We’re finally digging into the meat and potatoes of the 2020 election season, as the Iowa caucuses have kicked things off, proving once again that they are absolutely dumb as hell.
For the second time in a row, the Iowa Democratic Party is lost and confused in its moment on the big stage, wondering how a system in which officials are putting their chicken scratch on random sheets of paper could possibly go wrong. While there was plenty of confusion in 2016 that resulted in late reporting of the final tallies, the Democrats took things up a notch this year by working with an app developed by a software company literally called Shadow, which apparently multiple candidates had a financial stake in. Weeeeeee!
Aside from the mass confusion that somehow takes place from a system in which people sort of mill around a gymnasium and some are convinced to join candidate pools like dogs being coaxed by potential owners on either side, all of which is handled differently by the nearly two thousand different caucus sites (sometimes by a coin toss!) and is not beholden to stringent election laws, it’s insane that we would ever put this much stock in one state’s outcome, anyway.
But I know people are just ravenous to get this whole process started, so they’ll take any little crumb, and political reporters and pundits are just as desperate to give us their mostly wrong takes once again. And with almost every candidate putting every resource they have into Iowa, hoping it will work as a springboard to the other primaries, you sometimes get some… bizarre outcomes. Hello Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Bob Dole, Tom Harkin (though to be fair, he was an Iowa senator and no one, wonderfully, really gave a shit about Iowa that year), etc.!
Iowa is one of the whitest states we have, and the absurd, needlessly confusing caucuses make it even harder for people to get involved in the process. To put any real stock in its outcome is ridiculous, unless your candidate wins, of course. This year looks to be especially close, but what the hell do I know, I’m writing this the day after, when the results aren’t even out yet and no one really seems to know what’s going on, except Pete Buttigieg, who is going to try and tweet his way to victory.
This already all sucks, and we’ve only just begun!
