It’s time for party authorities at the national level to exert their influence so that Iowa and New Hampshire are no longer the first contests.
This “tradition” has become an entrenched entitlement that works against the interests of the Democrats in the general election, not least because the results are so unrepresentative.
Apparently Iowa even has a state law that its caucus must come before any other state’s primary. However, the national party has ways of penalizing Iowa if it refuses to budge from that position.
I think the simplest explanation is the most plausible- they got themselves an app that wasn’t ready for prime time and used it. It doesn’t sound terribly difficult to program but somehow somebody messed up.
I predict whatever the results, the Bernie Bros will whine about being cheated because that’s what Bernie Bros do. Even if he wins big, you have to discount it slightly because of the lack of diversity in the state. Sanders and Buttigieg can win big with white liberals, but can they compete for the “Reagan Democrats” the way Biden can?
You may or may not recall that the Romney campaign in 2012 had a program - I believe called ORCA, God help me - that they believed would assure them victory by allowed agile responsiveness to voter turnout trends on E-Day. They were shocked it didn’t work properly.
Blame it on American’s belief in using technology to solve problems that aren’t really problems. Hell, blame it on persuasive salesmen fooling people in buying something they don’t need.
All I know is the campaigns should sue the Iowa Party claiming harm based on incompetence.
They do not. They have, in the past, threatened to reduce or refuse delegates from states that moved before Iowa or New Hampshire. So the precedent is well-established.
Yeah. I don’t know if they paid $4 million for the App, or if it was one of those Apps you get with 3 corn-flakes boxtops and 20 Likes on Facebook. And I don’t care.
Look, I used to be the idiot savant hippy boy who fixed “Apps” that nobody else could fix. Don’t tell me about Apps. And about how increasingly wretched software has become. (Chances are fair the failing part of the App was its its malicious aspects. Some App-writers wouldn’t pass up the chance to grab some emails and passwords.)
When the App fails, Pick up the ****** telephone and say “We’ve got 26 votes for Amy and 59 votes for the funny guy with white hair!” How hard is it??
When I said nobody can add “7 plus 4” anymore if their smart-phone charger breaks, I was only half joking.
Man, if Russia announces the results before Iowa does I say we burn this whole roach-infested MF to the ground and adopt a nomadic stone-age lifestyle. Seems to be the best socio-political system for N. America.
I heard one county chair say that they went to the training for the app, and, after one failure which was their own fault, everything worked just fine for them.
Working in IT for many years, it is not at all implausible to me that staff in some counties might decide that the training wasn’t needed and not attend, with predictable results.
Good point. No matter how idiot-proof developers think their apps are, there are always better idiots to prove them wrong. Also the users who need the training the most are the ones who don’t think they need it.
They were expecting high turn out, some pundits suggesting it could eclipse 2008 and the turn out for Obama’s win. Now it appears turn out is in line with 2016.
More importantly even if it did eclipse 2008, the caucus system is antiquated and a form of voter suppression.
No, just ordinary Democrats. The ones that run Detroit , Baltimore, San Francisco, and St.Louis so well. They made a good case as to why they should be running the country last night.
Great, so now some Dems are sufficiently pissed off at other candidates to stay home in November and Republicans are making outrageous voter fraud claims in an election they aren’t even running in. Looking forward to the general.
I read something similar over on CNN’s site. This may be true for all I know, as I don’t follow Iowa caucus bump statistics but I don’t necessarily agree with the idea. First off, the rest of the country, and not even people from New Hampshire, are not riveted to their TV screens waiting for the returns at 10pm on a Monday night. And of course if you were watching you already saw at least Klobuchar* and Buttigieg give “victory” speeches to the people they really matter to, their supporters at the caucus. The results will be released today, only a few hours late, people will know who won, and it seems to me that a week is more than enough time for whomever wins or did well last night to get to New Hampshire and start crowing about their victory, and sending out emails, etc. But again, who knows?
*Yes, even she talked like the one who won the damn thing. And others might have done the same, I just didn’t see them.
Eh, that was all just pillow talk anyway. They’d both already gotten all they were going to get from Iowa, and they have a date with NH tonight and had to get going. They just wanted their Iowa supporters to feel the love.
There was never a need for an expensive custom app to send a few dozen numbers from point A to point B, especially when most of the users are going to be random volunteers selected without regard for their comfort at adapting to new technology.
I still think that a substantial component of this is going to turn out to be that a bunch of precincts fucked up the math, and fucked it up in 2016 and 2008 and 2004 and 2000 and 1992 and 1988, but they never had to show their work before, and now they do. Would you trust random volunteers from the common clay of your community to do your tax return for you? That’s basically what they did here. There’s a big book of rules, and counting, and multiplication, and division, and remainders. And it’s all done on the spot under time pressure.
Well, yes, he’s a politician. That’s what they do. The whole “bean bag” thing, which politics isn’t. But in fairness to him, if even the numbers from the Bernie camp quoted above are close to being true, he does have something to crow about. I watched his speech and I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear him claim outright victory.
but I don’t necessarily agree with the idea. First off, the rest of the country, and not even people from New Hampshire, are not riveted to their TV screens waiting for the returns at 10pm on a Monday night. And of course if you were watching you already saw at least Klobuchar* and Buttigieg give “victory” speeches to the people they really matter to, their supporters at the caucus. The results will be released today, only a few hours late, people will know who won, and it seems to me that a week is more than enough time for whomever wins or did well last night to get to New Hampshire and start crowing about their victory, and sending out emails, etc. But again, who knows?