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The team that rigged the GOP primaries accuses Democrats of rigging Iowa against Sanders

By Philip Bump | Published February 04 at 9:43 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted February 4, 2020 |

President Trump’s campaign was alleging that the Democratic caucuses in Iowa were rigged well before problems with the vote count emerged Monday night. The narrative is an echo of one it deployed in 2016 to turn supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) against the eventual Democratic nominee. Trump allies wasted no time in running the same play. The irony in 2020, of course, is that there is a major party primary that’s demonstrably rigged: the Republican one, in favor of Trump.

Trump’s campaign held a news conference with campaign manager Brad Parscale and Trump’s two adult sons near Des Moines on Monday afternoon.

“I can see Bernie trying to get messed with the same way the president got messed with back in our caucus,” Parscale said. “I can already see the establishment ...”

Donald Trump Jr. jumped in.

“You saw what happened the last time they rigged the election!” he added.

A few hours later, before the caucuses began, Parscale appeared on Fox News. He was asked if the anti-establishment energy Sanders's campaign demonstrated reminded him of what Trump enjoyed in 2016. But that wasn't exactly what Parscale wanted to talk about.

“I was having a little deja vu the last couple of weeks, I got to be honest with you. I don’t know exactly what’s going on in their backrooms. Turnout for us was great,” he said. “The party all came together and we elected — I think they’re in a much tougher spot. But I get that deja vu. I think things might be a little bit rigged against him.”

He made a facial expression meant to convey something such as I-hate-to-say-it-but.

That point about turnout for Trump’s side being great is important. The Trump campaign put a focus on ginning up support in Iowa, dispatching surrogates including Trump’s children and his acting White House chief of staff across the state to speak to supporters. Trump-friendly outlets such as the Washington Examiner bit on the story that Trump’s team hoped to tell.

“With no real contest,” the outlet's Byron York wrote on Twitter, “a show of Trump organizational strength.”

York meant that as an expression of awe, but it’s more accurate to read the phrasing as written. There was no real competition, but Trump poured resources in anyway — adding something of an asterisk to the overwhelming support he enjoyed.

Why was there no real competition? In part because the Republican Party nationally took steps to make sure there wouldn't be.

In September, the Des Moines Register reported the party would, in fact, hold caucuses in Iowa this year. That announcement was necessary because in other states — South Carolina and Arizona — the state parties had decided to forgo any actual contest. While there were some announced challengers to the president, there were no formal Republican debates.

Last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel scoffed at the idea that other candidates should challenge Trump.

“They have the right to jump in and lose,” she said. “That's fine. They will lose. Horribly.”

They did in Iowa, certainly, as McDaniel and Trump’s campaign ensured they would by boxing them out.

Little did those same people know, though, how lucky they would be in their efforts to cast the opposition as the ones rigging the outcome. As soon as it became apparent the Democratic caucuses would be mired in uncertainty, Trump allies leaped at the opportunity to declare Democrats were trying to rig the outcome.

“Mark my words, they are rigging this thing,” Eric Trump wrote on Twitter. Campaign press secretary Kayleigh McEnany wrote something similar: “Dems rigging it at the Iowa Caucuses!”

Parscale seized on the Democratic Party’s explanation that they were doing “quality control” on the results coming in.

“Quality control = rigged?” he wrote on Twitter, adding the thinking-face emoji. Donald Trump Jr. declared, “The fix is in … AGAIN.”

Some Sanders supporters were inclined to agree. Unfounded theories about the delay in the count and about the phone app introduced to tally the caucus results spread quickly. Sanders’s base of support does have a broad distrust of the establishment, and the Iowa caucuses’ sloppy execution provided plenty of fuel for that view.

Trump’s team tried to be subtle in promoting it. Some of the campaign’s supporters, though, were more explicit. One declared that “they” — presumably the party — “stole Iowa from Bernie Sanders in 2016 and they’re going to try and do it again in 2020.” Conservative pundit Erick Erickson was explicit about the utility of the mistakes the Iowa Democratic Party had displayed.

There’s no evidence that the failures to report caucus results stemmed from anything other than ineptitude, though even that provided fodder for Republicans.

President Trump, for example, tweeted about the problems with the caucuses Tuesday morning.

“The Democrat Caucus is an unmitigated disaster,” he wrote. “Nothing works, just like they ran the Country. Remember the 5 Billion Dollar Obamacare Website, that should have cost 2% of that. The only person that can claim a very big victory in Iowa last night is ‘Trump’.”

He hasn’t claimed the process was rigged against Sanders. No need, really; his team was making that case well before the caucuses even began.

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In Iowa, a drama becomes a farce

By Dan Zak, Ben Terris and Jada Yuan

February 04 at 11:26 AM EST

DES MOINES — Folks. Look. Here's the deal.

Our system is screwy. Our methods are maddening. Each voter has both a head and a heart but ultimately just one vote between them, and that vote is first cast during the cattle call of a caucus, here in Iowa, where factions split apart and blob together, where some outcomes are tie-broken by coin tosses and then can’t even be reported because the caucus app is down and the phone lines are tied up. Democrats are impatient and tired and about ready to lose it. They just want to know what their fellow Americans are thinking, what they’re feeling. They have had to ask themselves: Which candidate do I love the most, which candidate can win, and can one person be the answer to both those questions?

“Folks.”

Joe Biden had taken the microphone.

“Well, it looks like it’s gonna be a long night.”

It had been more than three hours since Iowans had headed to their gyms and town halls to begin untangling their heads and their hearts as the nation bounced its collective leg in anticipation. But then something, somewhere — possibly everywhere — had gone wrong, and the high human drama of the caucuses devolved into a logistical farce, and a new set of questions emerged: When in God’s name would we learn who won this thing, and would anyone trust that answer when it finally arrived?

It was approaching midnight on the East Coast and there were no results, only refrains.

“Folks,” Biden said. “Each and every one of us knows, deep in our bones, that everything this nation stands for is at stake.”

To his right, at Drake University, were giant letters that underscored the point: “BATTLE FOR THE SOUL of the NATION.”

It’s a battle, all right: head vs. heart, human vs. technology, voter vs. voting system. Biden was part of a parade of candidates who would speak to their supporters and with results still missing because of “inconsistencies” in reporting, nearly everyone would end up declaring themselves a winner. In the fog of unconfirmed tallies and carefully worded “victory” speeches, the only result anyone could agree on was that Iowa lost, and chaos won.

A few hours earlier — a more innocent time — Iowans had come together to do their sacred duty.

[Why Iowa? It gets to go first. We can only watch.]

Tassi Cook, 28, had arrived to caucus at the gymnasium of the Pleasantville High School nine months pregnant and uncommitted.

Her heart (and boyfriend) was with Bernie Sanders, she said, but her head was with Biden, for whom her conservative father — and others like him, presumably — would vote for in a matchup against President Trump.

“Last time I went for Hillary and maybe that was more head,” Cook said rubbing her belly. “I’m starting to think I should go with my heart.”

She did, but it didn’t really matter. At her caucus, Sanders and Biden tied for second place, prompting a coin toss that Sanders won, putting him next in line behind Pete Buttigieg.

Coin tosses! There was one in neighboring Warren County (Biden beat Amy Klobuchar). There was one in Johnson County (Elizabeth Warren won). In Scott County, a three-way tie resulted in names being pulled from a hat (Biden’s was picked).

It was an injection of random chance during a night that would end — or rather, not end — with official reassurances that order and precision would eventually prevail.

A return to order, after three years of Trumpian chaos, was something that many of the candidates were selling to Iowans in the interminable run-up to this interminable night. “Electability” had emerged as a watchword among voters, in Iowa and elsewhere, whose main priority is not losing to Trump again.

“I want someone who can win,” Zach Heater, Klobuchar’s precinct captain, said Sunday. “I’m willing to go with a boring president for a while.”

What does electability look like? On Friday night in Clive, 10 minutes north of Des Moines, it looked like an endless row of brake lights pulling into an overflow parking lot by a megachurch and a bus labeled with the command: “Follow Me to Eternity.” Inside the Horizon Events Center, Sanders surrogate Michael Moore scoffed at the notion of Biden as the safe candidate.

Joe Biden is safe like John Kerry, Moore said. He’s safe like Hillary Clinton.

“I’m tired of losing,” he said. “Aren’t you tired of losing?”

On Saturday, before a Biden event at a community center in North Liberty, one man at a urinal turned to another and said: “Bernie can’t win.” Over in Waterloo, Clarianne Young was rhapsodic about the former vice president. “Everybody knows how much my heart is with Joe Biden,” said Young, 50, who just started working as a DoorDash driver in Cedar Falls. “It’s in my heart. It’s not just in my head.”

She looks at Sanders, 78, and sees a heart attack; she looks at Biden, 77, and sees a man who runs like he’s 20.

There’s nothing precise about electability. It’s in the eye of the beholder, and the beholders in Iowa were determined to get caucus-goers to see it their way. Biden organizers talked about how achievable his goals were. Warren suggested that only she could “unite” the party. “Bernie Beats Trump,” declares a popular Sanders T-shirt. Klobuchar has her own version of that, in green, with so many words per T-shirt that she may as well just hand out fliers.

“Bernie says he’s a socialist,” said Linda Powers, 73, at a Biden rally in Waterloo, a town that’s losing all its jobs making John Deere farm equipment. “That’s not a bad thing in my opinion, but for a lot of people that’s right next to the big C.”

How much does electability have to do with enthusiasm? Buttigieg, whose personal style is one of scholarly restraint, inspires groupie-like frenzy among his supporters, who dress up in yellow and blue light-up costumes and have a flashmob dance routine to his theme song (Panic! At the Disco’s “High Hopes”) and whose recurring chant was “I-O-W-A, Mayor Pete all the way.”

Biden, whose name recognition and national polling figures have allowed him to run as Mr. Electability, has a habit of pointing out the endorsements of party elders such as Kerry and Chris Dodd. On caucus day, at a precinct in a shopping center in Marshalltown, some of those in Biden’s corner didn’t seem particularly thrilled about him; they just didn’t want Trump to win again.

“If a car was running, I’d vote for it,” said Patricia Duff, 73, a retired office manager.

Nearby, Shellie Heil, a former nurse who is now on disability, explained why she’s caucusing for Biden. “I just sat down,” she said, and Biden’s chairs were closest to the door.

The group didn’t meet the viability threshold of 21 people, so they absorbed some Klobuchar folks and tried but were unable to lure over the only remaining Andrew Yang supporter, a 19 year-old construction worker named Felipe Montes — who happened to be dating a Biden person’s granddaughter.

In the end, not enough people wanted to back Biden, so they joined the party in the Buttigieg side of the room. They didn’t think he was electable but at least he wasn’t a socialist.

Montes remained uncommitted. “Maybe I’ll vote for Trump,” he said. “Just to mess with the DNC.”

At caucuses across Iowa, big-picture questions about electability gave way to small-picture questions about viability — which, on this night, had a precise definition: Candidates needed to have the support of at least 15 percent of people at any given caucus to stay viable.

At precinct 38 in the fieldhouse at Drake University, supporters of three nonviable candidates were scheming to stay relevant. Sophomore Rachel James, a 20-year-old Texan supporting Klobuchar, scampered across the Astroturf to negotiate with her fellow students representing Biden and Yang. They could all walk away from the caucus, and not be counted at all, or their factions could band together and reach the viability threshold of 61 people. That would be the smart thing to do, but they were unwilling to cede their loyalty to one another’s candidates. So they decided to pick a fourth to unite behind to block a delegate from going to Buttigieg, Warren or Sanders, and to reserve a seat for a moderate at the county convention.

“Cory Booker had my heart and soul,” James, who supported the senator from New Jersey before he dropped out last month, told Yang supporter Andrew Thompson, 19.

“That could work,” said Thompson, who then brought the idea to Biden precinct captain Addie Cosgrove, 19.

“If you really want a moderate candidate,” Cosgrove said, “shouldn’t we do Joe, who is polling best nationally?”

Joe: the sure thing who maybe wasn’t so sure, the candidate who appealed to Cosgrove’s heart. But Cosgrove made a decision based on her head.

She and 16 other Biden caucus-goers marched over toward the Klobuchar and Yang camps. And then they converged on four women who had stationed themselves by a sign that said “other.” These were Booker holdouts, who had come to the caucus even though their candidate wasn’t running anymore, and now were the leaders of a newly formed coalition.

“I’ve never been happier in my life,” said Ireland Larsen, 19, a sophomore from South Dakota wearing a Booker T-shirt. “It’s all about the love. And the delegates. But mostly love.”

Caucus-goers aligned and realigned, were tallied and re-tallied, and then disbanded for campaign parties, where they had hoped to validate their strategies and devotions, their heads and their hearts. They were met instead with delay, uncertainty, glitch.

It was a mess, but the candidates saw only victory.

“We are punching above our weight,” Klobuchar said just after 10 p.m. Iowa time.

“Folks!” Biden told his supporters. “We’re gonna do this. I promise you.”

“We are built for the long haul,” Warren said.

“By all indications,” Buttigieg announced, “we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.”

“I have a strong feeling,” Sanders barked, “that at some point the results will be announced.”

At the Sanders party, near the airport. People hunched over their smartphones, bathed in harsh light and the faint smell of weed, trying to divine results from terse tweets about random caucus sites. Coins were being tossed. Tabulations were being second-guessed. Conspiracy theories circulated about DNC tomfoolery.

Five candidates were using the lack of information to claim the high ground — to distract minds and buoy hearts. “App-ocalypse,” CNN would put on its chyron. “Chaos and confusion in Iowa.”

The Sanders crowd chanted, “This is what Democracy looks like,” which, on a long night like this, sounded like an indictment.

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Deval Patrick to Democrats: ‘Others have plans, I have results’

By Jonathan Capehart | Published Feb 04 at 6:01 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 4, 2020 |

For more conversations like this, subscribe to “Cape Up” on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick (D) and I were getting on the elevator at The Post last month when he hit me with a question delivered half in jest. “What was that that your aunt said? Why a black man can’t win?”

The candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, who was also the first African American governor of the Bay State, is not only battling low poll numbers but also a black electorate whose gaze appears firmly affixed on former vice president Joe Biden. “It’s going to have to be an old white person to go after an old white person,” my Aunt Gloria explained to me at the family barbecue last August. “Old-school against old-school.”

Patrick wasn’t expected to do well in the Iowa caucus on Monday. Thanks to a results calamity, how any of the candidates did in the Hawkeye State remained a mystery as Monday became Tuesday. But as the primary calendar advances to more diverse states such as South Carolina, where Patrick might stand a better chance of breaking through, he still faces a daunting task: convincing black voters like my Aunt Gloria to vote for him. And the mind-set she articulates, Patrick told me, makes him “sad.”

“We are so focused on the very, very important work of defeating the incumbent president that we are, all of us, looking for permission to vote our aspirations,” Patrick said in the latest episode of “Cape Up.” His was a more pessimistic turn on a similar sentiment expressed by Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) when she was making her pitch for the nomination last year. “It is about allowing people to remember that we as Americans, the very nature of who we are, culturally, that we have the ability to see what can be unburdened by what has been,” she told me during an interview in November, eight days before she ended her quest for the nomination.

According to Patrick, part of the problem is the narrative promulgated by political pundits and the press. The one that argues that the pragmatism of African American voters, the foundation of the Democratic Party, is what has placed them solidly behind Biden. “When I hear pragmatic, I am hearing that they are buying a narrative about likelihood of success from people whose success at predicting likelihood is mixed at best,” Patrick said. “The fact that we know Joe Biden, we’re familiar with Joe Biden — who, by the way, is a wonderful person — doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s the most effective at standing up to President Trump.

“We have to offer the American people more than removing him. That is important and it’s a threshold matter, but if we don’t offer more, then it leaves people to think, ‘Okay, we’re just gonna go back to doing what we used to do,’ and what we used to do isn’t good enough for right now,” Patrick said. “Others have plans; I have results,” he added, before recounting his work on climate change, Massachusetts’s history with affordable health care, and his views on capitalism and wealth.

[TRANSCRIPT: Deval Patrick editorial board interview]

“The problem isn’t wealth, it’s greed. It’s the hoarding of all the benefits among a few on the supposition that it’ll trickle down to everyone else,” Patrick explained. “We got what we have because we’ve been on this path of trickle-down economics since 1980, and it was foreseeable that we would be here.”

Given his views on wealth and the power of money, I wondered if Patrick had a problem with two billionaires being among his rivals for the Democratic nomination. He wasn’t interested in engaging in that fight. “Don’t bring me into that. Anybody who wants to compete should compete,” Patrick said. Instead, he pivoted to his “Democracy Agenda,” which he hopes will repair American democracy.

“I have a problem with money in politics, the concentration of money in politics. In fact, our ‘democracy agenda’ . . . speaks to that, the various ways in which, over time, we’ve been treating our democracy as if it would tolerate limitless abuse without breaking,” Patrick told me. “The hyperpartisan gerrymandering, the amount of money — much of it dark — in our politics today, and much of it negative, frankly. The voter suppression, the purging and how hard we make it to register, and how intentional all of this is as a part of a strategy to make sure our democracy produces less and less democratic outcomes. And we need to go at that. That’s the very first agenda item we rolled out because it’s the very first thing I would put before our Congress and the American people.”

Listen to the podcast to hear Patrick make the case for why he should be the next president of the United States. His campaign has at least one theme in common with his rivals’: It’s not just about ridding the White House of Trump. It’s about saving our democracy.

“Every single day it feels like it can’t get worse, and it does. And it’s embarrassing, it’s dismaying. I’m talking now about President Trump and the administration and their choices and behavior. It’s dangerous,” Patrick told me in our sit-down a week before the president’s Senate impeachment trial got underway. “And I think we can all agree, or mostly agree, that four more years of Donald Trump and this nation will be unrecognizable as a modern democracy.”

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Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse.

By Margaret Sullivan | Published Feb 04 at 10:45 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 4, 2020 |

Nature abhors a vacuum. And so does Twitter.

As it became obvious late Monday night that a technical glitch would dramatically hold up the results of the long-anticipated Iowa caucuses, social media exploded with dark ideas about what had happened.

The hashtag “MayorCheat” was trending, a nasty shot at Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg promoted by Mike Cernovich, the rabble-rousing pro-Trump media personality, who tweeted out his conspiracy theory in the early hours Tuesday about connections between the former South Bend, Ind., mayor and the technology company behind the app at the center of the electoral meltdown.

If that was too subtle, another of his tweets simply repeated “RIGGED!” 35 times.

President Trump wasn’t far behind. Though he didn’t immediately suggest malfeasance, he claimed it as a personal victory: “The Democrat Caucus is an unmitigated disaster. Nothing works.” His 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale used the episode to sow doubt: “Democrats are stewing in a caucus mess of their own creation with the sloppiest train wreck in history. It would be natural for people to doubt the fairness of the process,” he told The Washington Post’s Anne Rumsey Gearan.

Meanwhile, memes featuring Hillary Clinton hunched over a keyboard circulated with the hashtag #IowaCaucusDisaster.

All credible reporting seemed to confirm the explanation that a technical snag, not a dirty trick, was to blame. But it didn’t matter. Iowa conspiracy theorists were already working overtime long before voters headed to their caucus sites Monday evening, thanks to another technical glitch that prompted the Des Moines Register to cancel the release of its vaunted Iowa Poll on Saturday night.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang circulated the hashtag “#ReleaseThePoll,” claiming without evidence that it had been killed because their respective candidates did better than expected.

Calmer voices could be heard amid the shouting, but you had to listen carefully.

“People should get a grip,” wrote Sam Stein of the Daily Beast. “There are paper ballots. The caucuses happen OUT IN THE OPEN FOR EVERYONE TO SEE. . . . There isn’t a wizard behind the curtain here.”

But the murkiness was only deepened by legitimate concerns about the security of the new method for tabulating Iowa caucus votes, as a Wall Street Journal article warned last week. While Democratic Party leaders claimed a new mobile app would make it more efficient to report results from the caucus sites, others worried about susceptibility to hacking.

Douglas Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa who has studied election security, told the Journal that the app was a “security nightmare,” and that it’s hard to protect individual cellphones against the range of possible cyberthreats.

Add to that, of course, the established facts about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the whole picture becomes a muddle of things that might be true, things that might sound true but are in fact false or exaggerated, and flat-out preposterous lies.

And this mess isn’t about to stop with Iowa.

The circulating falsehoods “could so erode faith in the election that a losing candidate’s supporters may refuse to accept the results, either for the nomination or the White House,” warned David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

“The thing that keeps me up at night,” Becker told the Associated Press, is that even if the 2020 election is fair and well-managed, “the losing party’s supporters won’t accept that democracy worked.”

You could see that ugly reality taking shape in the early hours of Tuesday morning, as hashtags flew and political opportunists rubbed their hands in glee.

Legitimate media has a huge responsibility here: to quickly identify what’s false. To relentlessly explain how disinformation flows. And to get accurate information out quickly — but never before being fully vetted.

But even if executed perfectly — and it won’t be — much of this will be in vain.

The vacuum already will have been filled to the brim.

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The UPSIDE of the Iowa fiasco(Jennifer is always the OPTIMIST)

By Jennifer Rubin | Published Feb 04 at 10:12 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted Feb 4, 2020 |

The Post reports:

After years of preparation designed to prevent the chaos and confusion that marred the caucuses in 2016, and after careful planning aimed at preventing the spread of conspiracy theories by hostile foreign actors, Democrats began their high-stakes nominating contest Monday under a cloud of uncertainty and dysfunction. Shortly before midnight, the Iowa caucuses were in a state of suspended confusion — with precincts unable to communicate results, state party officials huddling with aides to the top candidates and, above all, a blemish on the process held out by the state as a model of civic engagement.

If and when final results are released, they are certain to be greeted with skepticism. There will be paper ballots to back up the results, but the outcome will nevertheless be questioned and the impact of the results lost in recriminations about the caucus system and Iowa’s preferential position in the primary system. Iowa’s caucuses, an undemocratic relic of the past, failed in their most fundamental task: to provide a credible and prompt vote count.

Every candidate who spent a day or a dollar in Iowa is entitled to be enraged. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — whose supporters ironically fought to keep the caucuses and who demanded that raw vote numbers and first alignment results be released along with delegate counts— loses an opportunity to stake claim to victory in a race in which he outspent other top contenders.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who counted on Iowa to establish herself as a credible, top-tier contender and whose fundraising capacity is more limited than several of her rivals', might be the most adversely impacted by an uncertain result.

Based on reports from precinct captains in 77 percent of the state’s voting locations that suggested he won 25 percent of the final vote, former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg claimed victory. If he did pull off a mammoth upset, taking down Sanders in a state where the senator had been surging in the polls, he should rightfully be seen as a giant-killer with a real shot at the nomination. Whether he wins or not, Buttigieg certainly won the day after Iowa, following his victory speech with a flurry of interviews and reminding us that he dominates free media like no other contender in this race. Sanders, meanwhile, claimed to have won “29 percent of state delegate equivalents, followed by Buttigieg with 26 percent, [Elizabeth] Warren with 18 percent, [Joe] Biden with 15 percent and Klobuchar with 11 percent.”

If other campaigns’ claims that Biden came in fourth are “correct” (inasmuch as the results are still unknown and some campaigns will question their validity when the official numbers are released), he got a lucky break in avoiding intense focus on an unimpressive result. It will not, however, calm the fears of many donors, voters and other Democratic insiders who fear he is a weak front-runner who leaves the party open to a potential disaster: the nomination of Sanders, who in their minds is unelectable as a self-described socialist. Likewise, if Warren comes in substantially behind the top-two finishers, she will have avoided a mediocre outcome and survived to fight on friendlier turf in New Hampshire.

There was one big winner in the Iowa debacle: the people who argue that Iowa long ago should have been shoved out of first place in the primary schedule and forced to drop an archaic and undemocratic caucus system. The Iowa Democratic Party has egg on its face and has created a public relations nightmare for the Democratic National Committee. The only consolation here is that in 2024, Democrats in all likelihood will not have to start in Iowa nor depend on caucuses to help winnow the field. (Nevada caucus officials should be shaking in their boots as they prepare for their Feb. 22 event, which was scheduled to use an app similar to the one that was blamed for causing so many problems in Iowa.)

Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg also comes away looking smart for having avoided Iowa and the other three early states, including the now-problematic Nevada caucuses. He has been spending gobs of money in Super Tuesday states while the top-tier contenders have been, foolishly it turns out, wasting time and money in Iowa. If Biden does not establish himself as a solid front-runner and no other moderate rises to take his place, Bloomberg will serve as the lifeboat the Democrats will badly need. Suddenly, his Super Tuesday strategy does not look so implausible.

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