Pod Save America - “Iowa, you had one job."

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

As they wait for Iowa caucus results, Jon, Jon, Tommy and Dan talk about what went wrong in the first contest in the nomination process, what it means for the caucus moving forward and how the candidates move on from here, even as they learn more about the delegate counts.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. A beautiful day for democracy here in Des Moines. We are recording this bonus episode at 1 p.m. on Central Time on, what day is it, Tuesday? And so at 4 p.m. Central, we should have at least half the results. So by the time you hear this, we will have some results from the Iowa caucuses. But for now, we are just going to talk about everything that went wrong yesterday, Monday,

and some of the things that went right, I guess. We'll try to find some things that went right. We'll try to find some things that went right. Okay. So the four of us and the Crooked Media team, we started the night. We went to a caucus precinct in Ankeny. Ankeny 09.

Ankeny 09, which is a suburb of Des Moines. And, you know, things seemed pretty smooth at ours. Seriously. No, I mean, it was perfectly run. That's why we're laughing because it's like you wouldn't have known. We went to our caucus location it was a pretty diverse mix of uh supporters of all the different kind of candidates uh i think bernie ended up winning our caucus but pete was right

behind him warren was right behind him uh and then klobuchar was behind warren yeah four candidates reached viability which is pretty unusual i think yes it is yeah and then and the process of counting and everything else and the realignment and all that went pretty smoothly and then we all left and drove back to des moines to watch the results and that's when we started seeing that uh they were not going to be reporting the results anytime soon because there was an issue kink in the hose so let's um i mean just because there's so much different information out there let's talk about how the process was supposed to work um with an emphasis on what was different about it this year and obviously hopefully many of you know exactly how the process was supposed

to work this year because you listened to on the ground in iowa um but in case you haven't heard it yet uh tommy tell us what was different about this year and how the process was supposed to work. Sure. So there were a few things that were different this year. There were some changes to the rules themselves, which meant on first alignment, meaning when everyone first lines up in the corners of their precinct and you determine viability or not, you determine if they have 15% or not, you are then locked in with your candidate. So that was one new rule change. There were also these presidential preference forms that people filled out. So you physically wrote down who you're caucusing for.

And then what the data that was reported back that was going to be released by the Democratic Party change. So they were going to release a raw vote count after the first alignment, the raw vote count after the second alignment, the traditional vote count after the second alignment, the traditional state delegate equivalent number, and then like how many delegates you would get out of the 41 in the state. That was the plan. And this was the first time that all of those sets of data would be released or would be reported. Usually it's just the state delegate equivalents and then ultimately the pledge delegates. And so the raw vote totals both in the first alignment the second alignment

those usually didn't have to be reported and so now they were going to be reported for the first time so there was extra data to report and the way they were going to report it was they had this app that was going to report all the data but they also as a backup had you could call it in via phone and it seems like the there was problems with both of those systems love it why did you design that app the way you did hello it is me app designer i work very long and hard on programming app goes smoothly works exactly according to plan so um that's so stupid i guess the best way to do this is just i will read the um the statement from the iowa democratic party that was basically the

last statement that they released uh super late on on monday night they said as precinct caucus results started coming in the iowa democratic party ran them through an accuracy and quality check it became clear that there were inconsistencies with the reports. We determined with certainty that the underlying data collected via the app was sound, but while the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in our reporting system, which they then fixed. And then separately, there was a was a phone issue apparently the issues with the app were confounded by failures with the party's hotline system the idp had set up a phone hotline

as a backup method for precinct chairs to report results in case the app was not working however they were completely overwhelmed with calls monday night and precinct chairs were left on hold for hours what was your reaction tommy when this was all unfolding, having been there for a while? Thrilled. No, I mean, like, look, this is a more complicated year than ever. There's more data being reported. There's so many candidates. I mean, it's crazy that there were precincts where five candidates were viable, right? So there's more math to be done. Just stepping back, like, caucuses are not a precise precise process this is not like scientific really you're we were in a room with 283 people and then human beings divided it up counted them

moved them around counted them again and then ultimately split 10 delegates amongst these candidates right so it's an imprecise process this isn't fucking deloitte and in some ways uh all this morning run yeah it's more in run the deloitte but the in some ways, all those new- It's more Enron. Yeah, it's more Enron than Deloitte. The Enron caucus. At scale, I think there's probably always going to be some errors at caucuses. In some ways, the transparency of a caucus where you literally stand up and do all the math publicly helps eliminate some of those errors, but there will always be problems. I think that this app and some of the technical flaws were a challenge. I think that there's a bigger problem of people probably not being fully trained to use these new technologies well.

I mean, there's reports that people are downloading the app day of. Which just seems crazy. That is inexcusable. I don't know how that's possible. And there clearly wasn't a backup system. You know, you have all these paper ballots people are filling out. What was the process for then retaining like up to a couple hundred thousand pieces of paper? You need a system for that. You need some way to use it or else you're just sitting on a bunch of paper. So my reaction was enormous frustration that we didn't

have any answer to who's winning. There's no winnowing of the field coming out of Iowa. There's no bounce for any of the candidates. It really sucks and saddens me that people are just calling into question the primary process generally and with some good reason here. And then my heart just breaks for all these kids and campaigns who worked so hard for a year, put literally everything they had into this campaign, and they came out not feeling like winners or losers, but just let down by the party. That is the most heartbreaking thing to me. The thing that I'll agree with all of that, I feel terrible for the people who are at our caucus, who did everything exactly right. The guy who was the caucus chair was a master of organization. Yeah, he really was.

He was awesome. And jokes. Yeah, and quite funny. Yeah. But there's also, I think Tommy hit on a really interesting point here that shows why this was a little bit of a perfect storm of problems, which is you have all the new complications of the new system. But if you think back to recent years, the math was exponentially more complicated, even by the old system. In 2016, the room split up in two ways. And maybe there was one or two O'Malley people who they would fight over, but overwhelmingly, there was two candidates. In 2008,

there were three candidates. I think maybe Richardson or Biden got a single delegate somewhere, but almost every room split three ways. So there was less on realignment. It was just a much less complicated system. Here where you have four and five candidates reaching five billion each place makes this so much harder. Plus, you know, decent-sized turnout.

We can talk about the turnout issues, but still a lot of people, like 283 people in the room we were in. And that it is complicated and hard. And then when you put in a phone system that doesn't work, an app that doesn't work, a new system with people being employed by volunteers who have been doing the old system for decades in some cases, it was a recipe for disaster. Yeah, love it. We were watching the caucus and there are many, many critiques about the Iowa caucus that are completely legitimate. Iowa is not demographically representative of the country. There's a lot of

people who can't caucus. People with disabilities sometimes can't caucus. People who have autism sometimes don't feel comfortable caucusing. It's not a blind ballot. But yet, seeing it unfold, you actually appreciate what makes it democratic, what makes it feel like communities coming together to talk this thing through. It is civil. It is collaborative. It is a bunch of people who ultimately have the same goal coming together to do something positive. And the way in which this has been destroyed by the failure to report the information, it's a heartbreaking thing. This is the beginning of the most important primary of our lives. We've been saying that for a year, and it's an incredibly inauspicious and disastrous beginning. And it's also just a deeply sad fact that we're going to be hearing about this from

irresponsible people like Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham and others for the next year. Yeah, I mean, going back to the site that we were at, right, we had this precinct captain who was doing everything right. All the people who were volunteering with him to put this on were like excellent all the supporters and all the precinct captains from the different campaigns even as they were like realigning they were treating each other well no one was arguing no one was fighting like it just went off so there's been plenty of blame spread around to a lot of places that it probably shouldn't but i do think and tommy correct me if i'm wrong but it seems like the majority of the blame is on the iowa democratic party itself for not i mean there was problems with the app for sure right there were coding problems so that deserves some blame

for sure but like a lot of these precinct chairs weren't trained on the app a lot of them didn't even know about the app for a couple weeks until a couple weeks before. They didn't do dry runs. They didn't have the phone system, wasn't ready to handle a bunch of calls in case something went down. It just seems like they should have planned for all this. Yeah, look, it's an enormously complicated process. It's almost 1700 mini elections. But what I've heard anecdotally from people is that, you know, they didn't have people to run some of the precincts until the last days. They were scrambling to find folks. It seems like there were people who just didn't understand the rules and they screwed up the alignment processes or didn't do realignment or screwed up the data. So with the caveat that we don't really know exactly what happened, we don't know

if it was just a terribly coded app or if it was user error among people who aren't familiar with the app, whatever. I don't know. I don't care. The Iowa Democratic Party, you had one job, literally, was to make this go off. And it was an unmitigated disaster. And there was a lot of momentum. And I know those people and they're nice and they're well-meaning, but there was a lot of momentum going into last night among people in the party about how the primary process needs to change. And I think there is now literally no argument for Iowa going first because part of the deal we make is that, yes, it's a not representative state. All the problems love it listed. But Iowa Democrats take it really seriously. Candidates get vetted and the process gets run and we learn something and it winnows the field. That deal didn't they didn't come through on their end of the bargain last night. Yeah. And it wasn't just random Twitter users.

The Trump campaign and other Republicans said it was rigged. A few journalists implied that, even a few politicians. I saw blame directed towards the DNC, Tom Perez, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Robby Mook, former campaign manager at one point, Silicon Valley. Robby Mook was trending on Twitter for something he had nothing to do with, apparently. So, like, obviously, you know, we just talked about how most of the responsibility lies with the Iowa Democratic Party here. But does it seem like it's not too much to ask for everyone to just wait for all the information and reporting about what went wrong to come out before you start, like, just jumping at conspiracy theories? Especially if you are in a position of authority in some way? It is too much to ask. I mean, that's what I'm saying. Are we just like,

part of me wondered, even if it was just a minor problem, or even if things went relatively well, like, are we just in a situation now that when there are fuck ups like this, people aren't going to be able to handle them appropriately? And not just fuck-ups, but confusion. Right, confusion. We are going to be in a situation if we run into a close race in California, where California will not be called potentially for a week or more after Super Tuesday because we do mail-in ballots. The Republicans exploited that massively in 2018 because they were ahead on election day count and as in the crooked

seven districts and as those ballots came in and it was you know these terms about like missing ballots and ballot stuffing and all of that and we are ripe for that because our we live in this dystopic media environment where bad actors have all the wrong incentives. And we have a massively complex primary process that lends itself to confusion on its best day and incompetence on its worst. Yeah. The other thing, too, is like the idea that we always talk about this, that when we were in government and it was a question of like, did something go wrong because it was some someone was you know it was a conspiracy or some malicious attempt or was it incompetence it's usually like nine out of ten times incompetence and it seems clearly like that was the case here which is not excusable in any fucking way but the idea that um i don't know someone was going to like develop an app that somehow swung the caucuses towards one candidate

the other is just like it fucking defies belief yeah it defies belief also you know look a chaotic deeply important situation with very limited information is going to be revealing in how people respond and so i think you saw people like aoc and others trying to turn the temperature down, saying everybody just breathe. We'll get the information. I think that's generally the attitude we tend to take in moments of crisis. Not to say that there isn't a huge fucking problem, not to say it's not a big deal, not to ignore the fuck up, but to say, let's wait till we have genuine information.

But then you also see people who use it as an opportunity to go after their favorite villains, to score points, to excite division, to fight the same fights they fight online every other day of their lives. And it's obviously unhelpful. It's obviously damaging. There's this book, a lot of people are saying the new conspiracism and the assault on democracy. And I've been thinking about it a lot because it does capture something essential about how we respond in these moments. And the longer we went without an answer as to what happened and the more people who support Bernie or Pete or any of the candidates were getting more and more angry that their candidate may have been denied a key moment, the more they were looking for something big to explain

their terrible feelings. And this is just a fuck up by some incompetence of people who didn't plan enough is unsatisfying. And so you look for an answer that matches your level of anger. And I think we see that all the time. And one of the unfortunate consequences of that is people just asking questions, people just doing Internet sleuthing without much to back it up in a moment of real uncertainty have fed into what Donald Trump and the Trump campaign and Lindsey Graham, who buried the difference between right and wrong with John McCain, will use now for the next year in Facebook

ads to target and demobilize potential Democratic voters. Yeah, I mean, look, I think we should point out that the campaigns were actually pretty responsible and pretty measured. Some of them put out some of the information that they had at that point of time because all these campaigns, they're talking to their precinct captains who are reporting back and they're putting that into an Excel sheet and trying to figure out what's happening in real time. We can talk later about some of the things Mayor Pete said and the fact that he declared victory in a lot of ways and whether that was appropriate or responsible. But I think what was disheartening last night was a lot of these additional data collection

and reporting measures were put in place because of concerns the Bernie Sanders campaign had in 2016. And yet that didn't stop. They wanted more transparency. They wanted more transparency, and rightly so. But that did not stop a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters for trying to wedge the challenges and reporting back that data into a frame of this is the party trying to fuck Bernie Sanders. And the most just asinine, absurd example of that is someone online who declared that this is on Obama because he wanted Tom Perez in charge of the DNC, apparently not understanding that the DNC wasn't running the Iowa caucuses. Right. So like DNC doesn't run state parties, guys.

People doesn't. They're independent. People like Levitt said, were freaking out and emotional and went nuts and just lost their fucking minds. We should reiterate again, like the Sanders campaign has been maybe one of the most responsible campaigns. And that's true on the record in terms of what they said publicly and off the record when I was talking to them. They were like, ah, we think they're calming people down.

Yeah, and I'd also just say too, it's unsatisfying, but even in a moment where there wasn't a lot of information and people were looking to find someone to blame, it was hard to find an ideological direction to go in because we don't know what the outcome's gonna be. But it seems like the two campaigns most upset by not knowing what happened are Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders.

And the only... Who are not... Not on the same page here. Right, exactly. And the only... And by the way, it's also worth pointing out that the only campaign that's come close to questioning the results is the Biden campaign. Yeah.

Let's talk about all the candidates are handling this. And let's start with Mayor Pete, as Tommy was just talking about, who basically declared himself the winner in a late night speech where he said, quote, Iowa, you have shocked the nation because by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious. His team put out a memo based on the information they received from 77 percent of their precinct captains, which told them they were doing eight points better than they had expected. And so therefore, they had guessed that they will win the most state delegate equivalents. Now, again, by the time you hear this, we'll probably have more information on this. But let's actually, before we talk about whether it was right or wrong for him to do this, Dan, can you talk a little bit about how campaigns know this kind of information internally or how much they know internally on a night like this as they're waiting for official public results to come out? So a campaign builds a model based on their data of how they have to perform in each precinct

to get to what they believe their win number is. And that model is turnout-based. But you can dial it up or dial it down based on what turnout is. And you make that prediction based on how many people show up. And so these campaigns, if they are well-organized, have a precinct captain whose job it is to tell someone via email, phone, or text in the headquarters how many people are in that caucus site, right? So the Pete campaign's model may have said, we're expecting 350 people at this site. The other person tells them it's 283.

They then adjust their model to that point. And so these results of the campaigns have put out are based on their model. And I think if Pete is reporting near 80% of precincts, he has a good sense. The thing that I would caution everyone on him is no one knows total turnout. So you could have really high turnout in some areas and really low turnout in others. And that could affect your model and your estimate. If you're not at 100% precinct captains giving you data. Your model and your estimate. If you're not at 100% precinct captains giving you data. Yeah. So then with 77%, the Buttigieg campaign looks at the data and says, okay, I think we might be ahead in delegates by the end of the night.

They don't say, you know, raw vote at the final alignment, but they do think the delegate number. And we've talked before about how these could all be different. So they send him. So all the other candidates go out and just give sort of their stump speeches. You know, Amy Klobuchar says, we punched above our weight tonight. The other ones kind of say, let's see. They give their stump speeches. And Pete declares victory.

What do we think about that? I think he read Crooked.com and the piece that Hillary Clinton's communications director, Lily Adams, wrote on the site last week that said, in a moment of confusion, if you're confident, declare victory and go to New Hampshire. And that's what Pete did. Yeah. And I guess some of the context for this too is even if everything went perfectly last night, and we've talked about this before, these candidates leave Iowa, Tuesday night is the State of the Union. And then there's another debate Friday night, and then the New Hampshire primary is Tuesday. And all of these candidates, when you leave Iowa, you're looking for some kind of a big win to get momentum as you're headed into New Hampshire.

But now that there's a whole bunch of different sets of data and someone could win the vote and someone could win the delegates and someone could win the pledge delegates, there could be multiple winners. And so we always knew it was kind of going to be a race to have someone spin their win as the real win and now that there was this big fuck up i'm sure that buddha judge campaign thought okay well if we're the leaders and delegates we better fucking say something now because if this goes on for days and we don't know the actual results i will be completely meaningless to this campaign but you could also make an argument that maybe you shouldn't go out there and say we're victorious when you don't know for sure we're victorious.

Pete's campaign has said, we just have to do well here. And they'll say, kind of on background, we just have to beat Biden. But they really need to win. Pete is struggling mightily in national polls. He has nigh on to 0% African-American support. He needs to get escape velocity to have a chance to actually be the nominee.

And they have not so subtly modeled themselves, maybe a little bit ironically, on Obama and his path. And Obama won Iowa. It was a gigantic deal. We didn't win New Hampshire, but it gave us an opportunity to actually take on Hillary Clinton. And make it look like it was then just a two-candidate race. And that option is not available for Pete as of the recording of this. You look at what the five campaigns have said. You had Amy Klobuchar go out there and say she punched her upper weight. You had Warren go out there and say, it's pretty tight at the top up here.

There's three of us, then a space, and then maybe Biden. You had Biden go out there and saying, we got delegates, right? And you had Bernie and Pete declare some sort of victory. And to me, that tells you what they're all feeling, and it kind of, it aligns with each other. And so the thing that I'm struck by is thinking, let's say we find out, and we don't know, but let's say we find out that either, you know, Pete or Bernie can really declare victory here. They were really denied something incredibly important. A Democratic socialist who's been trying to build a movement for three decades and won the Iowa caucus, that's an incredibly big deal. Or a gay person won a statewide contest for the Democratic Party to choose his presidential nominee. That's incredible. That's historic.

And it is just sad that we're here the next day speculating as to whether or not they should have given victory speeches. It's just, we're going to say it over and over again, but it just, the reason that conspiracy theories are so frustrating is they don't actually point to any grand villain because it looks like the two people that may have been hurt the most are the people on the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Tommy, what'd you think of Pete's move there? I get it from a raw political perspective. And I do think there is something to be said for getting ahead of waiting for all the results to come in and just sort of making your case. That said, I think when you combine the fact that Pete really leaned in harder than the

other campaigns in terms of declaring victory and the fact that they clearly are the reason that the Des Moines Register poll was spiked, you can understand why that leaves a pretty bad taste in a lot of the other campaigns' mouths. Now, where it gets ridiculous is this company that developed the app, this shadow or whatever the fuck the company is. You've got all these like online inspector gadgets, like, you know, figuring out through FEC reports that, you know, Pete has paid them and the Iowa's Democratic Party's paid them in Nevada. And they're trying to like, draw these red strings and allegedly those conspiracy. That's where it gets completely

ludicrous and you lose me. But you know But I kind of winced when I saw him tweet, Iowa, you have shocked the nations by all indications. We were going on New Hampshire victorious because maybe they think that's true, but there's no way for us to vet their data. So it's kind of hard to trust. It's over-torqued, right? You can't say the results are undeniable. They're definitionally deniable. They're 0% reporting. And you can't say all indications because it's some indications it's some indications i guess i guess where i come down on this is just like if it's true that pete is the delegate leader then you look back on that and you're like oh yeah i guess it was smart for him to do that and get out ahead of it if it's not then he deserves a ton of criticism of course for doing that but

i guess we're gonna know like maybe by the time you're hearing this we'll know or never who knows yeah that's the problem or never whether pete is first or second and there does seem to at least be some unsaid consensus among the campaigns that that is the order right because no one that the other important thing here is no one has challenged so far pete's contention that they're going to win the delegates or Bernie's contention that they're going to win the vote total. And up until this year, the definition of how you won the Iowa caucus was you got the most state delegate equivalents. Right, Tommy? Yeah.

So that's how Obama did it. That's how Clinton did it. Clinton probably, although we don't know because we don't have data, but by all anecdotal evidence, lost the popular vote among iowa caucus goers in 16 but one more state delegate equivalents and so pete if that is true he did win the iowa caucus and if this was his conspiracy it was a conspiracy to deny himself his moment yeah that's the other thing about the like acronym connected to pete and shadow and stuff like that it's like so the app ended up screwing over Pete, though. How did the app fuck with the phones? Yeah, I know.

We keep saying that. No one's looked into the shadow conspiracy behind jamming up the phone lines, which is a pretty old technology. Incompetence is always going to be a safer bet over malevolent masterminds at some once in a while you'll find a mastermind all right it'll happen so most of the time so after pete did this bernie's campaign pushed out internal numbers so we're just going to go candidate by candidate here so bernie's campaign pushed out internal numbers they say are from nearly 40 percent of precincts showing bernie with 29.7 of the final vote, Pete 24.6%, Warren 21.2%, Biden 12.4%, Klobuchar at 11%. And they said in their statement and Sanders' statement that they recognize it

doesn't replace the full data from the IDP, but their supporters worked too hard and they wanted to have that data out, which I thought was a pretty good hedge from the Bernie thing. I guess my question was, and you brought this up, Dan, actually, why Bernie's only had 40% of precinct captains reporting. I would have thought they would have had more data. They were up to 60% by this morning, I believe. So a very well-organized campaign would get you, I'd say, at least 80% of precincts. You would have someone whose job, a volunteer whose job it was there to get that information. So I was very surprised about Bernie's campaign, which has seemed incredibly well organized in the state the entire time we've been here, at least,

would have that data come in so slowly. And I would bet just knowing the Warren people as we do that they actually have at least as good a data as Pete does. But it doesn't raise questions, to me at least, about the outcome, just about why that is. I don't know. I think that they're giving. I don't believe that they're hiding data or doing like that. It's just I thought I was surprised by how few precincts they had information from within, you know, five hours after the caucus. Yeah, but I just bet it's for mundane reasons.

It's like the precinct captain in such and such county put their kid to bed and went to sleep. You know what I mean? I was talking to people in the Warren campaign campaign this morning they're still chasing down internal data as well it's just you know it's a volunteer-led process in the grand scheme of things a very well planned coordinated system to gather this data is not that useful right they're all on their way to new hampshire regardless they didn't know that they were going to wake up to no fucking results yeah some reporter tweeted last night that if we weren't all competing with each other we could all

get this data in like two hours yeah that's funny well you brought up the warren campaign i should you know earlier i said the sanders campaign has been one of the most responsible on this whole thing i think maybe the most responsible campaign has been the warren campaign they basically put out a statement they've released no numbers they haven't declared anything they've said we're helping the party as much as we can we're trying to like give them the data that we have too to make sure everything's right. The Warren people think there's like a clear tier one that's like Bernie, Pete and Elizabeth Warren, and then a clear tier two, which is Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden. Now, in a normal race, the one percent difference between

the candidates in that top tier is everything. Right. And what stinks now is because we're still waiting on this data, because it's coming in piecemeal, because some of it we might never get, we might not ever have total clarity on that. And that would be infuriating to me. Yeah, and that really sucks for the Warren campaign too, because if they came in a really close,

or if they end up coming in a really close third to Bernie and to Buttigieg, then that would be a big deal for her out of Iowa if it was a clear. This also sucks for Amy Klobuchar, who seems to have had a surprisingly good night, which normally would be the second big narrative out of this. Instead, the big story coming out of Iowa

is this is a clusterfuck, and that's a bummer for every campaign that competed, except probably Joe Biden. Well, that's exact. So that brings us to Joe Biden. So the Biden campaign, talking about how all the campaigns were super responsible at the beginning they were the first ones to release a letter from their lawyer um earlier in the night when things started getting fucked up basically saying you know the app has failed the phone system has failed you know both

are true basically sort of like putting everyone on notice that they were upset about the results themselves and then the biden deputy campaign manager this morning said, if you have a process where you can't be confident that the results that are being reported are reflective of the votes that people cast last night in the process, that's a real concern. So it does seem like the Biden campaign has gone further than the other campaigns, and perhaps not just saying that this was a fuck up on reporting the results but questioning perhaps the integrity of the results themselves um what did you guys think about that it's not what you do when you think you won the Iowa caucus that's for sure yeah is it

fair we don't know but it might be I don't know what they're looking at that leads them to believe that but I also don't think that given the disaster all around us that I'm going to criticize them for wondering that aloud. I would say this. I don't think anybody is in a position to defend what the Iowa party has done. And I understand why the Biden campaign, especially if they think they underperformed, is going to put out a statement like that. There's a big difference between saying there's a problem with this reporting system.

There may even be a problem with some of the numbers and claiming that there's some kind of vector against your candidate, right? Which they're not saying, but it's in some way implied by them making this stink. I was very uncomfortable when I saw that last night. After having slept for approximately three hours on it, I'm not sympathetic, but I do like, it is very possible that there are real questions. And it could be that some of the precincts where they expect to do better are the smaller, more rural ones where there may be more problems.

Like the Polk County Democratic Party was able to figure out all their stuff and drive the numbers over to the headquarters. The headquarters turned it away, which is another problem, but they got the answers. So I've seen a bunch of like bigger, better organized county parties who have been able to handle their own business. And that's probably not happening out in the rural places. But we shouldn't disconnect that from the fact that he if all the reports from all the campaigns are true and what we saw anecdotally, then he has a very big incentive to not have these results come out or have or not have them be seen as declarative. I guess I would say I understand their concern, but I would have preferred a much more nuanced statement of like what you just said or saying, you know, we think that we did well in

a lot of these more rural counties where we've heard more reports of problems and we just want to wait and see. And I actually think, you know, the campaign statements I've had some issues with Joe Biden in an event today in New Hampshire was like, let's just all take a breath, wait and see till all the results come in. I think we might surprise people, whatever. I think saying stuff like that is completely fine. Good for them. I worry about, unless you actually have evidence, you know, starting to, in an environment like this, questioning perhaps the integrity of the results, which they're sort of getting a little close to. I would separate two things. There's the integrity and the accuracy. Right.

The integrity suggests malfeasance somewhere, right? That someone has cheated our regnus system. Accuracy is about competence. Clearly, there's reasons to question the competence. Agreed. What will it take for Democrats to beat Donald Trump in November? I'm Jon Favreau, and that's the big question I try to answer in Season 2 of The Wilderness, a podcast from Crooked Media. Over six episodes, I talk to voters, strategists, organizers, and candidates

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So we talked a little bit about who's hurt most by this debacle. I was going to ask, does it help anyone? It might help Joe Biden if he ends up coming in fourth or fifth, right? Because it's such a muddle. And then he sort of gets away with what would have been probably the worst narrative of the night if he came in fourth or maybe even fifth. If Joe Biden ultimately comes in fifth, this is an incredible rescue of Joe Biden. If he comes in fifth behind Amy Klobuchar, that would have been an extremely damaging, far-reaching story for his campaign. And by the way, they can try to kind of sow doubt in what the outcome would be, even if they have some legitimate grievances.

But, you know, I'm sure inside of that campaign, the bigger question is not what happened in Iowa. It's what do we do moving forward that we have this incredible weakness that may have been revealed by this result? Yeah. Let's talk about turnout for a second. We don't, of course, know the final turnout, but we did get a statement from the party earlier in the night as things were going off the rails that they believe the turnout was on track to match the 2016 caucuses. And then I believe that Pete Buttigieg's campaign statement also said they thought it was on track to match 2016 from their internal data. How worrisome, Dan, is that to you that the turnout in an election like this would be lower than it was in 2008 and when it was record turnout? I think we were all, myself included, overly optimistic about reaching 2008 level turnout,

in part because this state has moved 19 points in the Republican direction at the presidential level in that 12-year period. So you're operating with fewer Democrats. I'm very worried about it. I think we've had 1,000 organizers in this state knocking doors for a year, and you would have thought you could bring more new people into the process. So that is concerning. There are some factors here that I think are worth at least addressing. One is people were very unsure.

Just anecdotally, all the people we talked to as we went around, people were like, I don't know about this. I don't know if this person or this person, or I got a list of three. And it's hard to commit to go to, on a very cold night, to go to a three-hour caucus when you're not passionate for one person. Because caucuses are always about enthusiasm. The second issue is the caucus has not been part of the conversation for the last 10 days. Normally, there is this huge ramp up for it. But we have had impeachment.

Every cable channel has, instead of having candidates on, Rachel Maddow has been canceled for a week basically so you can show impeachment. And then Kobe Bryant, which is another thing. I think political people, we don't think enough about how non-political news stories affect passive political observers ability to consume political news. The Iowa caucus was at best the third biggest story in the country in the run up to. And that's true in Iowa just as it across the country. So there's a number of factors there, but I'm worrying but not panicking about it.

Yeah, you could certainly see a scenario with that many undecided caucus goers. And I think some of the early data did show that more people than usual made up their minds in the last two days. And we saw it in our precinct as well when people are really, I mean, the way that we all look at politics as we observe it is that, you know, people's supporters are enthusiastic and passionate and don't like the other candidates. And within the precinct that we saw, like the woman that stood up to give the speech on behalf of Joe Biden to get people to come over to the Biden corner, ended up happily caucusing for Elizabeth Warren right after that when they weren't viable. And that happened with a whole bunch of other candidates across ideologies. People went to Klobuchar, Yang, Warren, Buttigieg, Sanders. So there's that. And you have to think to yourself, if you're an Iowan,

you could very easily think, I'm absolutely going to show up in 2020 to make sure Trump's not president. I can't really figure out which of these candidates I want right now. So why am I going to go out and sit in a caucus for a couple hours? Yeah, it's true. Look, I am worried. I mean, the 2016 turnout was about 170,000 people. The 2008 turnout was about 240,000 people. So to Dan's point, I think that does speak to an enthusiasm gap. And, you know, the conventional wisdom was that we might see higher than the 2008 level because there were so many campaigns, because there was so much organizing happening, et cetera. So that does make me nervous. And it does make me

even more nervous that there are probably some people who turned out who will leave feeling like their vote didn't matter. And that is the worst thing of all, because that is what Republicans want us to think, which is that nothing will change. All candidates are the same. So why try? And that's how they win. And part of the way people dismiss this online and on TV last night as well, Iowa's not a swing state anymore. But it is a state that we kind of need to pick up to have a good chance of getting the Senate majority. Yeah. Because Joni Ernst is up. We have two very important House seats we have to defend here. And so a process that left Democratic voters disillusioned and less likely to turn out in the fall is a huge problem.

How, and of course, we'll know more when we have all the results. But if you're all the other campaigns right now, if you're all the different campaigns, how do you sort of make the most of at least where we think these candidates are going to end up as you head into New Hampshire ahead of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday? Like, are you just, what kind of arguments are they all making, do you think? It's really hard because you don't really know anything, right? I think. I guess the most likely scenario for me is it just is the race in stasis for, you know, we have the State of the Union Tuesday night. They've got two days to campaign there. We've got a big debate Friday night. I guess some shit could go down there. And then you've got like three more days of campaigning and then voting again.

Here's my tip for all of them. Don't condescend to Hillary Clinton in a really shitty way at the debate. And say that she's likable enough. Don't do that. That's a good tip. I mean, there is a way in which I'm sure Bernie Sanders, if he turns out to be the winner, was obviously denied a very important campaign moment. There is a way in which this actually ends up to his advantage. Yeah.

Because he is the highest floor of any candidate. And so as long as you have many viable candidates getting decent support, he has a big advantage. And so he is not – Iowa is supposed to winnow this field where we would find out if Buttigieg or Klobuchar really had a shot or Biden or Warren and people would sort of start to consolidate. And that did not happen. So we're going to end it. No, probably no. It would be the first Iowa caucus where maybe no one drops out after the Iowa caucus. But even-

Hope he'll might get in. Fuck. This also speaks to the challenge for Pete, which is Pete, if he ends up with a SDE, a state delegate equivalent lead, benefited mightily from Biden not making viability in a much larger portion of precincts than anyone ever could possibly imagine. And then Klobuchar being strong, but not strong enough to be viable everywhere. You get to New Hampshire, those people just get to vote for their person. Right. And so Pete's strategy was probably do really well in Iowa because you did well in Iowa you look like you are the alternative to Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar and then even if Bernie does really well in New Hampshire maybe you're number two and I guess that could still happen for him

but he doesn't quite he might not have the boost that he would have had this thing not been so fucked up and for Joe Biden on the other hand it gives him a chance to sort of sneak by iowa pretend it never happened and show up in new hampshire and be like oh yeah i'm still the most uh still the most electable candidate what iowa thing what are you talking about i think that's i think that's true externally internally sometimes campaigns need to be smacked in the head yeah and if like his campaign manager went on our friend david plus podcast and said they would be viable in 90 it was either 90 or 95% of precincts in Iowa. And clearly that did not happen.

Very clearly. No matter, yeah. 0% of the two precincts we saw. I was going to say, we know that much now that he was not. And that bespeaks both an organizational and a political weakness that they have to come to terms with. And if they have any shot of putting this together, succeeding in South Carolina and then being launched into Super Tuesday, something's going to have to change there.

Sometimes you have to get knocked down to be able to get back up, right? And he may not get that either out of this. It's interesting. The one thing that I guess we were hoping Iowa would do is shake the race. Just we got two people in the left lane. We got two and a half, whatever, three people in the moderate lane. And we just need something to shake this loose to see who ends up being the final two or three competing. And the fact that we may not get the result until later today, if after,

has prevented an opportunity for that shakeup to take place. I will say, you know, it seems pretty bleak today, but we do have a lot of voting left. And now these primaries and caucuses happen very quickly. And we have debates coming up that I imagine that these coming debates will not be the friendly affairs that they were in Iowa. Maybe they will be, but I would imagine that as we are starting to go on and there's a desire on all these campaigns to make sure that the field starts winnowing uh and they are part of the people who have not been winnowed um that there may be some sharper elbows and there may be some more contrast as we get to these other states and i do think even though it looks like a complete fuck up today like by the time we get to new hampshire and then nevada and then by the time we're in South Carolina, you know, it could this this this chaos could be a distant memory.

I also make one just like one slightly hopeful note in that it was actually also striking to me coming to to see some of these candidates in their stump speech in the final days to see how many of them became such stronger candidates while being in Iowa. And they left without a result. But Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, you know, I was struck, Amy Klobuchar, I was struck by how much they've gained just by being in an intimate form of campaigning for so long. And I think that's probably true of a lot of the organizers who learned a lot being on the ground and doing

this kind of politics as well. So we think this is curtains for the Iowa caucuses? I do. I mean, Dan was making a compelling case for this being the last Iowa caucuses before the results, given the very obvious need to give more power to diverse voices in the country. I think there needs to be a small state early in the process so you have retail politics. Otherwise, you could run a campaign by sitting in a satellite studio in New York and just doing TV hits all day. Podcast studio in LA. Yeah, podcast studio in LA. But Iowa had a great run. I just can't imagine that they're first again. Yeah, and not just the state of Iowa,

but just the caucus process itself. Caucuses are dumb. Yeah, it seems like there is no defensible reason to have elections this complicated. Yeah, like again. Especially when we control. It's not like a law we have to pass like election reform, which is really tough. It's the party. We control it. And not to sound like totally discordant as someone who like loved working in Iowa, loved being there with Obama, did a five-part series on the Iowa caucuses. The thing I loved about the Iowa caucuses is what Lovett was saying, that you're organizing at the grassroots. The candidates are getting better. You're having real conversations

with voters. You're taking hard questions. You're talking to the press. You get put through the ringer in this grassroots way, but that's not specific to a state. Any state could take on that responsibility if they want it. And it doesn't need to culminate in a caucus. It can culminate in a primary. You can culminate in a primary. You can have all the same retail politics in a place that ends where everybody can vote. People with disabilities always can vote. People who have to work can vote. Yeah, there's plenty of ways to do this.

Dan, you wrote a piece that's on cricket.com right now. This morning, you got up and felt like it's time to... I looked up my calendar this morning and it said analyze caucus results. And I was like, what else am I going to do? You want to tell us a little bit about what you wrote? Sure. I was struck last night by how the complications in the very complicated democratic primary process, which are complicated well beyond Iowa. We have proportional allocation of delegates. It is very messy.

It's going to take a long time to get the results in California. Exactly. And letting you know now, everyone. And what struck by that is how that was such a ripe target for bad actors who want to sow divisions within the party. Just in this Twitter era, the slightest hiccup can be turned into a massive conspiracy that's amplified by the Twitter calendar of the president of the United States. And we may see it in the State of the Union tonight. And that fuels cynicism. And what fuels cynicism hurts our party because we are completely dependent on encouraging people to come into the process, to make them feel like

their vote counts. And the Democratic primary process is a very good job of not making you feel that way. A candidate in a primary can win a congressional district by many points and end up with the exact same number of delegates as the opponent. And so I came up with some ideas of how, not this time, we can't fix it now, but going forward, we can do it. We should, as Tommy said, get rid of caucuses. We should go to winner take all. So whoever gets the most votes in a state gets the delegates. It would also make the process shorter, which I think would benefit everyone. And then rank choice voting. Because what I think is actually really wonderful about Iowa is you need to appeal to the supporters of other candidates to succeed here agreed and that and we saw that in a pretty

inspiring way in the caucus site we were in where people are like you may be a bernie person you may be a biden person but the bernie people over there trying to get the biden people to caucus with them which is like in inspiring ways yeah and like no one no one was mean. It's very unlike Twitter. And I think, but the fact that you need to be people's second choices in Iowa minimizes negative campaigning, which minimizes division. It fuels party unity in the long term. So if you went to a ranked choice system, I think it would fuel party unity in the long term. And then the other thing that I'm really struck about the Iowa caucus is basically about a thousand of the best organizers in the party have been here for a year. They've knocked every door, they've accumulated all this data, and they've built really strong local political power.

And they're all getting on a plane today and they're leaving, and they're not coming back. So what if we did this in states where you would want them to all stay and win for the nominee, like Iowa used to be in 08 and 12. And so if you had a system that put Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Michigan, Georgia or Arizona near the front of the line, then I think there would not be a sunk cost in what we spend to organize a state. I totally agree on the swing state thing, because some people were saying, what would be a better state to do it? And someone's like, Illinois or this. And it's like, no, no, I don't want to put a bunch of people in a state where we're going to win in the general no matter what like let's pick some swing states some real swing states or states that are trending towards us like a georgia like an

arizona and it doesn't have to be a hardened process it doesn't have to be kansas is first forever forever we can rotate like it's so it's such a silly only the only thing i'm against for sure is a national primary like all the states in one day terrible idea because because mike bloomberg would be spending more money than everyone by a factor of 100 and he would probably win i'm not criticizing bloomberg but like that's distorting the process you want the the grassroots aspect of this is good someone having to go on the ground and convince people and build an organization from the ground up is good and you want a couple couple chances to get this right to pick the right nominee you don't want to have one day and then after you're done and you get a nominee be like oh now we're stuck with this person we

didn't get to see them grow through a process of different states have you met democrats we love a flight of fancy you know on that note uh all right we will uh dan and i will talk to you on thursday after we have some more results and we can talk about the... Yeah, hopefully. We can talk about the State of the Union that will happen tonight. It's just a whole other thing that's going on. We'll see a triumphant president who will be acquitted on Wednesday. Just a banner week here for all of us. Hey, let's hope this is the bottom, everybody.

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