Yes indeed, the people who designed the Democratic donkey for the Iowa caucuses literally got their back-asswards.
Iowa in particular has proven it is incapable of being allowed to be the first electoral contest. In the 2012 Republican caucus, Mitt R-money was declared the winner and got the bounce going into the New Hampshire primary, just across the state line from Massachusetts where he had been governor. Only later was it corrected to show that Rick Santorum had actually won, but by that time the boost had gone to R-money and Santorum had already fallen too far behind to catch up.
And now in 2020 the Democratic caucus is a complete debacle. It took almost a full day to count fewer than 200,000 votes from 1,700 precinct sites and we still have only partial results.
While I understand that the problem that would be posed with a national primary — that small, unknown candidates or those without money would be frozen out — it is time to create a system where multiple diverse states all go on the same day, maybe one each from the west, northeast, midwest and south, so one state doesn’t hog all the attention and power, and then base continued advantage on successful outcomes or possibly rotate a different mix of states each cycle.
Yes indeed, the people who designed the Democratic donkey for the Iowa caucuses literally got their back-asswards.
Iowa in particular has proven it is incapable of being allowed to be the first electoral contest. In the 2012 Republican caucus, Mitt R-money was declared the winner and got the bounce going into the New Hampshire primary, just across the state line from Massachusetts where he had been governor. Only later was it corrected to show that Rick Santorum had actually won, but by that time the boost had gone to R-money and Santorum had already fallen too far behind to catch up.
And now in 2020 the Democratic caucus is a complete debacle. It took almost a full day to count fewer than 200,000 votes from 1,700 precinct sites and we still have only partial results.
While I understand that the problem that would be posed with a national primary — that small, unknown candidates or those without money would be frozen out — it is time to create a system where multiple diverse states all go on the same day, maybe one each from the west, northeast, midwest and south, so one state doesn’t hog all the attention and power, and then base continued advantage on successful outcomes or possibly rotate a different mix of states each cycle.