They prepping the narrative landscape for some Caucus stealin
Can Iowa Hold a Proper Caucus for Once?
The closely-watched contest has been a hot mess for more than a decade.
Paper votes, many seen with “Romney” written on them, sit in small stacks. Two hands are in the photo, and one is holding a stack of votes.
Vote counting during the 2012 Republican presidential caucus in Clive, Iowa.Credit…Patrick T. Fallon for The New York Times
Paper votes, many seen with “Romney” written on them, sit in small stacks. Two hands are in the photo, and one is holding a stack of votes.
Reid J. Epstein
By Reid J. Epstein
Jan. 10, 2024
You’re reading the On Politics newsletter. Your guide to the 2024 elections. Get it sent to your inbox.
The most-watched early presidential contest in America has been a hot mess for more than a decade.
My first Iowa caucus night was in 2012. The Republican Party of Iowa declared Mitt Romney the winner by a mere eight votes over Rick Santorum, giving Romney a boost of momentum that eventually carried him to the nomination.
By the next morning, Santorum’s underdog campaign was hearing from county chairmen about miscounts. The state party ultimately retracted its call — Santorum had actually won by 34 votes — but not for more than two weeks.
“I pulled off a miracle, but they said Romney was the winner,” Santorum said when I called him this week. “It wasn’t, ‘Santorum came from nowhere.’ It was ‘Romney won, the race is over.’ What do you think the result would have been if they said I had won?”
The 2012 debacle was the first of three consecutive botched Iowa caucus nights. On Monday, the state’s Republican caucuses will once again be run by party volunteers at 1,657 caucus sites.
Local officials have repeatedly failed to meet the basic accounting standards Americans are accustomed to on election nights. And the kickoff contest for a 2024 election cycle that both major parties agree will decide the fate of American democracy is being hosted by a state with a history of fumbling the basic task of Democracy 101: accurately counting the votes.
Unlike primary and general elections operated on a regular basis by professionals, the Iowa way is to have regular people carry out the count. And it has not gone well.
In 2016, the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton was so close both said they won, and each had a legitimate case. The Sanders campaign said he had earned the most votes, while Clinton won the most delegates. The Iowa Democratic Party’s reporting process had no way to verify how many people had voted for each candidate.
Then came 2020 and the mother of all Iowa meltdowns. The caucus reporting mechanism failed, phones were overloaded at the Iowa Democratic headquarters and at the end of the night and into the next day, nobody knew who had won.
It took until the end of the week for it to become clear that Pete Buttigieg had won the most Iowa delegates. Instead of news cycles about his victory, the stories were about the logistical disaster.
Editors’ Picks
Sharing an Airbnb With My Parents for Seven Weeks
The ‘Mean Girls’ Costume Designer Has Heard Your Complaints
‘Mean Girls’ and the New (Home-Schooled) Kid in Class
“Iowa doesn’t have a great track record of getting people timely and accurate results and probably no one suffered from that more than Pete Buttigieg in 2020,” said Lis Smith, who was a senior aide for the Buttigieg campaign.
In the aftermath, the Democratic Party under Joe Biden pulled the state’s first-in-line status. As I reported this morning, Iowa’s Democrats have meekly accepted their fate as primary season also-rans.
Now I’m back in cold and snowy Des Moines for a caucus where the biggest question is who will finish in second place behind former President Donald J. Trump. But the thing I’m most curious about is whether we’ll even know if there will be accurate — or any — results on Monday night.
Iowa’s Republicans are feeling confident in their ability to count and report results in a timely fashion. During a videoconference with reporters last week, party officials said they had tested their reporting system and were confident there would be no repeat of the Democrats’ 2020 meltdown.