It's Friday, Feb. 4, 2022, the day of the week when I pass along an elucidating quotation. Today's insight comes, fittingly, from a prominent educator -- University of Pennsylvania political scientist Kathleen Hall Jamieson.
An expert in political communication, campaign rhetoric, and presidential discourse, Professor Jamieson's observation concerns the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucuses, a debacle of monumental proportions.
Two years ago today, Democratic Party professionals, officeholders, and activists awoke from a fitful night's sleep only to realize that their shared nightmare wasn't simply a bad dream. It was all too real: Democrats had kicked off their presidential primary season on Feb. 3, 2020 with a hot mess. The vote tabulation in the Iowa caucuses was riddled with errors and there was no way to declare a winner -- or even know who the winner really was.
The screwup was blamed, naturally, on a new software "app," with Iowa Democrats and the Democratic National Committee blaming each other for purchasing it. Some of the mass confusion, however, was caused by the in-person nature of the caucuses, and Iowa's rather loosely administered system of ranked-choice voting. But this was more than the normal level of election night fog-of-war chaos. This was also systemic incompetence.
The results released by the Iowa Democratic Party two days later were "riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws," according to the New York Times, which did its own analysis of the election returns. "More than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses," the Times reported. "In some cases, vote tallies do not add up. In others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates. And in at least a few cases, the Iowa Democratic Party's reported results do not match those reported by the precincts."
Amidst the turmoil, Pete Buttigieg claimed victory as the political primary calendar moved on to New Hampshire and Nevada. But as the actual numbers trickled in -- and it took until the last day in February for Iowa to make the results official -- it seemed that Bernie Sanders, not Buttigieg, had won. Not that anyone cared by then, but even this was up for interpretation as it turned out that Iowa had opaque rules for assigning delegates, so that the winner of the popular vote (Sanders, apparently) received fewer SDE's ("state delegate equivalents") than Buttigieg.
This dichotomy seemed so screwy that veteran political reporters found themselves wondering if they had reported the winners of previous Iowa caucuses correctly. Meanwhile, the muddle distracted voters and the press from fully processing the most bracing result out of Iowa, which was that frontrunner Joe Biden had finished an abysmal fourth. New Hampshire, which came eight days after Iowa, was even worse for the former vice president: Biden ran fifth there, behind Sanders, Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren.
But by the time New Hampshire's votes were counted, Biden was already in South Carolina, where he awkwardly read his campaign's stage directions aloud. "Black voters, please save me!" Biden said in so many words. That's not a direct quote. Here's what Biden actually said upon landing that night in South Carolina: "Up until now, we haven't heard from the most committed constituency of the Democratic Party, the African American community."
There was nothing subtle about Biden's pitch. Introduced to a small crowd by Rep. Cedric Richmond, former chair of the Black Congressional Caucus, Biden touted his close relationship with black South Carolina Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, his service as Barack Obama's vice president, a meeting he once had with Nelson Mandela, and his own longstanding personal and political ties to South Carolina and the African American community. "Do not let anyone take this election away from you," Biden said. And it was in South Carolina, in the last debate before the state's Feb. 29 primary, where Biden vowed to appoint a black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court if elected president.
And so it came to be. Iowa was a distant memory on Feb. 29, when Biden rode the support of those black voters whom he'd courted so assiduously to a smashing victory in the South Carolina primary. He never looked back, either, and soon wrapped up the Democratic nomination and, by the end of the year, the presidency. But it was on that same day, Feb. 29, 2020, that the Iowa state Democratic committee finally certified the votes of the Feb. 3 caucus. Some Republicans and a handful of journalists, most of them conservatives, seemed to notice that the Democrats' Keystone Cops launch of their own primary season tended to undermine their push to federalize U.S. voting procedures.
But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who is neither a journalist nor a conservative, also took note of the underlying problem with poorly run elections.
"My concern is that it calls into question the integrity of voting, whether you can trust the technology associated with voting in an environment in which people capitalize on those sorts of mishaps," said Jamieson, who heads the Annenberg Public Policy Center at Penn. "Particularly when you have close elections," she added, it's essential "that no one can plausibly say, ‘Well we don't know who won because the technology is inadequate to answer the question.'"
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
