This isn’t about the Iowa clusterfuck. That whole mess is a symptom, not the cause. The cause is caucuses.
To wit: Despite what you read from the civics-impaired twits on Twitter, there is likely zero reason to think the Iowa Democrats are up to any shenanigans. Logically if they were, they would have seamlessly trotted out results rather than cause a ruckus, but I don’t expect conspiracy theorists to use logic.
And the DNC has only a nominal say over what any state does so those screaming about blaming them not only miss the boat, they’re not even close to the water where the boat is docked.
No, the issue is caucuses. They suck.
Here is what the Washington Post editorial board wrote several days ago, denigrating caucuses in general way before we had reasons to lambaste the Iowa caucus in particular:
Caucuses are undemocratic and should be blasted off into the sun. Maybe they once had usefulness, but those days are long gone. We should be making voting easier, not harder.
A lot can be said about how letting homogeneous lilly-white rural enclaves such as Iowa and New Hampshire that bear little resemblance to America as a whole have so much influence over who we choose to represent the two major parties in the Presidential election is a terrible idea. But we can address that right after we get rid of dumb, dumb caucuses.
Canadian here, so excuse the ignorance. Candidates here are between the party members and the leadership to decide.
Why are states even involved in primaries and caucuses? From my understanding, there is nothing in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that even mentions political parties.
“States” are not involved, except insofar as providing the infrastructure for primaries (though not caucuses). State party organizations are the people in charge (not the national party organization). Each state has its own Democratic Party org, its own Republican Party org, its own Libertarian Party org, etc. These are different organizations from the national parties.
It should probably also be noted that there is no such thing as a “national” election in the USA. There are 50+ state (/territory/protectorate) elections. They aggregate to a national election for a few offices, but they are still separate elections, not one big national one.
Caucuses do a poor job at measuring voters’ preferences. The national Democratic Party should put a 50% penalty of delegates on state parties that hold caucuses instead of primaries.
Because the two large parties co-opted the state governments into subsidizing their internal elections. The smaller parties benefit as well, so they don’t complain.
Some states have moved to open primaries where candidates compete without regard to party. The top-two vote-getters advance to the general election. This works well and should be universal. Some state parties have complained about the state interferring with their internal party choices, conveniently forgetting that state-held primaries are public elections. Parties are always free to choose their candidates with private procedures.
We’ve spent much of my lifetime congratulating ourselves for our most excellent democracy, so much so that we tend to overlook how extraordinarily and laughably clunky our elections are in practice. It’ll be another Red Wiggler lifetime or two before we’re able to admit to ourselves what a fucking mess we are when it comes to electing people to manage the nation’s affairs.
Our system has it’s own issues, namely with a multi-party system and the fact that the Prime Minister is not elected by a popular vote you can have a party that controls the country with only 30% of the national popular vote.
In theory, I think caucuses are a wonderful idea. You get everyone in a room, discuss the candidates/issues and then come to something resembling a consensus on who your slice of the electorate supports.
In reality, of course, they end up being exclusionary since only the people who have the time to attend actually get to have their voices heard. So, yeah, they should probably be done away with.
I’ll miss them, though. I attend a couple in MN back in the late 1970’s.
Eh, you can get the same result in the US due to the electoral college. And Senators representing less than 4% of the US population can keep him in power indefinitely.
I’m going to miss caucusing this year. They sound completely nuts if you’ve never done it, and they are. But that doesn’t fully erase their benefits. And I don’t think that primaries are without problems.
For one, the parties pay for their own damn caucuses. Every non-Republican in a non-caucus state should be asking themselves why their tax dollars are going to a vanity vote for Donald Trump; presidential primary elections aren’t free, they’re not even cheap. And they’re frequently run completely separately from the remainder of the primaries, so you’re not even getting the economies of scale. Actually, every small-government, “fiscally responsible” Republican should be asking themselves the same question.
But more importantly, you do get to hear from your neighbors why they support who they support without it being filtered through the media; and more - why you should help support whoever the final candidate is once all the dust has settled. Last time around, my precinct was pretty split between Clinton & Sanders. It was really good for me to hear people explain in their own words what was important to them, how their preferred candidate really resonated with them and spoke to that point or that issue, and why they were there. I saw people change their minds. And I also walked away more convinced to support the eventual nominee. In past years, I’ve gotten to see 17-year-olds (who were allowed to participate so long as they turned 18 before the election). I’ve heard impassioned arguments for candidates that never had a chance, but really did embody specific parts of the platform (Kucinich anyone?). The process helps humanize and personalize “the other side” in a way that doesn’t happen in a primary and really doesn’t happen through “man on the street” interviews or social media where everything is a repeat of talking points or a soundbite. (Also, in my state caucusing made the whole delegates and electors selections very transparent and much more democratic than it seems to be in Primary states)
Does anyone really think that a coding error, in an app from a company called Shadow Inc, a company started by staffers from the 2016 Clinton campaign, caused all this chaos on accident? Seriously?
The message will remain clouded for some days and will not have the same impact it would have had if the actual results were available. By the time those results are clear the process will have moved beyond Iowa.
Biden flopped, Bernie came out strong and will be the likely nominee. But that is the message that cannot be allowed.
Nothing to see here, move along, watch the other hand, and it’s on to New Hampshire!
It doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with Hillary. But Hillary was the leader of the corporatist third way democrats, the main opponents of the progressive democrats. So her staffers are likely people who are supportive of third way policies and hostile to progressives. Very much the group in power in the democratic party desperately trying to keep it.