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The Iowa state primaries with which the Democratic Party has started the presidential race already have a winner: Donald Trump. That is the only possible reading of the catastrophic organizational failure of the elections, which, almost 24 hours after they had been held, did not even know the approximate results of the vote . The failure was so immense that the most striking thing is that, by mid-afternoon in the US, Trump had only mocked the opposition once, in a message on Twitter in which he said he described the opposition's caucus as "a disaster without palliatives. "
For the president of the United States, what had happened in Iowa revealed that when the Democrats take over something, "nothing works, just like when they run the country." His attack was precise and irrefutable. Because one of the alleged strengths of the opposition is its efficiency .
Democrats have insisted that, in the face of the chaos of the Trump administration, marked by constant resignations and dismissals, by the permanent presence of positions in office, and by the continuing confusion between what the president says and orders and what his Advisors, they are the match of effectiveness. After all, they say, people with a university education level, for the most part, are Democrats. The only problem that Iowa puts into that argument is that they are not able to count the votes themselves in an election that they have organized .
It's like getting a goal in your own door in the first second of the Champions League final. Since Perico Delgado appeared two minutes and a half late in the prologue stage of the 1989 Tour, it has not seen a start like that for nothing. The caucuses, which is the system that party uses in the Iowa voting, have the same rigor as a Loya Jirga - tribal assembly - Afghan. The attempt to regularize them with a verifiable count of the votes made through an app and a telephone line - a condition imposed by leftist candidate Bernie Sanders, who claims that Hillary Clinton stole her victory in Iowa in 2016 - ended in a computer disaster, another public relations and, finally, political. When 22 hours had passed since the beginning of the caucuses, it was not even known where a single vote had gone. The most to which the Iowa Democratic Party aspired was to give the results of 50% of the votes at five in the afternoon (eleven o'clock at night Spanish peninsular time).
But the astracanada does not end there. The Iowa Democratic Party has made things worse. With the app not working and the alternative telephone line dropped, no one from that formation, nor from the Washington National Democratic Committee, had faced 24 hours after the disaster began. The only communications from the party leaders had been press releases and private teleconferences with the candidates' campaigns. The approximately 170,000 state Democrats who went out at night to below zero to vote in the caucuses and spent more than two hours in them until they exercised their right to vote had no right to any direct communication. The same as the thousands of volunteers who worked for free in the caucuses, and many thousands who have come from other states to ask, door to door, the vote for their candidates or to work in telephone booths calling for voters.
Brett Bruen, director of the Global Situation Room communication consultant and former head of international communications at the National Security Council during the presidency of Barack Obama summed up yesterday for THE WORLD the encyclopedic failure cascade of the Iowa Democratic Party: "They have used technology that had not been tested for the most important part of the caucuses. They have not trained the volunteers in the management of the app. They have not had enough technical support personnel when the app broke down. They have tried to hide and avoid responsibilities . they have released brief and unsatisfactory statements to an increasingly irritated audience. " In summary: "They have violated the basic principles of communication in case of crisis."
For the campaigns of the candidates, it is an insult. Keep in mind that the presidential candidates have spent 68 million dollars (61 million euros), according to local press, in the Iowa primary, and have held 2,500 events. That is, one for every thirteen people in the state, literally. Everything to not know who has won.
The Iowa voter is accustomed to chaos. And accusations of fraud. Not only with the Democrats in 2016. In 2012, the Republican Party needed two weeks to decide that former Senator Rick Santorum had won. However, in those cases there was, at least, the excuse that the vote had been adjusted. In 2020, it is not known whether the vote has been adjusted or not. Nothing is known. The only thing the Democratic Party insists on is that there has been no interference from third parties, nor fraud. The US Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that there is no indication that the system has been hacked.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party held its 'caucus' in Iowa, which in their case are very similar to normal and current elections, without problems. Few people voted, just 32,320 people, that is, a fifth of what they did in 2016, when Trump suffered an unexpected defeat in the state. On this occasion, the president took 97.1% of the votes. It is the greatest victory of a president in office in a primary in Iowa, which indicates Trump's tremendous support among his party.
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