Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Iowa Caucus Chaos - Lloyd Billingsley


by Lloyd Billingsley

Buttigieg leads, Biden fourth -- full results still delayed.





At 7:26 p.m. on Monday, the Associated Press proclaimed Donald Trump the victor in the Iowa Caucuses, with 97.1 percent of Republican voters favoring the president. By contrast, the Democrat results were not released Monday night and nothing showed up on Tuesday morning. At 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Iowa Democratic Party chair Troy Price attempted to clarify the chaos.

Price told reporters what had happened was “simply unacceptable,” citing a “coding problem” and the need to “verify results.” Minutes later, based on some 62 percent of the vote, the results were in: Pete Buttigieg 26.9 percent, Bernie Sanders 25.1, Elizabeth Warren 18.3, Joe Biden 15.6, Amy Klobuchar 12.6 percent, and the rest, including billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, at one percent. As it happened, the vote was not the Democrats’ first delay.

“The Des Moines Register, CNN and Selzer & Co. have made the decision to not release the final installment of the CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll as planned Saturday evening,” Carol Hunter of the Des Moines Register explained Saturday night. That highly regarded poll, the last before the Iowa Caucuses, has been going on for 76 years, and Democrats wondered what the problem could be.

“A respondent raised an issue with the way the survey was administered,” the Register explained, “which could have compromised the results of the poll. It appears a candidate’s name was omitted in at least one interview in which the respondent was asked to name their preferred candidate.”

According to J. Ann Selzer, whose company conducts the Iowa Poll, “There were concerns about what could be an isolated incident. Because of the stellar reputation of the poll, and the wish to always be thought of that way, the heart-wrenching decision was made not to release the poll. The decision was made with the highest integrity in mind.” Voters would quickly find evidence that the highest integrity was not a factor.

On Monday, Democrats were not releasing the results of the actual vote, and that was still true well into Tuesday.  As Fox News reported, “a largely unexplained and unprecedented delay” had “raised questions about the legitimacy of the contest.” The Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) found “inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” but it was all “a reporting issue” and “the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion.”

The app is the creation of the tech firm Shadow Inc. which bills itself as “a permanent advantage for progressive campaigns and causes through technology.” Company bosses and a senior product manager “all worked for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign,” according to LinkedIn profiles cited by Fox News.

IDP bosses also blamed a “coding issue in the reporting system” that was allegedly identified and fixed. Despite the claim, the results were not emerging and Democrat officials blamed faulty telephones. Mark Steyn, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh, marveled that nobody had blamed Macedonian troll farms.

“So we don’t know the results,” Pete Buttigieg proclaimed Monday night,” telling his supporters, “because, by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar was “feeling good tonight,” and ready for New Hampshire. Joe Biden was also “feeling good” and “in this for the long haul” even as one of his campaign managers warned about “flaws in the reporting systems tonight that should raise serious concerns for voters.”

For Elizabeth Warren it was “too close to call” and Bernie Sanders had “a good feeling we’re going to be doing very, very well here in Iowa,” once the results were known. The partial results put him in second, with 25.1 percent, but confusion and uncertainty still prevailed.

Republicans, including President Trump, teed off on the Democrats, suggesting the process had been rigged. Mark Steyn pinned the delay in reporting on a poor fourth-place finish for Joe Biden, precisely what emerged later in the day.

As Steyn saw it, as in 2016, Democrats were out to block Bernie Sanders from being their candidate. To that end, Nancy Pelosi had delayed the impeachment articles to keep senators away from Iowa in the runup to the caucuses. That would benefit former vice president Joe Biden, the favorite of the Democrat establishment but now a distant fourth.

Bernie Sanders, running a strong second, talks up Denmark and such but for his honeymoon he opted for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Sanders’ concept of rights is straight out of the 1936 Stalin Constitution, and as David Horowitz says, the Communist horrors of the 20th century seem to have passed him by unnoticed.

On the other hand, all major Democrat contenders favor open borders, health care for illegal aliens, Medicare for all, and the Green New Deal, a national suicide note. All Democrat contenders favored the impeachment of President Trump, whose approval rating on Tuesday was a personal-best 49 percent.

Meanwhile, the New Hampshire primary is coming up next week and the election takes place on November 3. As President Trump says, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.


Lloyd Billingsley

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/iowa-chaos-lloyd-billingsley/

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