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WTF Happened in Iowa?

“They say democracy is messy. Well, welcome to the mess.”

UPDATE, 6pm ET: Just shy of 24 hours later, some results are in. According to Iowa’s Democratic Party chair, these are 62% of the results across all 99 counties (as of this writing), and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg is narrowly leading the pack. Here’s the partial vote breakdown in terms of how many state delegates will likely be allocated in favor of the candidate:

  • Buttigieg: 26.9%
  • Sen. Bernie Sanders: 25.1%
  • Sen. Elizabeth Warren: 18.3%
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: 15.6%
  • Sen. Amy Klobuchar: 12.6%
  • Andrew Yang: 1%


Here's how it all unfolded earlier: 

DES MOINES, IOWA, 8am ET — We don’t have the results from the Iowa caucuses yet, and no one is quite sure when we’re going to get them — just sometime “later today.” Yet, multiple campaigns either declared victory or gave victorious speeches about a strong showing based on their own internal data and a projection of confidence.

We thought the caucus results might go late because the Democratic presidential primary race is so competitive, and recent polls showed Sanders, Warren, Biden and Buttigieg all trading spots in the top 4. But we didn’t anticipate this! Shortly after all caucus sites finished voting, the Iowa Democratic Party was only reporting 1.9% of votes from precincts. Early results showed Sanders with a comfortable lead, with Warren in second place, and Buttigieg coming in stronger than Biden. But the hours ticked by, and we didn’t get any more results...only to be told by the state party that there was an issue counting the results, and they were trying to verify them as accurately and quickly as they could. That’s where we are now.


Here’s the latest from the Iowa Democratic Party this morning:
 

By this time in 2016, we knew the winner of the GOP contest, which featured even more candidates than the Democrats have now — it was Ted Cruz, followed by Trump and Marco Rubio. On the Dem side, the Clinton-Sanders side was much closer, but we at least had 75-80% of precincts reporting their results by the time everyone went to bed. Not so much this year.

So WTF happened?

  • This was the first year that Iowa caucuses tried out a new system of reporting numbers, and it clearly caused some chaos. Prior to yesterday, there was one number/result released by the state party on caucus night: the delegate count from each of the more than 1,600 precincts.
  • As a reminder, the number of delegates a candidate receives is based on the number of votes they have. If you have a high number of supporters commit to you at a caucus, you get a higher share of delegates.
  • This year, the state party got ambitious and asked for caucus chairs to submit three numbers for results that would be announced publicly: the number of people who back each candidate in the first round of caucusing, the number of people who back a candidate in the second round, and the final delegate count. (If you need a refresher on why there are multiple rounds of caucusing, go here.)
  • Based on complaints from the Sanders campaign in 2016, and in a bid to be more transparent, the party changed the rules to have all of those numbers counted and reported this year. Instead of transparency, though, it caused complete chaos, sowed confusion and not a little bit of conspiratorial speculation. As the New York Times put it, “requiring the reporting of three separate numbers from each of the state’s more than 1,600 precincts has slowed the gathering of data to a crawl.”


So the data was already more difficult to collect because of the sheer amount of it, and on top of that, the state party said they found inconsistencies among the numbers. Throw into the mix a new app that precincts were supposed to use to help keep track of these numbers, a learning curve for that app, user/human error, and long wait times to report results by phone instead, and you have one epic disaster. At least, it seems that way to people who are used to getting election results almost immediately.

So what do we know?

Early results from the precincts that were shadowed by reporters or election observers showed strong numbers for Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg. The first two were expected, the third one less so — and certainly a lot of people didn’t think Buttigieg would out-perform Biden. The South Bend Mayor took the opportunity, citing internal data, to say, “By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.” He was widely criticized online for declaring a premature victory, though many of the presidential campaigns tried to spin this mess in their favor — though perhaps none as clearly as Buttigieg, who gave the final speech of the night. Warren, for her part, noted that her campaign is in it “for the long haul,” anticipating a long primary running through June, especially if other nights are like tonight.

Not all of them should be: the screw-up here has put an intense spotlight on the flaws of caucusing in general, something that was already being scrutinized. It’s an open question whether Iowa will buck decades of tradition and do away with caucuses in the next election, but first, we need to actually get the results from this one.

I can at least tell you what happened at the precincts we were at: Buttigieg won one, with Sanders and Warren close behind. I heard that reported at several caucuses across the state, sometimes with Sanders in the lead, sometimes with Warren, so I wouldn’t be surprised if those results hold, with Biden in fourth place. We had a blast livestreaming from the actual caucuses as they happened and interviewing voters — watch the playback here.

Until the results come in, keep in mind this quote from the Iowa Democratic Party communications director, Mandy McClure. “This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion.” And to quote one of the speakers from our caucus site: “They say democracy is messy. Well, welcome to the mess.”