Ready The Clown Car: The First Batch of Democrats Are Ready To Announce Their 2020 Bids

Latest Iowa Polls

• Emerson: Sanders 28, Biden 21, Buttigieg 15, Warren 14, Klobuchar 11
• DFP/Civiqs: Sanders 28, Warren 21, Biden 15, Buttigieg 15, Klobuchar 8

The Iowa Caucuses are today and the latest two polls are almost spot on in agreement. Now we wait for the results.

 

Incomprehensible though this may be to you, the Democrat's convention rules and their usage of superdelegates has nothing to do with President Trump.

 

The DNC changed their convention rules in part because there was a perception among many, especially among Bernie Sanders supporters, that the primary, debate, financing and convention processes were corrupt during the 2016 primary cycle. There were lengthy public speeches made during the reform process, a good bit of which was telecast on CSPAN, as the DNC made efforts to heal divides, repair damage and hopefully prepare for a more trusted and widely accept primary and convention process in 2020 that will not be regarded as corrupt.

The changes to the superdelegate rules were a compromise and did not go as far as many thought that they should, but were nevertheless a small step in the right direction. For the DNC to change those rules back - after the primary voting process has started - apparently for the purpose of undermining the candidacy of a single designated candidate (Bernie Sanders) will be seen by a great many Democrat supporters and voters as a deeply corrupt move by the DNC, especially those on the far left "progressive" wing of the party, and among that group, even more so among Bernie Sanders supporters.

To be fair, I do not believe that even the DNC is so corrupt - and stupidly so - as to do something as crass and foolish as this alteration of the convention rules after the voting has already begun. Surely not. They cannot be at the same time both that corrupt and that stupid. They cannot be, can they?

 

Chris Matthews shares his feelings about the Iowa caucuses today on Morning Joe.



Chris does not appear to be feeling all tingly this time around.

 

No, it would be like the NBA saying that James Harden makes too many three pointers, so they are going to change the distance of the three point line in the playoffs - after the playoffs had already started.

The DNC went through careful, very public deliberations to reform these rules. If they had wanted to keep them like they were, they certainly could have decided to do that at the time. But to wait until you see who has the momentum in the primary contest and then change the convention rules very specifically to thwart the ability of one candidate to win the nomination - after the voting has started - that would be breathtakingly corrupt and only the most unprincipled establishment supporting partisan hacks would dare come out publicly to try to defend it.

This would almost certainly cause the Democrats far more harm than good.

Which is why I believe they will not do it. It is just some talk by a few people. I do not believe it will happen.

 

... if the DNC bylaws had a provision to allow the convention committee to adjust the rules at that time.

 

Politico, an establishment Democrat left leaning publication if ever there was on, assesses the Iowa Caucuses as a "Total Meltdown"

'It’s a total meltdown': Confusion grips Iowa with no official results in sight

A technical meltdown in Iowa Monday night set off bedlam in the critical first contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, triggering competing claims of victory and stoking doubts about the legitimacy of the eventual outcome.

No results had been reported by midnight Eastern, and the Iowa Democratic Party said on Tuesday morning that it planned to release caucus results “as soon as possible today,” while also emphasizing that its ultimate goal is to ensure the “integrity and accuracy of the process.”

“They are matching the paper worksheets by hand,” an adviser to one of the top tier campaigns said. The party said only 35 percent of the results were in and none of it was yet verified. “They literally have no verified results right now so we won’t know anything until sometime Tuesday.”

“We have no sense when results might come in," said Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden. "We are, as other campaigns are, very concerned with what they might release: the alignment numbers are not adding up."

“It’s a total meltdown,” she added.

Tempers also flared during a second call between Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price and the campaigns early Tuesday morning. Biden chief counsel Dana Remus repeatedly insisted that the campaigns be allowed into the “auditing process to give us confidence so we can then be your advocates in restoring confidence.”​

This is not as hard as they are making it and if they had just developed a system to match the worksheets by hand from the start, this all would have been done in a timely manner. For decades all of these states managed these sorts of caucuses by manually matching paper worksheets and tally lists. It is a perfectly good way to manage an election of this sort.

Let this be a lesson to everyone who is not an irretrievable dimwit. Just because you use an "App" (a software program intended to achieve a specific productive purpose) to manage information, that does not mean that the information is correct or better than what you can produce with a Big Chief tablet and a #2 pencil.

A better way to manage this would have been something like this:

1. Perform all of the precinct counts locally and post the results on a whiteboard or a PowerPoint slide for all to see.
2. Record the more detailed data on spreadsheets and Word documents and email these to the DNC headquarters in Des Moines and to whoever else it is determined should have a copy.
3. Have one person at the headquarters combine the summary information onto a master spreadsheet and add all the votes and delegates together from the precincts like that.
4. Confirm these numbers by affirmation of witnesses, perhaps by sworn affidavits signed locally and sent in separately, by email, fax, carrier pigion, or whatever.
5. Re-confirm verbally by phone with as many people as deemed necessary
6. When everything is determined to be correct, report these results out to the news media and let them broadcast the results in tabular form on television.
7. Distribute the results periodically in report form, by email, printed copy, or whatever is deemed appropriate, at appropriate intervals along the way.

Or something like that.



No specially designed "App" required. Easy, peasy. Of course everyone wants to watch closely to make sure nobody is trying to cheat or nobody is just flat getting it wrong. But this really is not that complicated.

 

I give up. Why?