The Iowa caucus is even more of a disaster than we thought
Bernie Sanders has announced that he’s won Iowa, even though – with 100% of the precincts reporting – Pete Buttigieg is in first place. The trouble is that, in addition to everything that specifically went wrong with this year’s Iowa caucus, the format itself is so Byzantine that different people can point to the same results and each make a potentially valid claim that they’re the real winner.
The Iowa caucus has attendees at each site initially pick a candidate, and then after the candidates who don’t reach a certain threshold are thrown out, the supporters of those non-viable candidates can choose to pick a different candidate. So you have the first alignment, and the second alignment, and then a formula to calculate “delegate equivalents” that’s so complicated it’s only understood by eight mathematicians somewhere in an underground bunker.
The actual official winner is whoever ends up with the most delegate equivalents in the end. But it leaves the door open for any candidate to point to the initial alignment numbers and claim that they’re the real results, even though the second alignment acts as a form of casting a second-place vote, and that counts for something too. The whole thing is just a mess, and it would have been a mess even if a crappy mobile app hadn’t malfunctioned.
The Iowa caucus is the equivalent of asking presidential candidates to run through a cornfield while blindfolded, then deciding the winner based on which candidate’s maze-running style is the most appealing to a relative handful of rural white people who didn’t have to work that evening. The problem isn’t that the Iowa caucus is non-diverse, and has a bizarre format, and tells us little about who will be the nominee. The problem is the media tries to convince us that the random results of this Iowa gymnasium food fight are important, when in reality this will all have been long forgotten after Super Tuesday.
