Editor’s Note: Laura Belin is the primary author at the website Bleeding Heartland. She has been covering Iowa politics since 2007/ You can follow her @LauraRBelin. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
The unexpected delay in the Iowa caucus provoked anger and anxiety among many caucus goers here in my state – and with good reason. Already plenty of Democrats around the country oppose starting the nominating process in Iowa. And the last thing Iowans needed was a high-profile snafu that discredits our role in selecting the president.
Unfortunately, Monday night gave us just that and left many Iowans puzzled, defensive and grappling uncomfortably with who was to blame.
Having covered Iowa politics for 13 years, I have long felt that Iowa and New Hampshire would have to struggle to keep their first-in-the-nation status for 2024 and beyond. The demographics of our states don’t reflect the diversity of the Democratic Party and country. The caucuses remain inaccessible to many politically engaged voters. And every additional problem that undermines confidence in the system makes it harder to justify the immense attention Iowans receive from presidential candidates and the media.
With multiple presidential candidates running well-funded campaigns and recent polls showing no clear leader in Iowa, any number of scenarios looked plausible going into the Feb. 3 caucuses. But no one could have predicted the sun would rise the next day without any official results.
How did this all look on the ground in Iowa? Well, in sharp contrast to the chaos of the larger fiasco concerning results this year, many individual precinct caucuses were relatively calm – less acrimonious across Iowa than in 2016, when shouting matches or disputed procedures led to some hard feelings between supporters of Hillary Clinton and those of Bernie Sanders. My caucus in a suburb of Des Moines, for example, was rather harmonious this year – with supporters of rivals engaging in friendly conversations.
The state party adopting a new rule that changed how Democrats select their second choices helped smooth the precinct process. In the past, experienced political hands sometimes used the “realignment” period – when Iowans could change their preference – to shift a few caucus-goers from candidate A to B, depriving candidate C of a delegate. This year, only Iowans whose first-choice candidate failed to clear the viability threshold (15% support, in most precincts) were able to make a second choice. More than 90% of the 253 caucus-goers in our local elementary school gymnasium landed with a viable candidate the first time, leaving only about 15 people to persuade.
I wasn’t the only one who had this positive experience. “My precinct experience was incredibly smooth and as good as a caucus could be,” Thomas Lecaque of Ankeny, a suburb north of Des Moines, told me on Twitter.
The problem came when a malfunctioning computer app and a jammed phone line at Iowa Democratic Party headquarters forced many precinct chairs to spend hours trying to relay their delegate and raw supporter numbers.
Nancy Bobo, a longtime activist in Des Moines, told me, “Sounds like no one listened about the choice of this app and this mess was fairly predictable.” Bobo felt that by giving out so little information to the media last night, the state party hurt Iowa’s case for remaining first on the calendar.
Nathan Thompson, who chairs the Democratic committee in a northeast Iowa county, said in a statement the state party deserved credit for putting “a lot of time and effort into ensuring a fair and transparent caucus process this year.” Unfortunately, he said, they also relied on untested software.
Others defended the party and its slowness to report results.
Vanessa Phelan, who chairs a neighborhood Democratic group in Des Moines, observed that prep work by volunteers paid off: “[t]here’s a huge paper trail that campaign precinct captains signed off on at each caucus.”
And Tanya Keith, a precinct chair in Des Moines, reminded critics that volunteers make the caucuses happen: “I’m proud my state is working to get this right. Remember you can only pick 2: cheap…, fast, accurate.”
Amber Gustafson, who chaired a precinct in Ankeny, lamented to me that “lies, conspiracies and fake news are multiplying” in the absence of concrete information. She worried the work of those who made their caucuses successful “is being cancelled out by the ‘incompetence and chaos’ narrative that the media is pushing. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
There’s reason to have faith in Iowans’ continued ability to host the first caucus in primary season.
For the first time, every Iowa caucus goer signed a “presidential preference card,” stating the person’s first choice and (if applicable) second choice. The cards made it easier to count groups when precinct chairs needed to allocate county convention delegates to the viable candidates. Even more important, they gave the state party something concrete to compare against results phoned in or submitted by app. Imagine how much worse the angst would be about the information vacuum if Democrats did not have a paper trail for every precinct.
And thanks to another change adopted for the 2020 caucuses, we will have raw supporter totals in addition to state delegate equivalents for each candidate, giving us a better sense of where Iowans stood on Monday night.