockery of democracy” that is the Iowa Caucus.