Debacle for Democrats after Iowa caucus fiasco delays results

WASHINGTON: Chaos and confusion were initial winners on Monday after an

app

malfunction resulted in a debacle for Democrats in inner party elections in

Iowa

that was expected to identify the front runner to challenge Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential elections.



Former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg and

Vermont

Senator Bernie Sanders both claimed victory in the Iowa caucus — the first primary race of the election — even as the Democratic fiasco drew ridicule from President Trump and his supporters, who taunted the opposition with variations of “They can’t run a primary election and they want to run the country?”

With no worthwhile challenge within the Republican Party, Trump polled 97% in the Iowa GOP caucus as he gloated about the Democratic carnage. “When will the Democrats start blaming RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, instead of their own incompetence for the voting disaster that just happened in the Great State of Iowa?” he posted on Twitter.

The Democratic debacle occurred after a new smartphone-based app that was designed to modernise a system that relied on precinct chairs phoning in their results to a central command failed to function properly. Party managers maintained thatit was simply a reporting issue and “the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion”, while insisting the “underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results”. But Republican operatives taunted them over the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 that began the whole saga of Russian interference even as there was no sign of results till the time of this report.

“The

Democrat Caucus

is an unmitigated disaster. Nothing works, just like they ran the Country. Remember the 5 Billion Dollar Obamacare Website, that should have cost 2% of that. The only person that can claim a very big victory in Iowa last night is “Trump”,” the Republican president in complete command of his party exulted even as polls showed his approval rating rise to an all-time high since he took office.

Democrats also torched each other with premature declarations of victory and allegations of cheating. #Mayor-Cheat was trending on social media after Buttigieg claimed to have won the caucus, resulting in supporters of Bernie Sanders, widely seen as the front runner, challenging the claim with their own internal polls showing a Sanders win.

Democrats already leery of the establishment revelled in the fact that former vice-president Joe Biden appeared to have done poorly, even as his aides claimed he had performed well (without declaring victory) and said they looked forward to primaries in New Hampshire (which follows next), Nevada and South Carolina in the coming weeks. The candidate who gathers most delegate support in the nationwide primaries (inner party polls) that will go on till June will eventually clinch the nomination to challenge Trump in the November 2020 presidential elections.

The shadow of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also hung over the Democratic debacle after it emerged that the firm that made the app is called Shadow, a tech developer co-founded by two people who worked on Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination. Shadow in turn is affiliated with a firm called Acronym, whose founder and CEO is a former journalist and was a digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.

There is deep suspicion in the Democratic ranks, particularly among supporters of Bernie Sanders, that the party establishment will again work to deny him the nomination.

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