Caucus Interruptus
In which the Iowa Democratic Party fumbles, bumbles, and stumbles
This is just embarrassing.
But those irregularities didn’t stop the Iowa Democratic Party from declaring a winner. Or, should we say, a “winner”:
So, let’s step back, because this utterly cockamamie story will make no sense at all unless we define some things at the beginning. Historically, the winner of the Iowa Democratic caucuses is determined by who gets the most state delegate equivalents. Not the popular vote, not national convention delegates — state delegate equivalents.
What does this mean? I’ve posted a bunch of explainers, but essentially what happened Monday night was the start of a tortuous process that won’t end until the spring. In short: each precinct in Iowa holds a gathering of the registered Democrats residing there. Theoretically, everyone who’s a registered Democrat can go, but in practice, that never happens, because you’re not just showing your preference for President, you’re also taking care of a ton of mundane organizational business.
That business includes the selection of a precinct chairperson, among other things, and delegates from that precinct to a county Democratic convention. That’s held later in the winter, and in that county convention, delegates to a state convention are elected. Notably: there is no requirement, at all, that the number of delegates a candidate gets at the county convention, let’s say, match up with the number of delegates elected to the state convention.
So, for instance: Andrew Yang received 22 state delegate equivalents on Monday. But if he drops out of the race, those delegates are free to support anyone else they like. Usually, they wind up supporting the presumptive nominee, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, they stick with their candidate through thick and thin. Sometimes, they don’t show up, in which case their representation is reallocated.
If you’re confused, I don’t blame you; this is an incredibly abstruse process, and casting a vote in a primary (which is what New Hampshire and most other states do) is way more straightforward. But for a number of reasons, Iowa was allowed to retain their caucuses.
In 2016, the caucuses had a photo-finish: Hillary Clinton just barely squeezed by Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ campaign, with some justification, claimed that they’d “won” the Iowa caucuses because they’d gotten more first-preference votes. That set the stage for Monday’s madness. In order to retain the caucuses, the Iowa Democratic Party was required to release the result of the “first-preference” vote. In the interests of transparency, they took it upon themselves to also release the “final-preference” vote tally, which is what the state delegate equivalents are based on, after a little arithmetic.
Oh, yeah. Now you’re seeing how things could — could — potentially get fouled up.
So the way the actual caucus works, if you haven’t checked out the explainers above, is like this:
Eligible attendees divide to form Presidential preference groups—simply by standing in a section of the room devoted to their candidate. As you walk in the door, you'll be given a card to write your first choice candidate on one side, and your second choice candidate on another side. More on this in a moment.
If a preference group for a candidate does not have enough people to be considered “viable,” which in most precincts is 15% of attendees, attendees will have one more opportunity to join another preference group or acquire people into their group to become viable. Delegates are then awarded to the final preference groups based on their size.
So the “first-preference” vote is simply who composed which group in the initial count, and the “final-preference” vote is how things settled up after the non-viable candidates were eliminated. Remember that card you were handed on your way in the door? You would also write down that candidate's name where it's listed on that card, both for the first and final preference votes. That gives the state party a backup in case there needs to be any recounting.
Anyway, despite the math and standing around and all that, and adding a couple more sets of numbers that needed to be recorded, you’re essentially dealing with counting heads and writing things down on paper. Pretty simple, right?
And that’s where the app comes in.
So, for some obscure reason, the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) decided they wanted to use a dedicated mobile app for tallying up results and sending them onward to the state party. The app was designed by a company named - I shit you not - Shadow. This company, in turn, is a subsidiary of ACRONYM, which is a political non-profit that’s ostensibly dedicated to restoring the digital edge that Democrats used to enjoy.
Other people have dragged the company and the coders; I’m not going to do that. I think rabble (yes, that’s their name) made an excellent argument for why we shouldn’t do that:
Basically: just as in so many other fucking things, we don’t fund things properly, or at all. As they put it later in the thread: “The decision makers refuse to use free software, alienating the progcoders/ragtag communities. They also refuse to fund projects between cycles to build reusable platforms.” This means that outfits like Shadow have to take on one-off campaign gigs. Which is where the IDP comes in.
Now: was an app necessary? Nope, not even a little bit. The 2008 caucuses didn’t use an app, because we didn’t have them back then, and that caucus set the record for attendees at nearly 250,000! They used plain old pencil and paper. I can see the “logic”, though: an app is Cool™! And it’ll supposedly do scut work for you, like calculating all the weird caucus math! Which means we’ll save time! And get results in faster!
By now, you know that literally none of that happened. None of it happened because things failed, as they inevitably do. My years working in and around technology instilled in me both an appreciation for tech and apps and gadgets and the near-certainty that they will fail just when you need them to perform. This makes the need for redundancy and failover mechanisms critical.
Guess what the IDP almost certainly skipped? That’s right: redundancy and failover. When the app failed on Monday, in a variety of ways, reporting of results came to a screeching halt. At first, it wasn’t noticeable. But by 9 pm, it became obvious something was wrong; by 10, the IDP was making its first statements about the lack of results.
At which point folks started melting down. You know the rest, I’m not going to recapitulate at this point. It was just an extremely pathetic thing to see, and the result was that the hard work of so many people in Iowa, working on different campaigns, was essentially wasted.
So, here’s the thing: if you’re an organizer in Iowa, and you get this email, let me know. I’d like to send you a card or something, just as a token of your hard work. You worked your ass off, and you deserve a hug, or a dap, or something. Just reply back from your campaign email address, so I know you’re legit.
One other thing: what made watching the caucuses frustrating was that it was so emblematic of the haplessness that suffuses Democrats. I’m just so tired of watching Democrats bumble around! I think low-key one of the reasons that people are drawn to Bernie Sanders is that he’s sincerely, genuinely angry at what Trump and the Republican Party are doing right now.
You can say the same thing about Elizabeth Warren, too, which is why I like the two of them. But because we live in a sexist, patriarchal society, only guys like Bernie get the advantage of yelling and screaming about things.
But the two of them are fired with a righteous rage at what’s happening right now; they are the only two who actually name enemies and are willing to take those enemies on. I don’t trust any other candidate — certainly not the oleaginous Pete Buttigieg — to do that.
One reason people are low-key panicking is that so many of us - and I include myself here, full disclosure - voted for Democrats in 2018 in order for them to confront and hold Trump in check. In short: we wanted Democrats to treat Trump - an entirely illegitimate President, mind you, elected through fraud - the same way Republicans treated Obama.
That hasn’t happened. And it’s not going to happen. So there’s a lot of frustration out there. I think Ron Brownstein put it well last December:
I’m not interested in treating “red America” as a target or enemy, though it’s beyond tiresome to watch people in Salina, KS trash New York City, then come here to visit. But it’s emotionally exhausting to serve as a target for Trump and the Republican Party, and then see Democrats - our ostensible champions - rush to make nice with them, and excuse them.
Anyway: I’m deathly ill, and exhausted, and I need to rest. I love all of you, and we’ve got each other. If you need anything, just hit reply. I think you’re all wonderful, and amazing, and we will get through this - together.