After a long wait from Iowa, we can finally declare the winner of the Democratic Party caucuses: Donald Trump.
What a debacle for the Democrats the caucuses have been. The Iowa Democratic Party failed to release the results last night, saying it found ‘inconsistencies’ with the reporting from its new app – a gadget designed by a firm called Shadow Inc. Think of all of the efforts down the drain. More than a year of campaigning in Iowa, millions of dollars spent, thousands of volunteer hours spent knocking on doors, all of the gatherings in coffee shops and school halls – it was all wasted. Last night, the TV news teams waited with their fancy electronic screens ready to give precinct-by-precinct results, showing big 0s next to each candidate’s name. Instead, they had to try desperately to fill the airtime with mindless talk. What a joke.
This year the Democrats seem determined to hand the election to Trump on a silver platter. They chose to impeach him over Ukraine, but were unable to convince a majority of Americans this was the right thing to do. In fact, they managed to increase his standing in the polls in the process. The Democrats’ fans in the media are also inadvertently helping Trump. Last week, CNN aired a conversation of political commentators mocking the ‘rubes’ who support the president – which was quickly turned by the Trump campaign into an advertisement for his re-election.
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And now Iowa. The scripts write themselves for the Trump staff. The Democratic Party that freaked out over supposed Russian hacking of the 2016 election, that doesn’t lose a chance to virtue-signal about stopping ‘voter suppression’, cannot count votes. The party that wants to ban fracking, and tell the thousands who will be made jobless to ‘learn to code’, does not know how to code. And the party that wants to take over and run the $4 trillion healthcare system for 330million Americans cannot organise an election among less than 200,000 voters.
Coming into the Iowa caucuses, the Democratic field was in disarray, splintered among many candidates and factions. Contenders have been squabbling like gossipy teenagers, as when Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders fought over whether or not Sanders had once told Warren that a woman could not defeat Trump. As with the impeachment, the Democrats have continued to re-litigate the 2016 election rather than look forward – with Hillary Clinton weighing in a number of times, including a recent outburst in which she said ‘nobody likes’ Sanders. Now Iowa, rather than resolving the party’s messy conflicts, has made it look even more dysfunctional.
