The NPR Politics Podcast - Iowa Results Waylaid By "Technical Difficulties," Democrats Say

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

As problems with a mobile app through which vote tallies were transmitted electronically caused a delay in the reporting of Iowa caucus results on Monday night, Democratic candidates seized the moment to fire up their supporters.Several Democratic contenders delivered what sounded like victory speeches, even though state officials have not yet released vote totals.It is unclear when officials plan on announcing the results.This episode: White House Correspondent Tamara Keith, election security and voting reporter Miles Parks, campaign correspondent Asma Khalid, and National Political Correspondent Mara Liasson.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the 2020 campaign. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And the time now is 1255 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, the 4th of January. It is now the early morning hours after the Iowa caucuses. It is far later than we expected to be sitting down in the studio and certainly later than many of the candidates were expecting. This was not the night that they were expecting to have. Let me begin by stating that I imagine, have a strong feeling that at some point,

the results will be announced. Well, it looks like it's going to be a long night, but I'm feeling good. So listen, it is too close to call, so I'm just going to tell you what I do know. You won! By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious. So we have a scenario that's a little bit like kindergarten soccer where everyone is a winner. We will talk about what that means. But first, Miles Parks, you cover election security. What is going on? Something has gone terribly wrong in Iowa.

Right. We are still trying to figure out the specifics of what is going on. But what we do know at this point is that over the 1600 precincts across Iowa, they all had individual results, people moving around the room and then moving again. And they had to report those results from their precincts up to the state party. This year, for the first time, they were using a new smartphone app, which we know very few details. We asked a lot of questions about this app when we found out that they were going to use it. They gave us very few answers. But what we do know is that there have been some, a lot of malfunctions involving the app. The state party has been releasing a few statements. The most recent statement says that we found inconsistencies

in the reporting of three sets of results. In addition to the tech systems that being used to results, we were also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report. They also say with complete certainty that this is not a cyber attack. This is not a hack. But we know very little beyond that. Well, and earlier tonight, Mara and I were on the phone with a man named Tom Courtney. He is the party co-chair in Des Moines County, which is in the southeastern part of the state of Iowa. And he was saying that he was having a really hard time sending the results in from the caucus at his location.

I've been trying to call for several hours to report my results, and I can't get through. It's a phone number, and I can't get through. It's a phone number and I can't get through. That number is constantly busy. So you have not reported, this is Mara Eliason here, you have not reported your results yet? No, I haven't. And we tried to call for, me and my secretary both tried to call for 45 minutes at the location. Finally, I said, after that, we're going home. Are you allowed to just go home before you report the results, or is this going to lead to some complications? I'm the party chair.

I can go home when I want to go home. But, yes, you can just leave and call it in when you're ready to call it in. I wouldn't sit in an empty cafeteria at the high school and wait to call it in. If I can't get through in a reasonable amount of time, I'll just go home. And then he said that he might just go to sleep now because he still hasn't been able to get them in. So what's happening there is basically you've got all of these caucus leaders who are supposed to be using this app, but if they don't want to use the app, the party said, it's fine, you can go the old-fashioned way.

You can call us on this hotline number, and we'll be able to take all these calls. Over 1,600 precinct leaders. And when I asked before caucuses had begun tonight, how many people do you have staffing those phones? I was told by a party official that it was a dozen people. So you can kind of do the math there and see the difference in and it kind of explains why maybe there's these backed up lines. Asma, you are clearly at a party. Where are you now? Well, so I moved. I've been with Joe Biden all evening.

But to be blunt, just for logistical reasons, because I need to catch a flight to New Hampshire, I met up with my colleague Scott Detrow, who's at the Bernie Sanders party. So, Asma, how are these various campaigns responding to the incredible uncertainty of this night? I mean, I would say there's a lot of frustration and confusion. One of our colleagues confirmed that there was a call earlier tonight between the Iowa Democratic Party and the Democratic presidential campaign campaigns, a number of them, and that it was heated in tone and that party officials offered really no time estimate on when results will be reported. Here at Bernie Sanders' party, we've been told that Bernie Sanders' campaign is going to be releasing its own count. Joe Biden's campaign has sent a letter to the Iowa Democratic Party expressing concern over what they are describing as considerable flaws in how this entire reporting

system came to be tonight. Well, and Amy Klobuchar's campaign manager has tweeted out that they think that they, based on their internal numbers, may be beating Vice President Joe Biden. It seems like we have a scenario where in the absence of official information, there could be a whole lot of unofficial information coming out. Yeah. I mean, look, the whole point of Iowa is momentum. People take the results or try to massage the perception of the results to help them. And Bernie Sanders thinks he won. He's going to release some results that he thinks his own tabulation that proves that Joe Biden might have been spared a humiliating third, fourth place finish. We don't know for now.

I think the people it hurts the most are Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, who really needed a good showing that they could trump it coming out of Iowa. Of course, Pete Buttigieg gave a speech where he declared victory based on what? We don't know. But there is one person who we do know won Iowa. That is President Trump. Yes, in an uncontested primary. Right. Largely uncontested.

And his campaign, though, has jumped on the apparent disarray on the Democratic side. And they have been pushing out tweets and other messages, trying to sort of cast doubt or raise the specter of this whole thing being rigged. Sure, sure. They want to take full advantage of this because their message is the Democratic Party should go to war with each other because Bernie Sanders was robbed once again. Now, we don't know if that's going to be the final result. But this is a terrible situation, reflects really poorly on the Iowa Democratic Party, which already the Iowa caucuses were the thing that Democrats love to hate. And I think that they're going to be come under even more fire. I mean, to your point, Mara, I think that that is the biggest question of tonight.

Earlier at the Joe Biden rally, we heard from a young caucus goer. This was her first time participating in the caucuses. She said it was such a dysfunctional process. They couldn't get the count right multiple times. They had to go around and just count the people physically in the rooms because people couldn't agree on that. She said it was such an unpleasant process that she just doesn't want to caucus again. Another person I met told me that she just didn't feel comfortable. She was a young Joe Biden supporter. She feels like she just wants to have more of a secret ballot. We are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, what the non-results might mean going forward.

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It's Oscar time, and NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour has you covered. Grab your popcorn and binge listen to all nine of our episodes covering the best picture nominees. And we're back. And at the time that we are speaking, which admittedly is in the middle of the night, there are no official results from the Iowa caucuses. None. So what does that mean? Asma, the Iowa caucuses are in theory this launching point for the Democratic primary. It winnows the field, but now there's nothing for people to talk about. I mean, I think that it arguably depends on which campaign you are in terms of how you might be able to spin this story. Because to your point, I mean, Iowa is entirely about momentum. It is not about the number of delegates. Really, you collect a minuscule number

of delegates here in Iowa. And it's not entirely representative even of the demographics of a Democratic primary base electorate. So it's really just about momentum. And look, if you're a candidate like Joe Biden, who has largely set low expectations here in Iowa, I would argue this is kind of a good night for you in the sense that there are not clear results out of here. But if you're a candidate like Pete Buttigieg, who had poured a lot of resources into Iowa, who you think, you know,

he thinks he sort of had a good night here, it's hard because that's not the narrative that the newspapers have tomorrow morning. And I just wonder when the results are finally released, A, will they have any credibility? And B, will the whole process be so tarnished that no one will get any momentum out of being a winner in Iowa? Well, and you know, the momentum isn't just about voters. It's also about money. You know, Bernie Sanders, when he very nearly won the caucuses in 2016, was able to raise just like a ton of money. All of a sudden it gave him this this rocket fuel for his campaign. And that is not something that any of these campaigns are going to be able to have, at least initially.

And then we head into this Newsmageddon. You know, tomorrow night, the president delivers his State of the Union address. It's a nationally televised address that gets a lot of attention. The following day on Wednesday, there is a vote on whether the president should be removed from office. Now, of course, we are pretty sure we know how that vote's going to go, but that's going to suck a lot of attention. And then you're almost to New Hampshire by then. And the Biden campaign has long been saying that they don't see the first votes to necessarily just be Iowa. Their take is that it's really about the first four states. And I would argue that a scenario that we're seeing out of Iowa where there is so much uncertainty kind of helps them in the sense that, you know, they get they get a chance to make

that argument more sense if we don't actually get concrete results from Iowa. The fact that there was no results, you know, Joe Biden, it underscores his talking point, which is that Iowa isn't that important. And he's going to look down the road for for victories. You know, one thing that's interesting about tonight, we do not know the results, but we do know one thing. We know that turnout was not higher than 2016, even though the expectations were that this would be a historic turnout caucus. What it means is that Bernie Sanders, even if he ended up winning, did not bring that many new people into the caucuses, which is what is his calling card. You know, he says that's how he can win by bringing a lot of new people in. And it doesn't sound like he did it. So I am now going to declare victory for the NPR Politics

podcast and the state of New Hampshire. You know who's not declaring victory at this point, though, is the Iowa caucuses and really the election system in the U.S. as a whole. Like this was the first test, right? We've been looking ahead at 2020. You think we'll have the Iowa caucuses going first in four years? I wonder, will we have Iowa to kick around anymore? I don't know. I've got all my Iowa t-shirts. I don't want to give them up. To quote Richard Nixon, I don't know if we're going to have the Iowa caucuses to kick around anymore. And we will be back in your podcast feeds when we have results from Iowa.

Or if we don't have results from Iowa, we will definitely be back late tomorrow after President Trump's State of the Union address. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the 2020 election. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.