The Iowa Caucuses

The Iowa Caucuses were a complete disaster. After many Democratic candidates, along with thousands of their supporters, spent the better part of a year campaigning in Iowa, the Democratic Party could not even get its act together to count the votes in a timely manner.  No results were available until the the next day, and only three days later did 100% of the results become available. And even these are said to be questionable.  The Democrats blame a failed app, but that's no excuse--it should have been tested beforehand.

Even before this debacle, I was beginning to question the wisdom of the caucus system.  It is quite anti-democratic, in that it favors retirees and students, and discriminates against working people with families, who either have to work or perhaps hire a babysitter in order to invest the hours of time involved in attending a caucus.

You would think the Left would criticize this anti-democratic system as vociferously as it does the Electoral college.  Like the Electoral college, the caucuses can produce different results from delegates to raw vote totals.  This is fact actually happened in Iowa this year--Sanders won the popular vote, but Buttigieg narrowly won the delegate count. This is because the system rewards candidates whose votes are more broadly distributed geographically; here, Sanders piled up huge margins in college towns, thereby winning the "popular vote", but the Buttigieg votes were better distributed.

But the Left doesn't criticize the caucus system, because it allows a motivated group of supporters to dominate a district and dictate the delegates to be selected.  This is exactly what we McGovern supporters did in 1972 in Wichita, when we so dominated the Sedgwick County caucuses that we selected all four of the delegates from our Congressional district.

The caucus system should be discarded completely.  Some advocate for a national primary, but that is a bad idea also, because the candidate with the greatest name recognition would win every time.  What is needed is an initial primary in a small state, and then go on from there.