I wanted to share TPM Reader RB’s more positive take on the Iowa Caucus, if not this particular execution of it. And that prompts me to add this slight qualification of my condemnation. These are great participatory civic exercises. You can see that watching them. They’re just not substitutes for elections. That may be a sort of impossible answer since if they don’t “count” people wouldn’t participate in the same way. But both can be true. We have expectations of elections. And the key one is that everyone gets a voice, an equal voice, at least on the foundational act of voting. Not just everyone in the sense of people who can’t necessarily spend a whole evening out doing this — covering differences in class, having children, working night jobs. That also means people who simply do not want to publicly announce their political beliefs or get hassled by neighbors or strangers about changing their votes.
With that, TPM Reader RB …
JoinIowa shouldn’t matter. It’s a small state that looks very different from the national Democratic electorate. In 2016 it voted Republican. This state’s outsized impact on the presidential nominating process rests somewhere between absurd and scandalous. But this debacle tonight is difficult to process.
Obviously this is a pretty big debacle regardless of what the ultimate explanation is. But I want to note one thing. The state Democratic party has put out a series of statements which say that they found inconsistencies among the three separate tallies of data they planned to report and that they were thus rescrutinizing or rechecking the data to make sure everything was right. They were clear that it wasn’t a problem with the results. It was a delay in the reporting. They also said that the app that precincts were supposed to use to report the data did not break down.
But there have been a number of interviews with precinct captains (one example below) who say that the app simply failed or that people couldn’t get it to work. They were then told to call in the results but they faced long holds or couldn’t get through at all.
Both explanations sound plausible. But they don’t seem consistent. Perhaps it’s a bit of each. So it’s not that one explanation is necessarily false. But they are at least in significant tension.
Here’s a precinct head or caucus-runner explaining what happened to CNN. Best explanation I’ve seen of what happened.
STOP EVERYTHING and listen to this. You'll understand exactly what the problem is (not kidding). pic.twitter.com/w3sL0a1d1u
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 4, 2020
We keep hearing about doing “quality control” that is causing the delay in caucus reporting tonight. There are scattered reports of Iowa Democratic party officials talking about widespread technical difficulties with the app that was supposed to handle reporting. It seems like something went wrong with the reporting and party officials are either trying to reconstruct the results or perhaps re-canvass the results without the app. That part is speculation. What is not speculation is that something clearly went wrong. The only good I can see coming from this is perhaps this will be the last caucus in the American political system. It’s a terrible system when it works right. Make it more complicated, multilayered and totally different from how we run real elections and perhaps you get this.
Before we get started and start seeing results let’s remember that the “modern” caucus system is absurd, anti-democratic and shouldn’t exist. It’s basically voter suppression for well-meaning Democrats. There have been some reforms this cycle, in response to the primary controversies of 2016. But it’s still just retooling a system basically designed to exclude people.
Don’t miss Rick Hasen on how President Trump’s epic effort to propagandize the right-wing voter fraud myth went up in flames.
As I’ve noted before I seldom read books about contemporary politics or current affairs. When I open a virtual or physical book it’s almost always history and generally in the distant past. But I’ve been devoting a lot of time recently to reading a number of recent books for a project I’m planning. One of those I just finished is Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill.
I wanted to recommend it to you because I found it exceptionally good.
Adam Schiff, in closing arguments: “You can’t trust this president to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change. And you know it.”
For years I’ve been talking about the phrase, the title of an article by Slate’s Will Saletan: The GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord. Like a good poem I’ve come back to it again and again and found new levels to its meaning. The key point Will was getting at was that the fractures in the GOP, its ungovernability, institutional breakdown and extremism had made it possible for an outsider to wrest control of the whole thing by ruling only a chunk of it.
This dynamic was presaged in the Republican House from 2011 where the Republican caucus was dominated by three or four dozen hard-right lawmakers who eventually lead Speaker John Boehner to resign in despair and relief. Paul Ryan succeeded Boehner because this ‘Freedom Caucus’-plus faction lacked anything near the numbers to win a House leadership race. But they didn’t have to and perhaps didn’t even want to. They could run the party from outside the leadership. Trump’s innovation was to ape this faction and take over the party from the populist right. He was characterologically in tune and quickly made himself ideologically in tune. There was some hard going at first and breakage underneath the tires. But everyone else eventually fell in line for the same reason the party’s far-right wing got its way in the House.
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