After Iowa, Donald Trump looks invincible

Any future history of the decline and fall of the American Republic ought to include a page or two on the Iowa caucuses of 3 February 2020. It’s a meltdown story for the ages. The Democratic party, desperate to undo the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, somehow managed utterly to cock up its first meaningful vote in 2020. The calamity is so great that it may turn the whole Democratic primary — and therefore this presidential election year — into a farce. That suits President Trump. ‘Big WIN for us in Iowa tonight,’ he tweeted, on Tuesday night, as news of the Democratic imbroglio spread. ‘Thank you!’ He then retweeted Piers Morgan, who had responded to his tweet with a ROFL (Rolling on the Floor Laughing) emoji. Fun times.

We’ll hear lots of conspiracy theories about what really happened, but the Iowa disaster was probably just a result of good old-fashioned human error combined with newfangled crap software. To understand what went wrong, it helps to go back to 1 February 2016, when Hillary Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders in Iowa by a whisker. Several key precincts were so close they had to be decided by the toss of a coin. That prompted much grumbling, so ahead of 2020 the Democratic party introduced reforms to make caucuses more transparent, fair and reliable. Naturally enough, these ended up making the process much more obscure, unfair and unreliable.

In an attempt to drag the archaic caucusing system into the 21st century, the Democrats employed Shadow Inc, a suspiciously well-connected tech company, which created a snazzy and totally unnecessary app to tabulate the caucus results. The app failed. So did the back-up phone system. Nobody knew what was going on; panicked whispers began to spread that Russia had hacked the election — again. Others said that security measures designed to stop Russians interfering had caused the problem.