Miranda Devine: Iowa caucus showed Trump is ready, while Democrats drown
While the Democratic Party battled technical glitches and infighting on a monumental scale, the President of the United States emerged victorious, yet again, writes Miranda Devine.
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So the winner of the Iowa caucuses is … drum roll … President Donald Trump.
The Democratic Party imploded in its first test of the 2020 presidential election: Joe Biden collapsed as the Great White Hope of the Democratic party and technical glitches engulfed the caucus results.
“Iowa held a caucus but no one was around to report the results,” said one NBC News reporter, packing up and leaving after midnight.
Meanwhile, Trump scored the highest turnout in history for any president of any party in the lay down misere that was the Republican contest in this crucial midwestern state, slaying a couple of never-Trumpers with more than 35,000 votes.
Results in the Democratic caucuses were delayed after new rules and a new app failed to deliver results from 1,681 precincts across Iowa.
As 78-year-old Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders and 37-year-old gay Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg vied to claim victory, the party farcically was trying to verify results using screenshots of paper tally counts while Iowa officials spent the evening hanging up on frustrated campaign managers phoning for results.
“These are the same people who want to take over your healthcare,” Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said of the shambles. “They can’t run a caucus so how could you trust them with your livelihood?”
The delay didn’t hide the bleak picture for the Democrats that has emerged in Iowa against the backdrop of Trump’s impeachment trial and his paradoxically improved poll numbers.
Biden tried to put on a brave face at his caucus night party for the faithful at Drake University in Des Moines shortly before midnight Tuesday. “We’re here for the long haul,” he said.
But the former vice-president’s lacklustre performance has sent a chill through a party in the throes of civil war between an insurgent socialist wing and a corrupt machine represented by the Clintons and Bidens.
Sanders’ socialist ally, the charismatic young New York congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, leader of the so-called Squad summed up the division when she said, “In any other country Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party.”
Only a mutual loathing of Trump has preserved a semblance of unity.
In Iowa, Biden, 77, struggled to complete sentences or resorted to a tele-promoter to deliver flaccid criticisms of Trump.
Meanwhile, socialist renegade Bernie Sanders, 78, three months after a heart attack, has tapped millennial energy in almost Trumpian events across the state, offering to cancel student debt and legalise marijuana.
“Bernie, Bernie, Bernie,” chant his adoring fans, swooning when he describes his wife of 32 years as “the love of my life”.
The Iowa results debacle feeds into the outsider mentality Sanders is cultivating, one man standing against a rigged system.
The Democrats have just changed the rules to allow billionaire Michael Bloomberg to “buy his way onto the stage” as Sanders’ warm-up man, filmmaker Michael Moore puts it.
And at a rally in Cedar Rapids on Saturday night, Sanders told his young 3000-strong audience that he was battling not just the Republicans, but the Democratic establishment.
If he is cheated of the nomination his young followers are ready for war at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in July.
While honeymooning in the Soviet Union and praising communist dictators is a political death sentence for anyone who recalls Stalin and Pol Pot, for a younger American generation, ignorance is bliss.
Sanders’ $50 trillion in spending might dwarf the promises of his rivals but idealism doesn’t have a price.
At his caucus night party in Des Moines, the scent of marijuana wafted through the air as Sanders claimed victory, while Buttigieg’s campaign uploaded raw results on Twitter to claim their own win.
But an indication of the eventual caucus result could be seen in one small slice of Iowa earlier in the evening in the cafeteria at Lincoln High School in Des Moines.
In a unique three-hour long procedure, known as caucusing, 385 neighbours and acquaintances tried to persuade each other to join groups supporting their preferred candidate. After a first count, they regrouped as the lowest scoring candidates were eliminated.
The final count was Buttigieg 109, Elizabeth Warren 92, Sanders 89, and Biden 74. But, according to Warren precinct captain Jaime Yowler, 30, the only reason Biden survived the first round as a “viable candidate” was because of a dirty trick aimed at suppressing the “moderate” Buttigieg vote. The Warren team asked five people from a defunct Cory Booker group to move to Biden to keep him viable so the Biden people didn’t move their votes to fellow Buttigieg.
It’s elaborate and baffling but Iowa is the ultimate in grassroots American democracy. It matters because the winner of seven of the nine contested Democratic caucuses has gone on to be the party’s presidential candidate.
Sanders has had the momentum and polling surge in recent weeks, but he is the Democratic machine’s worst nightmare. The populist mirror image of Trump for the left, he represents a radical policy shift for his party rather than a mere adjustment in tone and manners that Trump has wrought on the Republicans.
Of course, Trump is making hay over the Democrats’ chaos. He held a packed-out rally in Iowa on caucus eve where he professed love for Iowa’s cows. Then on Caucus Day he sent dozens of A-team surrogates, including sons Don Jnr and Eric, cabinet secretaries and congress members to Iowa, ostensibly to “road test our ground game”.
In reality he was trolling his rivals.
In three years as President, Trump has triumphed over everything the Democrats have has thrown at him. Pussygate, Russia Collusion, Stormy Daniels, Ukraine, impeachment. What hasn’t killed him has made him stronger.
Let the games begin.