Sounds like, although Pete is ahead in state delegates, Bernie will be tied for national delegates. Combined with his winning the popular vote, this is not the end of the world for Bernie by any stretch.
I Caucused for Bernie is a small town and Pete had an almost equal number of voters and these were people I’ve known all my life. Say what you will about his policies or national campaign, but Pete did teh actual groundwork on a human level to get where he did. This aint a DNC conspiracy.
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Even if it’s true (and it seems entirely plausible to me that it would be), what does it matter? It’s an app that failed. Apps fail all the time. It was a dumb idea to rely on it at all; it was an even dumber idea to rely on it without testing. But my guess is that the venn diagram of people who are willing to work on a campaign or state-democratic-party salary and people who have amazing technical app programming skills has two relatively small circles with fairly little overlap.
The conspiracy theories drive me nuts. Especially this year, I think a lot of people (myself definitely among them) really only want to find the best person to beat Trump–and so the constant “OMG THEY’RE TRYING TO GET BERNIE” and “PETE THE CHEAT” garbage is both harmful and insulting. I think Bernie would be an absolutely awful president, probably the least effective one the Democrats have ever put in office, and he almost guarantees a 2024 victory for Pence or one of the Trump garbage children, but he will nevertheless have my enthusiastic support and my donations if he wins the primary, because a second term of Trump is the end of the republic as we know it.
We have a super weak slate of candidates this year. All of them are deeply flawed in one way or another. But tearing each other down because of insufficient progressiveness or insufficient moderateness, especially with weaksauce “DNC CONSPIRACY” claptrap only helps Trump and his lickspittle enablers. He’s literally pushing for that–he loves the idea that he can whip up Bernie supporters with claims of rigged elections.
Gah. This whole process is so fucking depressing.
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With 70ish precent of precincts in all you can really say is that given a sample size of a few hundred thousand in non-representative Iowa. A tiny percentage more appear to prefer Sanders.
Buttigieg seems to be getting the media focus because he gambled on declaring victory first. And a quirk of predicated in state delegates means he might have a better chance of taking the states actual miniscule number of meaningful delegates.
Mathematically this is a wash. Realistically Iowa is meaningless without the media circus. The story is going to be entirely different next week, and probably just as unimportant. Super Tuesday is really the first thing that gives you a look at what voters in a broad stretch of the country, and different demographics think.
The electability thing, and triangulation on issues, is frustrating because it assumes support must pre-exist. And can’t be built or changed. We should be less concerned about who’s inherently electable, than who can get elected. Less what policies already have support, than how to get support for good policies.
What ever else he’s on about Sanders is very good at selling himself in certain quarters. And he’s very good at attracting people to broad policy ideas.
Buttigieg. I dunno. The media pushed him for underdog reasons and because he’s got a lot of money from a very rich. But rather small group of donors limited to his home region. He seems to have done so well here by narrowly focusing on small rural counties with a disproportionate share of delegates. None of it seems to have much to do with the nice boy himself.
Biden is traditionally not good at any of this. But he’s the easy answer cause people like him and Obama spent 8 years doing the work for him. The focus on him is about expectations and preconceived notions, just like electability.
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In my insane opinion it is that Pete was given those delegates by Shadow because he is not a threat to the current “Biden losing to Trump” strategy that the Democrats have in place for the 2020 election.
shadow didn’t give anyone any delegates. just stop. the app just didnt work. the votes are backed up by paper ballots and real people. i went to a caucus. the human enthusiasm for pete is real here. this is not an endorsement. i caucused for bernie. just saying the conspiracy stuff is bunk.
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I caucused for bernie, too. Does that legitimize my claim to you ?
I’m not going to stop it. My take is that the detached mega-rich in the Democratic party are doing a Pompey the Great-like “tactical retreat”.
They have their wealth. And they see the writing on the wall. Either dump to Trump or lose their wealth to Bernie or Warren.
And all I see now is rich people dumping to Trump while making us dance dance no-revolution on social media.
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i just mean stop with the implying this app was a conspiracy. its clearly not and didn’t help anyone. especially not establishment candidates.
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id also like to point out that Steyer, who has dumping cash into the campaign since the day trump took office (he started with generic pro impeachment commercials before officially running), barely got like 1% of the vote. i feel like that is encouraging that money couldn’t buy him into even the top 5.
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The app wasn’t involved in the voting at all. It was just there for caucus leads to send results to party headquarters so they could relay results to the media and campaigns.
That sort of night of numbers release isn’t ever definitive. There’s always a more time consuming count going on used to officially certify results. It’s just that that can take weeks.
There isn’t any practical way this app could have altered the results or delegate counts. And even if it did it wouldn’t have mattered because a week from now there would have been a “holy shit” headline.
Bloomberg’s campaign position is almost literally “buy the nomination, elites wanted me to”.
If anyone was gonna three parentheses conspiracy their way to a disproportionate showing in Iowa. You’d think it’d be the guy who nobody but Jeff Bezos thinks should run.
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totally agree. my gut says bloomberg wont actually get anywhere either tho. Money puts your name out there but this is a popularity contest in the end and I really dont think many people like him. They already know him and they dont like him. I guess we’ll see…
I agree this is probably not a conspiracy…
However, given his funding of the project, it does not look on the up and up. I wish that did not matter, but it actually does. It looks like corruption, even if it’s not actual corruption.
It most certainly a solution in search of a problem that did not exist. Also, a great way to get money into particular people’s pockets…
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They do have a few cities, you know. Two of which are home to large universities.
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Nobody gives a shit about Bloomberg outside of the NYC metro. And a lot of us dislike him. In particular the guy is straight up hated by all those groups critically important to the Democratic coalition. Especially black people.
He ain’t making any headway.
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I think we’ve actually had a slate of exceptionally strong candidates this round. And while I completely agree with you on the conspiracy theories, Bernie’s instant-meme machine will be a hell of an asset if he gets the nomination. The other candidates are not nearly as well-equipped to take on Trump’s social media army army.
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Please don’t let facts get in the way of a perfectly good conspiracy theory.
In exactly what ways are those wrong or bad? They are factual. They are accurate.
i grew up in iowa. i lived in NYC all through the bloomberg years. he’s not liked much there either. He won his elections because the republicans are even worse. i’d say the same thing about andrew cuomo. AOC is onto something… in a democratic hold like NY we gotta primary out these kind of dummies because its too late in the general election for there to be a meaningful contest.
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Lumping two people together because of their gender when they have nothing else in common is not a good look.
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This is Iowa. The only fair way to deal with a tie is by a deep-fried butter eating contest.
“Come on, Pete! How bad do you want it?”
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