Iowa chaos: To beat Trump, the Democrats have to look competent

First the good news. The abject failure of the Iowa Caucus to produce timely results on Monday night might have finally brought the curtain down on this ridiculous charade that has achieved a prestige that far outstrips its real significance to the American political process.

Iowa is a small stage, representing just forty-one pledged delegates. It is overwhelmingly white and the caucus system – which involves party activists gathering in halls to argue the case for their candidates – disadvantages a majority of voters who simply don’t take part. How well should you read the results of a ballot of ultra-zealots from a state demographically misaligned to the rest of the country? The answer is: not very much, beyond it being more evidence that Democrats seem fundamentally incapable of winning, even when they have every wind at their back.

Iowa was supposed to be the start of a year-long victory lap that would see a Democrat emerge to challenge and beat a hugely unpopular president in November. Their task has been the very same that successive Labour governments have faced in the UK: look competent and find a leader who doesn’t give the average voter palpitations. And like Labour, they seem to find novel ways to fail.

This year, that novel failure has arrived in the form of technology, which feels predestined given that the talk since 2016 has been about election interference and the fragility of electronic ballots. One might have assumed that the lessons of the DNC hack would have meant that Democrats would have looked to use less technology rather than more. But, of course, that’s not how Iowa Democrats roll. They invested in a sophisticated “app” which promised new levels of data and immediate results. In practice, few of the people on the ground in Iowa seemed to understand how the app worked, meaning that data now needs to be collected manually for many of the 1678 precincts. The result: hours of dead airtime increasingly filled with conspiracies against Uncle Bernie as network anchors tried to explain the scale of the failure.

The bad news for Democrats – or indeed conservative Republicans hoping to see the end of the Donald Trump in November – is that his chance of winning re-election will now have risen considerably. This isn’t merely a blip but indicative of a problem with the entire Democratic campaign. Iowa reminds voters of the DNC’s habitual incompetence as well as overstates the appeal of the progressive wing of the party. It’s even more shocking when you consider how the latter was always going to be the case. The caucus system advantages the more passionate liberals and moderation is hard to argue in the moment inside a packed hall. It’s the kind of street-level politics that favours the committed and the ideologically chaste. It’s a system that seems designed to make Bernie Sanders shine and leaked campaign estimates suggest he did just that.

In the bigger picture, Iowa’s delegates might not really matter but the tone certainly does. Joe Biden will do well to come away in fourth place but that’s hardly ideal for a campaign already struggling with motivation and funding.

Public appearances in recent days by his wife, Dr Jill Biden, seems designed to inject new energy into the campaign. For all the emotional connection he has with voters, Joe Biden has been missing too many important beats. His speeches slide into mumbles rather than escalate towards crescendos. Too often he’s caught with his back to the camera when delivering potent soundbites. Biden was never expected to do well in Iowa but, if he has done as badly as some estimates suggest, faith in Biden will dwindle even more.

Biden moderates might have reason, then, to see Iowa as the moment they should start to look elsewhere and, if so, that genuinely opens November up. Pete Buttigieg might have outperformed his polling in Iowa but that’s no indication of how well his brand of centrism would perform in a national ballot, where his sexuality will surely become more of an issue as Democrats try to attract dissatisfied Republicans. Then there’s his problem with black voters who tend to be socially more conservative than the rest of the Democratic caucus. As for Amy Klobuchar, she remains the one moderate who has shown no apparent weakness and whose stock has risen throughout the campaign, as evidenced by her endorsement by the New York Times. It’s a puzzle why she’s not doing better.

Lastly, there’s Mike Bloomberg, whose serious money has bought him into serious contention. The fact he’s seventeen times richer than Donald Trump has led a few Democrats to sanctimoniously question his run but that really speaks to the shambles that is the Democratic race. They devalue their strengths and promote their weaknesses. It’s beginning to feel like 2016 all over again…