18 TheEconomistFebruary 8th 2020
1I
n the smallhours of February 4th a
straggling squadron of private jets left
Des Moines International Airport and
headed east through a clear, cold sky, its
clouds and the snowy land beneath them
silvered by the light of a setting half moon.
Conditions in the state the planes left be-
hind them were far less perspicuous. A
malfunctioning app made by a firm called
Shadow Inc. meant that the results of the
Iowa caucuses which are normally an-
nounced not much past nine o’clock in the
evening, remained shrouded in mystery.
By the time Pete Buttigieg, an ex-mayor
from South Bend, Indiana, heard that the
first, partial release of results from Iowa
showed him to have won the most “dele-
gate equivalents” (27%) he was 2,100km
(1,300 miles) away in Laconia, a lakeside
town in New Hampshire. Bernie Sanders, a
socialist senator from Vermont who the
early results showed coming second with
25%, was an hour’s drive south in Milford.
Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massa-
chusetts, heard of her third-place finish in
the little city of Keene; in the larger city of
Nashua, America’s former vice-president,Joe Biden, learned that he had managed
only fourth place, with 15.6%.
Remarkably, final results had still not
been published as The Economistwent to
press. With 97% of the count completed,
Mr Buttigieg still had the edge in delegate
equivalents; though Mr Sanders had slight-
ly more actual votes, their concentration in
urban areas counted against him a little. Mr
Buttigieg also picked up more support than
anyone else in the stage of the caucuses
where votes originally cast for the less pop-
ular candidates are reallocated (see chart 1
on next page).Hate to wake you up
The Democrats have always been split, to a
greater or lesser extent, between the more
left-wing and the more centrist. Finding a
candidate who can at least try to please
both is part of the point of the primary pro-
cess. Today the factions’ differences are
more pronounced than usual, though—
and they line up with two different ap-
proaches to what the election is about.
Democrats of all stripes say they care
most about ousting President DonaldTrump. But the two wings offer fundamen-
tally different prescriptions for how to do
it. Moderates offer something like a fur-
ther-to-the-left version of the pre-Trump
status quo. The radicals seek what Ms War-
ren calls “big structural change”. They want
to fix the problems of concentrated power
and influence they see as having led to Mr
Trump in the first place. That difference
could yet cost the party the election.
A nostrum from before the days of each
candidate hiring their own jet held that
there were only three tickets out of Iowa;
candidates who did not win, place or show
in the caucuses had no shot at the nomina-
tion. It would be rash to bet heavily on that
rule of thumb holding. Fourth-place Mr Bi-
den is a nationally popular figure with a
long-standing lead in the polls (see chart 2
on next page). He may have a chance to re-
deem himself when South Carolina votes
on February 29th; African-Americans, who
have shown strong support for him, make
up a majority of the electorate there.
Even so, Mr Biden was the only candi-
date who actually benefited from the slow
dripping out of the results. The Super Bowl
on Sunday, Mr Trump’s state-of-the-union
address on Tuesday and the Senate’s ac-
quittal of the president on Wednesday
meant that the caucuses had only a small
window in which to be a big story. When
the results missed that window Mr Biden’s
lacklustre performance—he may not have
won a single delegate—got a lot less atten-
tion than it might have.
Of the people who did well out of theIowa and after
CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE, INDEPENDENCE, IOWA, AND WASHINGTON DC
A shambolic kick-off to the nominating process did nothing to help the
Democrats build unityBriefing The Democratic race