By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, February 06, 2020
By Wednesday afternoon, we were allowed to see 92 percent
of the Iowa Caucus results. That’s better than the zero percent on Election
Night, and the 62 percent released late Tuesday afternoon. But the full results
of the caucus — which used to be available the night of the caucus, live, on
television, late in the evening, in the era before the Internet — are
apparently being collated so slowly, they may or may not arrive before the next
George R.R. Martin novel.
The Iowa Democratic Party was entrusted with running the
first and arguably one of the most consequential contests in the presidential
nominating process, and it completely fumbled, prat-falled, and metaphorically
set itself on fire in the process. Not only can the state party not provide the
full results, not only can they not say when they will be able provide
full results, but they also cannot explain why they cannot provide full
results. The unnerving possibility from this inexplicable refusal to give answers
is that the party doesn’t actually know if their data are accurate and that
perhaps some staff in some precincts made errors during the recording of votes.
Who entrusted the Iowa state party with that privilege
and responsibility? The Democratic National Committee, which controls and runs
the nominating process. This is the same DNC that Democrats fume has changed
the rules for the primary debates after the process began, whose efforts at
‘inclusivity” have somehow left only white candidates up on stage, who is
generating “endless grief from fretting party regulars,” in the words of the New
York Times, and who is apparently preparing a “generous exit package” for
Chairman Tom Perez and top deputies.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign secretly assumed
control of the Democratic National Committee’s debts, effectively co-opting the
DNC into its service. Incoming chairwoman Donna Brazile, according to Politico,
was stunned to learn that “Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary
Victory Fund (the campaign’s joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken
care of 80 percent of the DNC’s remaining debt, about $10 million, and had
placed the party on an allowance.” Once this was revealed after the 2016
election, many supporters of Bernie Sanders concluded, understandably, that the
committee was not merely biased — it’s not surprising that committee staff
would prefer one presidential candidate to another — but in fact a tool
designed to ensure the illusion of a fair nominating process.
When you hear the argument that the modern political
parties are much weaker than in the past, the argument is generally correct,
but there’s a difference in the form of the weakness of each party. The modern
Republican Party can’t prevent the wrong guy from winning the most votes; the
modern Democratic Party can’t count the votes.
The modern Republican Party establishment was not capable
of preventing Donald Trump — a former registered Democrat, and pro-choice,
pro-gun-control donor to the opposition party, with no experience in government
— from stepping in, winning the nomination, and once he won, more or less
turning the entire party apparatus (the party committees, lawmakers, and allied
groups) into extensions of his own political empire. But the party did extract
certain unwritten agreements from Trump. Trump wholly converted to the causes
of the Second Amendment and the pro-life movement, more or less picks his
judges from the Federalist Society All-Star team, and raises funds and does
rallies for Republican candidates down-ticket.
If you’re a Republican who wasn’t enamored with Trump,
the 2016 primary offered a great deal of disappointment and frustration. Fox
News and talk-radio figures who had positioned themselves as defenders of
principled conservatism suddenly started explaining why Trump’s past support
for the Democratic Party and abortion and other deviations from orthodoxy didn’t
matter, in light of the fact that Hillary was his opponent. The mainstream
media, convinced that Trump would be toxic in the general election, boosted
their ratings by offering extensive and often uninterrupted coverage of many of
his speeches and rallies. The other candidates, instead of focusing their
attacks on Trump, seemed much more interested in beating one another up in an
effort to become the last man standing against him. And when both Ted Cruz and
John Kasich stayed in, all the way to the Indiana primary, it became clear that
no one would end up in a one-on-one matchup against Trump.
Conservatives who were unreconciled with Trump could (and
did) fume at all the factors that helped Trump, and they may well feel that
they were failed by the institutional measures that were supposed to prevent
someone like Trump from getting the nomination. But what didn’t fail
those conservatives was the primary or caucus process.
Trump may have won less than half the votes in the
primary — 44.95 percent, when all was said and done — but he won 6 million more
votes than any other candidate. Never Trump conservatives may have felt that
the GOP’s nomination of Trump was foolish and reckless and unlikely to succeed
(it was more likely than it seemed, it turned out). But the process was
certainly fair, and he was freely chosen by those who chose to
participate in the Republican presidential primary. Donald Trump went out, made
his case in his own wildly unpredictable and never-boring style, and convinced
more Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to vote for him than any
other candidate. Trump’s rivals might be upset by their defeat, but they knew
it was an honest one.
Bernie Sanders fans weren’t so convinced that their
defeat had been an honest one.
Since 2016, this has continued; the Republican
establishment tries to work behind the scenes but doesn’t openly intervene in
primaries much. By conservative lights, things go the wrong way with depressing
regularity. We’ve seen Roy Moore win a Senate nomination and fumble away a seat
that was once thought impossible to lose. Corey Stewart won a GOP Senate
nomination in Virginia and promptly got spanked by incumbent Tim Kaine, that
whirling dervish of raw political charisma. Kris Kobach managed to lose a
gubernatorial race in Kansas, and his prospects looks similarly disastrous in
this year’s upcoming Senate race.
But you know what happened in those GOP primaries in
Alabama and Virginia and Kansas where those awful candidates won? They held
a primary, and they counted all the votes! Every time some idiotic, morally
repugnant non-establishment underdog wins, it is another sign that the
establishment doesn’t control the vote tabulation through shadowy hacks
and dirty tricks and other unethical and illegal means. Sure, now and again the
GOP may get stuck with a candidate who’s terrible, but the problem is with the
electorate’s judgment, not that the primaries are a meaningless exercise
designed to rubber-stamp the choice of shadowy power brokers. You may think
that a majority or a plurality of GOP primary voters must be on drugs or have
suffered head injuries before making their choice, but at least on our side of
the aisle, the democratic process works as intended.
After Iowa, if you’re a Democrat, you can’t say that with
confidence.
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