On Monday evening, thousands of Iowa voters headed out to partake in the first-in-the-nation caucuses, a major event that signals the beginning of the long slog that is the presidential nomination. After hours of caucusing, voters and election watchers across the country got, well, nothing. We have no idea who came in first place, or who came in any place, for that matter.
The cause for all the confusion is due to problems with an application created specifically for the caucus that was supposed to be used to report vote totals from Iowa’s 1,681 precincts. But after the app failed, and the backup plan to call in vote totals also failed, the entire counting process went belly-up and at 2 AM Tuesday morning the Iowa Democratic Party had still not verified a single vote. Some reports also suggested that the way the caucus was held was flawed, which might mean that we will never see full results from the caucus. Regardless of whether final results get released or not, this caucus was a complete disaster and Democrat Party officials will undoubtedly be rethinking the entire process.
As the hours passed with chaos and mayhem unfolding around them, some of the candidates decided to take matters into their own hands. Most bold was Pete Buttigieg, who outright declared victory. His campaign claimed that after tabulating reports from 77% of their precinct captains, they believe that Buttigieg received 8 percentage points more votes than they had projected. Bernie Sanders released numbers collected by campaign staffers that purport to show him having won the caucus in “almost 40%” of the precincts. Make what you wish of that.
Election analysts say that the mess will affect all caucuses and primaries moving forward, with voters being skeptical that their votes are being counted properly. Meanwhile, Iowa Democratic Party officials told the presidential campaigns that they expect to have and release the results sometime on Tuesday.
The winner in all this? President Donald Trump. As the disaster unfolded in Iowa, his campaign sent out a campaign release capitalizing on the mess. “Democrats are stewing in a caucus mess of their own creation with the sloppiest train wreck in history. It would be natural for people to doubt the fairness of the process. And these are the people who want to run our entire health care system?” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in the release.
In the Republican caucus in Iowa also held on Monday, President Trump received 97% support from caucus-goers and shattered records for voter turnouts in a caucus for an incumbent presidential candidate.
The downfall of the demoRats one painful incident at a time.
You are, dare I say, slightly biased.
This should have been an opinion article.
Few realize that the caucus process in Iowa is totally run by volunteers. Even fewer understand how it works. The failure of the application is the developers alone and does nothing to influence the outcomes of state primaries. The bias of the writer is exemplified by the fact that they called the President winner of the caucuses.
Wouldn’t it be pathetic if Trump lost because people spent time patting themselves on the back how the Democrats are going to lose so badly? There are millions of Americans that hate Trump and his policies and will vote for whoever’s running against him. Writing biased opinion pieces for Jews in NJ whose votes don’t matter anyway may make you and us feel good, but it does nothing to change the outcome of the election. If you really want to effect change, work on the swing voters in swing states and stop wasting time “Preaching to the Choir” what they want to hear.
As said above, this is a opinion piece.
These are the same people that think they can run the country better than Trump. They are going to run our healthcare, collecting and spending our tax money. They can’t even count votes.