By Michael Swanger
Years from now, if not sooner, we might look back at the 2020 Iowa caucuses and view them as the finale, or another misstep — albeit a major one — in our state’s ongoing first-in-the-nation status of winnowing presidential candidates since 1972.
With the eyes of the nation upon us on the evening of Feb. 3, Iowa Democrats and Republicans gathered at 1,765 precincts across the state to choose candidates for president. Voters registered with the Iowa Republican Party, seamlessly and overwhelmingly, cast their primary votes in favor of President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, technical problems with a new app used by the Iowa Democratic Party became the big story of the night as the Iowa Democratic caucuses crashed on the wrong side of history.
Though voters and precinct captains did their part, a coding issue in the app’s reporting system was to blame for the lack of Democratic Party voting results that night as Iowans and the rest of the nation went to bed not knowing who won. What’s more, Iowa Democratic Party officials failed to troubleshoot the app ahead of caucus night, nor did they deploy enough phone banks to serve as an effective reporting backup system.
On the morning of Feb. 4, as Iowa Democratic Party officials were still unable to release voting results from the previous night, Iowa was in the crosshairs of the national media, political pundits and Democratic Party presidential candidates who collectively spent millions of dollars campaigning in Iowa for more than a year. In short, they declared the Iowa caucuses to be an abysmal failure and some suggested it should be the last time that our state should serve as the nation’s leadoff caucus. Later that evening, 62 percent of the votes were reported. A few days later, more results trickled in. By then, however, the damage had been done.
Historically, it was the worst Iowa caucus chaos, but it wasn’t the first. We have seen caucus confusion by both political parties over the years.
In 2012, for example, Republican Party candidate Mitt Romney was declared the winner by only eight votes. However, eight precincts still had not certified their votes. Following a two-week certification process, it was determined that Rick Santorum beat Romney by 34 votes, but those eight precincts were never counted. Ron Paul, who was a close third, was later declared the winner when the Iowa delegates were determined.
In 2016, the Iowa Democratic Party did not declare Hillary Clinton the victor until the day after the Iowa caucuses as one precinct was late in reporting its results. Clinton narrowly defeated Bernie Sanders that year in Iowa.
On caucus night in 1980, computers used by the Iowa Republican Party crashed and George H.W. Bush was declared the winner. For years, supporters of Ronald Reagan claimed that if all of the ballots from the Iowa Straw Poll held in August the previous year (the Iowa Republican Party announced it would stop using the Straw Poll in 2015) were tallied then Reagan would have won. A recent review of that year’s Straw Poll voting tabulations confirmed Bush was the winner.
In 1916, the only time Iowa held a presidential primary, according to the State Historical Society of Iowa, it was also declared to be problematic due to its high cost and low participation after Republican nominee Charles Evans Hughes defeated Democratic nominee and incumbent Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. Newspapers were critical of the event. The Sioux City Journal called it a “farce,” the Ottumwa Tri-Weekly Courier declared it a “calamity” and the Cedar Rapids Gazette went so far as to call it an “imbecile enactment.”
No doubt, when it comes to caucus chaos, this year was not Iowa’s first “goat rodeo,” as one pundit put it. Here’s hoping we remain first-in-the-nation, for the sake of every Iowa Democrat, Republican and Independent who takes their civic duty of vetting and voting for presidential candidates seriously.
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