A few words about the mess in Iowa

I have to admit that I'm furious with some of my well-meaning friends who support Bernie for stoking the flames of conspiracy theory in respect to the failed app the Iowa Democratic party attempted to use to help tabulate and report results. This is almost certainly a matter of incompetence and lack of software testing than anything, and speculation about the DNC "rigging" the process against Bernie is recycled Russian propaganda. Stop it, Bernie fans, you didn't lose in 2016 because of the process. It's bad enough that people fell for the line that the hacked DNC emails showed a conspiracy against Bernie, but I actually read them, and they don't. OMG! People in politics have opinions about politics that they share with co workers! The Horror! The Sanders campaign rightfully complained that the DNC didn't schedule enough debates... and they scheduled more. Bernie got tons of national exposure and a large minority of support within the Democratic party -- but the plain fact of it is that considerably more Democrats supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and she was the party nominee as she should have been.

But I'm more annoyed with the national political media, who once again have proven themselves tied to the past. In the past, when candidates could only accept campaign contributions in limited amounts from donors who could only donate in limited amounts, the fundraising game accelerated after Iowa and NH. Having 2 smaller states help "weed out" those candidates who couldn't get in the top 3 despite spending months in the state served a useful purpose. Now, there are 6-8 candidates with the funding to compete in Super Tuesday, which is now over half the country, so none of them are going to drop out due to lack of funding or reasonable path to the nomination. If no one is being weeded out, and the number of pledged delegates at stake in these 2 states is miniscule, then the only remaining relevance to Iowa is media momentum.

Buttigeg and Bernie will leave Iowa with the same number of national convention delegates. I know the media is used to having a winner declared who gives a victory speech (check out Obama's 08 Iowa speech) and that provides "momentum" that could influence voters in later states, but had one candidate emerged with 27% compared to 25%, that isn't a telling victory, and as far as I'm concerned, it is just as well that all the media people stayed up late on Monday with nothing to talk about. The 'winner' had nearly 3/4 of the caucus goers support someone else in the end, and there wasn't much to talk about other than Biden, with decades of experience, losing moderates to an openly gay mayor.

If we are going to have smaller states act to winnow the field -- and notice how this didn't happen in 2016 in the GOP -- then rotating states, including more diverse ones, makes a lot of sense. As it stands, however, the sequencing of nomination contests mostly seems to serve the purpose of giving the media a lazy horse-race question to ask, no different from a Gallup poll.