Iowa caucuses 2020

Vox writers are making the best case for the leading Democratic candidates. This article is the fourth in the series. Read them all here. Vox does not endorse individual candidates.

Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination March 1 after a fourth-place finish in the South Carolina primary, saying he believed the best path forward was to “step aside and help bring our country and party together.”

It appears Iowa’s days as the first-in-the-nation caucus may be numbered — particularly now that several high-profile Democrats, including Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have publicly criticized the current process for choosing a presidential nominee.

Perez — who has signaled support for reevaluating the caucus system in recent days — explicitly called for reform in an interview with CNN Wednesday morning. In particular, he expressed concern over the lack of racial diversity in Iowa and New Hampshire.

As President Donald Trump puts his impeachment trial behind him and begins his transition into election mode, a new poll found most voters believe he will win even if they don’t want him to have a second term.

The latest Monmouth University 2020 election poll, released Tuesday, indicates that about two-thirds of voters believe Trump will be reelected, with 27 percent saying the president will definitely win and 39 percent saying he probably will. Only 22 percent said he would probably lose to the Democratic nominee, while just 9 percent think Trump will definitely lose this fall. The national telephone poll, which surveyed 872 registered voters, has a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points.

Pete Buttigieg appears to be, at the final count, the winner of the 2020 Iowa caucuses.

But the story isn’t quite over yet. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign has said it will ask the Iowa Democratic Party to recanvass some of the vote.

The Iowa Democratic Party has completed its review of caucus results from 95 precincts called into question by Democratic presidential candidates, and has made a preliminary announcement of how many national delegates each candidate can expect.

Should these results be made final, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Buttigieg would receive 14 of 41 delegates, Sen. Bernie Sanders would receive 12, Sen. Elizabeth Warren would get eight, former Vice President Joe Biden would be awarded six, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar would get one.

This isn’t how Acronym wanted to rocket onto the national stage.

The Iowa caucuses debacle drew a lot of attention to a new app made by a company called Shadow that was at the center of many technical failures of the evening. It’s also putting scrutiny on Acronym — the Democratic group that backed Shadow — which has sought the spotlight in recent months though probably didn’t hope for this situation.

The Nevada Democratic Party promises it’ll do better.

The Iowa Democratic Party is saying coding issues in a new app are to blame for the failure to report any official results from the first-in-the-nation caucuses on Monday. But even beyond the app, there are several ways new rules adopted by the Democratic Party could have created confusion and “inconsistencies” in the results.

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) declared victory in the Iowa caucuses Thursday afternoon, minutes after Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez called for a “recanvass” to audit too-close-to-call Iowa results.

“We are now at a point with some 97 percent of the precincts reporting, where our campaign is winning the popular initial vote by some 6,000 votes,” Sanders told reporters in a Manchester field office. “In other words, some 6,000 more Iowans came out on caucus night to support our candidacy than the candidacy of anyone else. And when 6,000 more people come out for you in an election than your nearest opponent, we here in northern New England call that a victory.”

Monday night’s Iowa caucuses were supposed to offer America a first look at the Democratic Party’s frontrunner in the 2020 presidential race, based on the results of the first primary battle. That didn’t quite happen. Instead, after a chaotic night full of errors and mismanagement, the party had still failed to name a winner by the next afternoon. While party leaders and pundits alike are struggling to figure out what went wrong, it looks like a hastily built and reportedly insufficiently tested smartphone app is at the center of the disaster.

The fears that the Iowa Democratic Party’s smartphone app would compromise the Iowa caucus results were, in the end, well-founded. But the issue doesn’t appear to have been the work of foreign hackers determined to infiltrate our democratic process. No, it was probably something much more ordinary: The app didn’t work very well.

Well, the Iowa caucuses are turning out to be a real shitshow.

Days after the 2020 Democratic primary season kicked off in earnest, Iowa continues to surprise us, and not in a good way. It’s not just that questions continue to swirl about the app at the heart of the meltdown as new information about its severe shortcomings and more revelations about the shadowy groups behind it come to the surface.

There’s now a chance Sen. Bernie Sanders could take the lead in Iowa, and something called satellite caucuses appear to be giving him an edge.

First tested in 2016, the satellite caucuses were officially rolled out this year; they were a measure to increase flexibility for Iowans who couldn’t be physically present at traditional caucus locations and times. A couple dozen were held for Iowans who live around the US and the rest of the world, but many more were held right in the state. Those voters included the elderly in nursing homes and factory workers who couldn’t caucus right at 7 pm, among others.

At long last, the Iowa Democratic Party is reporting its 2020 caucus results.

By late Wednesday evening — and after an initial delay of nearly a day after the caucuses took place — the state party had posted nearly all of the results.

President Donald Trump invests a lot of energy into portraying his Democratic opponents as a pack of incompetent, crazed cheaters. A lot of that is based on projection. But unfortunately, the dysfunctional caucuses process in Iowa provided the president with fresh material he’s already using to make his cynical case.

On Monday evening and into Tuesday morning, Trump and his associates, including campaign manager Brad Parscale and both of the president’s adult sons, posted tweets making unfounded claims about the ongoing delay in the state party reporting the caucuses results. (The Iowa Democratic Party said the delay was due in part to technical errors with an app that was used to report results from each precinct.) Trumpworld baselessly suggested the problems are evidence the process was rigged against a candidate the establishment didn’t want — presumably a reference to Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Amid the unfolding debacle over the Iowa caucus results, there’s been a great deal of attention on a poorly performing app the state Democratic Party used.

But it’s also the case that rule changes for the caucuses this year seem to have delayed the count. “We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” Iowa Democratic Party communications director Mandy McClure said in a statement late Monday, in explaining why results were so long delayed.

The Iowa caucuses melted down on Monday night after technical difficulties caused significant delays in reporting the results, which have not, as of Tuesday morning, been declared.

A smartphone app, which was reportedly made by a firm called Shadow, appears to be at the center of the confusion. The app was designed to help precinct chairs send the results to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters, but reports that volunteers were unable to download or properly use the app suggest that this new way of doing things did not go smoothly. A number of volunteers resorted to calling the state party to report results, and many reported being left on hold indefinitely due to busy phone lines.

If Democrats really wanted to change Iowa’s placement on the primary calendar, the decision would be up to a familiar body: the Democratic National Committee.

In theory, the party could make a simple change to the rules during a review process it does at the end of every election cycle. But practically, this would require the committee to make a hugely controversial political decision, even as the push to dethrone Iowa continues to grow.

The Iowa caucuses result delay is not a momentary screw-up, an excusable error being overhyped by journalists antsy for a story. It is a monumental error that has already damaged the fragile legitimacy of the 2020 democratic process — perhaps irreversibly.

This is not because the results themselves are likely to be doctored. We have little reason to believe they won’t be correct once they finally come out.

The debacle in Iowa Monday night has fueled complaints about its first-in-the-nation status.

Iowa has played a huge role in our nomination process since 1972. Winning Iowa means instant credibility for a candidate, and that means more favorable media coverage and therefore more momentum for a campaign.

We don’t know much about the official Iowa caucus results just yet. But one thing we do know is that, based on early results, turnout this year is reportedly on pace to match the 2016 Democratic turnout.

If true, that might be a bad sign for Democrats. In 2016, there was less enthusiasm around the Democratic race — in large part because Hillary Clinton was widely seen as the likely nominee — and about 170,000 people turned out in the Iowa caucuses. That was down from 2008, when excitement around figures like Barack Obama and Clinton led to a record attendance of 240,000.

We still don’t know who won the Democratic Iowa caucuses, largely due to technical issues with an app that precincts were supposed to use to report their results. The official results are now supposed to come out sometime Tuesday.

In the meantime, the delay — and concerns about the technical issues — has already begun to erode trust in the results on social media. Some people are even posting full-blown conspiracy theories, typically claiming, with no evidence whatsoever, that the Iowa Democratic Party is altering the results because they show Sen. Bernie Sanders, a candidate disfavored by the establishment, to be the night’s winner.

The 2020 Iowa caucuses have been grossly mismanaged, and it’s an absolute disaster for our election process.

As of now, none of the precinct’s votes have been publicly reported by the state party; by contrast, all of the state’s delegates had already been awarded at this point in 2016. So far, all we know is that the party is attributing the delay to “coding” problems with a new app used to collect and report the results.

The Iowa Democratic Party hasn’t announced the results of even a single precinct from Monday night’s Iowa caucuses, leading longtime political observers to declare the event a debacle.

The state party said Tuesday morning it expects results later in the day. In explaining what went wrong, the party cited “coding” problems with a new app used to collect the results and hinted at the complexity of this year’s process.

Whatever the final outcome of the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses, one thing is clear: The whole thing was a disaster. Journalists, analysts, and other election watchers were expecting to get some results Monday night — and as of Tuesday morning, we still have nothing, in large part due to technical issues.

Now some politicians and pundits are latching onto the mess to argue why Iowa shouldn’t keep its status as the first state in the nation to select a presidential nominee, particularly if it’s going to keep doing this all through a caucus system.

Pete Buttigieg took a victory lap after the Iowa caucuses on Monday — even though he hasn’t yet won them.

The Iowa outcome has been delayed due to a series of technical glitches and missteps by the Iowa Democratic Party that include trouble with a new app it’s using to calculate and report results at precincts across the state. That development put candidates in a bind: Generally, you give a speech at the end of the night and comment on the outcome. There was no outcome to comment on, but many of the candidates gave a speech anyway — including the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor.

In Iowa, everyone is a winner.

At least, that’s what it seemed like Monday evening as the Democratic candidates leading in pre-caucus Iowa polls — Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg — as well as Sen. Amy Klobuchar, each gave their own version of a glowing victory speech. They did so without having any official numbers to back their optimism.