The Daily - A Very Long Night In Iowa

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

The kickoff to the 2020 voting was undercut Monday night by major delays in the reporting of the Iowa caucus results. We traveled to Johnston, Iowa, to tell the story of the day — from the perspective of one caucus in a middle school gym. Guests: Alexander Burns, who covers national politics for The New York Times and Reid J. Epstein, a political reporter for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: A new system of reporting caucus results led to confusion and few solid numbers — forcing the Iowa Democratic Party to delay the release of results until a winner could be verified later Tuesday.Here’s where you can see live results as they become available.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the kickoff to the 2020 campaign was undercut on Monday night by major delays in the reporting of the results from the Iowa caucuses. The story of the day. caucuses. The story of the day. It's Tuesday, February 4th. Here comes Alex. Um, I'm just gonna go. Yeah, yeah. That was Alex Burns.

Hi. Hi. Happy Caucus Day. Happy Caucus Day. Is that a thing people say out here? I don't know. It's something we say out here. Exactly. So let's just set the scene a little bit.

It's 4 p.m. We're in Des Moines. In about two and a half hours, Iowans are going to start heading to these caucus locations around the state. We're going to do the same. And I want to talk with you about how this is going to work. So can you just give me a quick primer on this very particular tool of American democracy, the caucus? Well, calling it a tool of democracy is generous in the view of some people. It is not a secret ballot. This is not something where people take 10 minutes in the middle of their workday, go vote, and then return to their desk. This is an in-person, out-in-the-open exercise of demonstrating your public support for a candidate. The way this works

literally physically in practice is there are hundreds of pre-designated caucus locations around the state, and around 7 p.m. local, people show up at these locations, and they're asked to gather themselves into groups according to which candidate they're supporting. They do that. There is an assessment made about which candidates has 15% of the support in the room and which candidates do not hit that threshold of support. So when people refer to the threshold, that's what they're talking about, 15% support at the caucus site. Of everybody in the room, 50% of everybody who has shown up. That's right. If you haven't hit that 15% threshold, your candidate does not qualify to get delegates. And then the voting goes to a second round where you get to reallocate yourselves to candidates who did hit the 15%

threshold. So if you go in there expecting to caucus for Alex Burns, and Alex Burns in the first round only has 9% of the people in the room supporting him. Highly possible. Entirely possible. He's not super popular in Iowa. You can reallocate your support to somebody else in the room, perhaps Michael Barbaro, who just barely cleared the threshold at 16.5%. So what might be the impact of this process on the field of 2020 Democratic candidates and what we know about those dynamics. I'm thinking about Bernie Sanders, for example, who has been polling in the lead and who we understand has benefited from more moderate Iowans splitting their support among the other

leading candidates in the race. Well, what the Sanders campaign believes will certainly be good for him or almost certainly be good for him is having that first round popular vote ultimately released to the public. They believe that however the reallocation process ultimately sorts itself out, that he is very, very likely to have the most support on that first round of caucusing so that even if he ends up slipping behind somebody else, they will be able to brandish that as a symbolic victory. Which is another way of saying he predicts he might lose some support through the process as it goes along. Exactly. And for the more moderate candidates, those candidates have been competing for a lot of

the same indecisive voters who are trying to sort out which of these candidates is the best bet against Trump, but I'm not for Bernie Sanders, right? So if you are a moderate woman in the suburbs of Des Moines and you are tempted by three or four of these candidates, you may very well have the chance to vote for one and then change your mind in the second round. And it's really anyone's guess right now as to whether you are going to see more moderates moving towards Joe Biden on the second round, or women moving towards Elizabeth Warren on the second round, or perhaps Pete Buttigieg supporters scattering across the field. It is wildly unpredictable.

And because of the way that 15% threshold works, it is hugely important whether somebody in the first round is at 16% or at 14%, not only because whether they hit the threshold for themselves, but because it will determine whose supporters are actually deciding what happens on the second round. That in a caucus site where Elizabeth Warren is at 16%, her people are locked in. In a site where she's at 14%, that's a place where suddenly Bernie Sanders is in a position to pick up all the support from liberals who preferred Elizabeth Warren but might consider him on the second round. Right, right. But if Elizabeth Warren's at 16%, Bernie Sanders can't go after any of her supporters

because they're locked in. Right. So if you are Pete Buttigieg or Joe Biden, you are looking at the other guy and really hoping he doesn't clear 15% in a lot of places because you're betting that most of those voters are moderates and they're likelier to go to me by a lot than they are to go to Bernie.

But if both Biden and Buttigieg mostly end up at 16 or 17 percent, then they could find themselves sort of persistently stuck behind Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. So what should we be most on the lookout for as we head out to these caucuses? A lot of voters here are not necessarily going to make up their mind based on the ideological factors that we perceive as the national media looking at these candidates from afar. There can be a real sort of oversimplification for the way we see the lanes in this race, that we think that somebody who is an Elizabeth Warren supporter is more likely to go to Bernie Sanders than to Joe Biden, as I just said. But it may be

that somebody is an Elizabeth Warren supporter, not because they are left populist ideologically, but because they like her experience and they saw her in television ads with Barack Obama and they liked that. So they could easily go to Pete Buttigieg, not Bernie Sanders. Right. Or to Joe Biden or to anybody else. Right. That if you're a Klobuchar voter, I think we in the national media tend to think of her as a centrist candidate, and by and large, she is. She's also the only other woman with a real shot at clearing the 15% threshold in this process. And if you're for Amy Klobuchar, not just because she's a centrist, but because you feel like it's important to elect a woman president, you might end up moving to the ideological left on the second round just because Elizabeth Warren is the option available to you.

Got it. So you're saying don't make assumptions. I'm saying that anybody who is gaming this out in advance with ideology as the sole or defining characteristic of how these voters make up their minds is really risking missing the way real people are going to experience this. Thank you, Alex. Thank you. So we will talk to you four hours.

Five hours? Hopefully four. Okay. Good luck. You too. Here we go. Prepare yourself for some extremely unpleasantly cold weather. Okay. I don't know...

Actually, that's... Hello! Hi! Hi, how are you? Thank you for being our chauffeur. I feel like my dad's taking us all to the soccer game. It was really wild. Hi. Hi, how are you? Thank you for being our chauffeur. My dad's taking us all to the soccer game. It was really wild. What are you listening to?

I have Les Mis on, I told you. Are you a big Les Mis guy? No, but this is like the last day. So this is the song that... Wait, last day of Iowa? Last day of Iowa. So this is the idea of the song is like one day more. One day more. Can we crank it?

We can crank it. Hold on. One day more! One day more! One day more! One day more! One day more! One day more! One day more!

Discover what the common heaven has in store. One day more! Can you pull the lyrics up on your phone? One day more. One day more. Continue on 2nd Avenue

for four miles. So we're pulling into Johnson Middle School, and the parking lot is getting pretty full. I'd say there's maybe 150 cars here. Press. Right over here on the left. Okay, so I'll take it and I'll just go over here.

Please over there and see if you're on the... Okay, it's 6 o'clock and the doors have just opened. Recent one is on this side. Recent two on this side. We are now in a very crowded main hallway of the school. And I think they're going to go register. You're not on here either. Yes, I am. Oh, good.

Thank goodness. Checking IDs. Thank you. Hi. How are you? You know each other? Do a lot of people know each other? Two houses down.

Yeah. And then they head into the caucus room. Which is a gym. Which is, I believe, a gymnasium. I'm having flashbacks to high school. So now we're in the gymnasium. There's a huge set of bleachers in the back, So now we're in the gymnasium.

There's a huge set of bleachers in the back, and that is where the candidate alignment is going to begin. There are signs for Bernie, and people are sitting on those bleachers. There are signs for Pete. People are sitting on those bleachers. Warren, Klobuchar, Yang. The sign-in is practically done, and it's 7 o'clock, so how about that? It's Tom Leffler. He's the precinct chairman. He's running the caucus. In the vicinity.

Klobuchar is outside. Is she allowed in? Yeah. Just walked into the room dramatic entrance it's so great to see all of you here so my story is you know i am from Minnesota. I am a granddaughter of a man and a daughter. Why is Klobuchar here, and why is she allowed to be here? Any candidate who shows up can speak. And why, what's the point of her showing up at the last minute, right before the caucus? Because this is really the time when she has to convince undecided caucus goers to come for her.

And more important, people, their candidates might not be viable on the second alignment to get them to come to her on a realignment. I would love people to show up, and she's literally showing up at the caucus. It's a really dramatic gesture. I would love to have your support, but I also want us to win big in the general election. Let's do it! Thank you, everybody. Do you know what's happening right now? Excuse me?

Do you know what's happening right now? Is now the time you vote? Yeah, see, what we're doing is... I don't think we have to. He told us we had a total of 358 people here at the caucus, registered voters. We have to have 15% to be viable. Well, that figures out to 54 is the count that you have to have to be viable.

So I was going to ask, does it look like anyone's at this moment in danger of not being viable? And who is it? Well, the Yang group is probably not going to be viable. It doesn't look like they have 54 people over there. Biden, it doesn't look like Biden is going to be viable here. So Biden and Yang may not make 15%. May not have 54 people. Right.

Are you surprised that Biden doesn't seem viable at the moment? Very surprised. Are you upset? Well, what happens happens, but I think that's a mistake. I can't understand the lack of support. Of course, my wife's supporting somebody else. Who's your wife supporting? Warren.

Warren. Okay. Yeah. So if you don't become viable, where do you think you're going to go next? Warren. Okay. Yeah.

We'll see you over there. Yeah. We'll see you over there Yeah Are you guys the Yankees? Yes we are How are you guys doing? We're from the Daily from the New York Times How's your vote count? We're about 20 short to viability So we're also looking at a very small buying crowd and hoping we can pop over there.

I don't know how to negotiate. We're hoping. That's my hope. So you want to convert them to Yang, you think? My hunch is the Yang is probably more of a group of true believers versus hoping just for the most electable candidate. So we'll find out. The Yang people are now heading over to the Biden people to do some business. Do you want to? The Yang over here would be willing to tell you why he's a good candidate? For me, I really like Yang.

I really want to see him in the government. He needs to be in the government. I don't see him as president quite yet. He's still young. He's got a lot to do. But we need him in the government now. And I think that cabinet member or something, and so he will be there. Let me tell you why I think Joe, and we would love to have Joe.

No, we're not going to go to Joe because he caucused when I was 24, his first election, 1988. No, he's not. He just almost got impeached or caused our whole country to fall apart. With the impeachment. And his son. He got his son that job for $50,000 a year. That's crooked.

100%. And that's going to come up during the election. If you don't think that's not going to come up when he runs against Trump. Have you fact-checked that? Yes, I have. Yes. Have you fact-checked the whole thing? I have. Yes. Have you fact-checked the whole thing and about the legitimacy of it? His son, yes, his son, his son has not done anything for that money. His son has not done anything for that money. So is this is your overture to the Biden people? Yeah, I'm sorry. I know. It didn't work very well, did it? It fell flat on its face, so I'll go back. God, you just scared me. That amazes me. I'm so sorry about that. You didn't

seem swayed. What? You didn't seem swayed. I'm not swayed. Are you angry? No, I'm not angry. I'm disappointed, okay? Well, yeah, because I'm hot. But I'm not that kind of hot. Does that feel like a winning argument from the Yang people to you? No, not to me. Do you know where you might go? I'm Biden. No, but are you going to go somewhere else if he's not viable? If he's not viable, Amy would be my second choice.

Will you try to convince your group to go to Amy? I don't know what I'll do. I'll have to think about that. I have to think about that, but Amy would be my second choice. Final results are being read now for the first allocation. Allocation. Mike is 37. 37 of the non-viable. You can come over here. Okay, this is Pete. Pete Buttigieg has 70. Viable.

Warren has 59 viable Klobuchar has 75 viable viable so at 8 o'clock here is the count from the first round, the first allocation, as it's called. Sanders has 76. Klobuchar has 75.

Buttigieg has 70. Warren has 59. Biden has 37, is not viable. Yang has 33, is not viable. Steyer has four, not viable. Steyer has four, not viable. Gabbard has three, not viable. And there are now 77 votes among the non-viable candidates that will be redistributed in the coming minutes,

and that could obviously, given the spread between the top candidates, completely change everything. Of course, some voters may just walk out because dinner's at home getting cold or because they don't believe in any of the other candidates. If you want your voice to be heard, join us. Join Team Bernie. I think I'm going to go with Amy. Amy Klobuchar.

So we have some Biden voters who don't have a home heading over to Klobuchar. What's your name, if I could ask you? Kathleen Finkenauer. Kathleen, I can see from reading your lips that you are about to go home and not cast a vote because Joe Biden is not viable. Can you explain that decision? I just, he's just my candidate.

There are other ones that are good. I don't want to go to Bernie. I just don't. He's too far one way. He's just too far one way. For me. For me. I'm 82 years old, so I like Amy.

I really like her. Go there either. No, I'm not going to go there either. I'm just kind of old and tired, and I'm going home. I guess I just don't have the feeling other than I want Joe, and I guess I don't have the fire I used to have. Oops-a-daisy. You know?

I don't have a sane reason for any of this. Oh, God. If I can get down without breaking my neck. So it's about 8.15, and it feels like realignment has more or less finished. People have switched sides, switched seats, switched camps, and it feels like a final count is upon us. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Warren has apparently added nine or ten new caucus goers in this latest round.

Who are you with? Steyer. Steyer. Yeah. Steyer. Yang. Yeah, another Biden there. Biden, too.

Have you counted the new ones? Yes, 10. The new Warren votes in round two pretty much come from everywhere. They've come from Yang, Biden, Steyer, and Uncommitted. Klobuchar has picked up a lot of new votes, too. Looks like she might win this precinct. Highly possible. 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29.

Let's do it again. Klobuchar picking up nearly 30 votes, and it looks like that's going to be enough. We've got one more. Oh. Sorry, I was behind you. Wonderful. What's the count? 31 and 75 is 106. Yes. Okay. Now collect them. Okay. Okay. I cheated and I looked at that spreadsheet and it looks like Amy Klobuchar has won this precinct. Okay. Bernie had 7 more.

The new total for Bernie is 83. Warren had 10 more. The new total is 69. Klobuchar had 31 more. The new total is 106. And Keith had 11 more. The new total is 106. And Keith had 11 more. The new total is 81. So at 824, here are the results.

Amy Klobuchar wins this precinct. Just won, but she wins it. And Sanders in second place. So what we saw happen, which Reid predicted could happen, Sanders won round one by a hair and lost round two. Klobuchar won round two. I mean, the big thing was Klobuchar got almost all of Biden's people. And so she

won this precinct. Thank you, Reid. So I've got to go on to Pete's headquarters. I understand that you're literally leaving us carless. I'm leaving you carless. You're going to walk back from Johnston. Reed, thank you. Thank you.

It was so nice to meet you. You also. And have yourself a walk. Thank you so much for your help. Thank you. It was really fun. Nice to meet you. Yeah, you too.

I wonder what happened in this other precinct. Are you guys from the other precinct? Yeah. What was the result there? Oh, Pete won, I guess. Pete won? And what was the who, who's second, third, fourth? So Pete won, and then there was a tie between Warren, Biden, Sanders, Klobuchar.

Was there a big shift in the realignment? A lot more people went over to Amy. Amy wasn't viable before the realignment, and then she ended up with two delegates afterwards. So she, like, doubled her people. Yeah. It's okay. Yeah, I know you want down, but you but you're just gonna run backwards and we don't want that well thanks again have a good night we'll be right back We're going to connect with our colleagues in New York. Right now, it's 11.22 Iowa time, 12.22 New York time, and we're getting the sense that we won't have the results by 6 a.m. when this episode needs to go up.

So we're figuring it out. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi, Aaron. Tinker here. How do you like that? So we have been so deep in the tape that we have no idea what the news actually is.

So what's going on? So there's just a huge delay in reporting from all the precincts that, for all we know, could extend late into the evening or even the morning. Uh-huh. So does just nobody know what's actually happening? Put this into perspective for us. How seismic of a shock is what has happened here at the Iowa caucuses in 2020?

You mean what hasn't happened? The results? The outcome? Yes, that one. The thing we've all been waiting for? Do you think we'll get results tonight or tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, before the debate on Friday? It's unclear. Sean Sebastian is joining us right now from Story County.

He's a precinct secretary out there. What can you tell us about this delay in getting any results, Sean? Well, Wolf, I have been on hold for over an hour with the Iowa Democratic Party. The guy in the White House is chuckling all night here, showing the Democrats can't even get a three-car funeral organized or whatever you want to call it.

This is a real coincidence, Wolf. I just got off hold just now. So I've got to get off the phone to report the results. All right. Go ahead and report your results. Can we listen in as you report them, Sean? Yep.

All right. Let's listen. All right. Okay. Hi. Hello? They hung up on me. This has not been a success.

So, Alex, it's 12. Jesus, it's 1 o'clock in the morning. You seem a little frustrated. I'm a little frustrated, Michael. Why? Because we have no results from the Iowa caucuses. We have seen sort of anecdotal data dribbling out all evening, but the Iowa Democratic Party has not posted any complete results from any of the caucuses online. There's just been a massive failure of data collection and transmission and verification. And so we don't really know a whole lot more about

who won the Iowa caucuses now than we did three or four hours ago. And do you understand exactly what happened? Why we don't have the results? Where the breakdown happened? We don't know in all the kinds of forensic detail that I think we probably will soon enough. But what seems to have happened is that this time the Iowa Democratic Party created an app that was intended to make it super easy for the volunteer leaders at these 1600 plus caucuses to send in the results to a central hub. And that that app did not get the job done, whether that's because of user error or bad Wi-Fi, bad cell service. We don't really know in full. We know that the backup system was supposed to be that these precinct volunteer leaders were supposed to be able to call in the results,

and then the phone lines got totally overloaded. And so the state party is trying to collect and verify three different sets of data to report out exactly what happened in these caucuses, and we have access to exactly none of them. So how are we seeing the candidates handling this absence of information? We're trying to see each of them fill this void with their own message as uncertain as that message might be at this time. They have access, because of their own sophisticated campaign machinery, to at least some detailed data about what probably went on on Monday night. Right. Their precinct captains, of course, have their tallies for every precinct.

That's right. The campaigns aren't flying completely blind the way we sort of are as reporters. We don't have hundreds of people around the state feeding us information like that. So when you see one of the leading candidates come out and strike a certain tone in a speech or not strike a certain tone in a speech, they're not completely guessing. They're at least making a pretty educated guess about what kind of final results they might experience. Like what? Well, the Biden campaign, for instance, has been extraordinarily aggressive at going after the integrity of the Iowa caucus process.

If you're a campaign that doesn't think that you're going to finish so great here, and you want to put a permanent asterisk on the results and just point the attention of Democratic voters later in the process. This is how you do it. You heard Biden in his speech to supporters sort of raise an eyebrow at what was going on with the caucuses, as I think most Democrats can relate to. Well, the Iowa Democratic Party is working to get this result, get them straight. And I want to make sure they're very careful in their deliberations. And then point towards states where he thinks he is going to do better than he probably did here based on the information that his campaign has. So it's on to New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and well beyond. We're in this for the long haul.

You heard a similar, not quite as baleful approach from the Elizabeth Warren campaign. This race started right here in Iowa, but from tomorrow it will run from ocean to ocean. She came out and gave a speech pointing to the long haul ahead of them in the Democratic primary. Sort of an upbeat speech that she felt good about what would happen here in Iowa. Tonight showed that our path to victory is to fight hard. But it wasn't a sort of attempt to declare victory. And you did hear her campaign manager, Roger Lau, go out and say that every second that the Iowa results are not known,

it undermines the process. That is notably a tone that you're not hearing from the Sanders and Buttigieg campaigns, which among the competitors here in Iowa probably feel the most optimistic about their odds of coming out on top. Let me begin by stating that I imagine, have a strong feeling that at some point, the results will be announced. And when those results are announced, I have a good feeling we're going to be doing very, very well here in Iowa. So we don't know all the results. So we don't know all the results. But we know by the time it's all said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation.

Mayor Brugge basically gave a victory speech as though the race had been called for him, even though we're not nearly there yet. Because, by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious. That is a very, very forward-leaning posture in a situation of great uncertainty. Right. That's known as leaning into a vacuum. But it's a hell of a vacuum right now, right? That there's just no information for ordinary people. And his campaign, I think genuinely from my own conversations with them, feels very good about their odds of ultimately winning or coming close in this state. Right. And then you have Senator Amy Klobuchar, who certainly believes that she did a little bit better than anticipated. We know there's delays, but we know one thing.

We are punching above our weight. And whose campaign manager went out on Twitter and said, according to their internal data, she is running even or ahead of Vice President Biden in a lot of places. Again, we have no way to verify on our own whether that's true at this point. But it is the position that a number of the campaigns are taking. I have heard it from advisors to Klobuchar, to Warren, and to Buttigieg that Joe Biden had a weak finish. That's certainly what they're hammering away at. Well, actually, at the precinct where we went in suburban Des

Moines, a town called Johnston, the thing that Alex, you had predicted would happen actually did happen. Sanders ended up as the frontrunner in the first count. And then when the realignment happened, the more moderate candidates ended up benefiting. And that ended up working out in Klobuchar's favor. She won the final tally by about 20, 25 votes. And that might have been aided by the fact that she showed up. But what do you make of that? I think most of us who are following this campaign and a lot of the strategists who are active participants in this campaign believe that that dynamic would favor Joe Biden at the expense of Amy Klobuchar, that if there was a moderate candidate who was persistently not quite hitting that 15% threshold, it would be her and that her supporters would mostly go to Joe Biden.

If something like the opposite happened, that could give us a really fascinating result when we actually get the numbers we're waiting for. This will be thrown into much sharper relief. Any moment now. Any moment. Any moment. Do you think that tonight's kind of meltdown of this process is going to lessen the ultimate significance of the results in Iowa? Because the usual significance we give it as the first in the else is going on in the news this week between

impeachment, the State of the Union, global pandemic, the Super Bowl on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. I don't know how much the ultimate victor is going to be able to break through now that they've been denied their own evening to spike the football, as it were. And I think it's possible that a candidate who gets really embarrassed here will suffer badly for it. But I think the likelihood that somebody gets some enormous surge of momentum based on the results of Iowa is much more questionable now than it would have been if the Iowa Democratic Party had run this process in a more competent fashion. Alex, thank you.

Thank you. And good morning. Good morning.