Buttigieg Victorious in Messy Iowa Caucus

The Iowa Caucus is the first step in choosing the candidates for the 2020 presidential election. For Democrats, it works by having voters move to a group in a room based on which candidate they support. This takes place at different caucus locations, known as precincts. There are 1,678 of these precincts in Iowa, and they can be held in many different places: a church, a library, a community center, and more. The groups are then counted, and a candidate needs to have at least 15% of the vote in order to receive delegates, and if a candidate doesn’t have enough, their voters can join another candidate’s group. Delegates are then given to each candidate based on how many voters are in their group. The delegate group eventually gets cut down until they are left with 41 delegates that will represent at the Democratic National Convention over the summer, where a candidate needs 1,990 from all states to win the nomination.

This year’s caucuses, which took place on February 3, were, frankly, a mess. It all started when the app created for precinct officials to report the results fell apart. Some people weren’t able to log into the app, and the app was not able to calculate the data correctly. Once people started to realize the app wasn’t working, they began to call into the Iowa Democratic Party. But there weren’t enough people to answer the phones, so many calls took a while to go through and some officials just gave up and went to bed. After all of this, the party announced they would do a recount by hand and release the results as soon as possible. 

Results began to trickle out and Former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg jumped out to an early lead. Senator Bernie Sanders then closed the margin and ended up receiving only .1% fewer delegates than Buttigieg. The race ended up being very close, but the Iowa Democratic Party declared Buttigieg the winner. Buttigieg won the most delegates, with 14, although he lost the popular vote to Sanders, who won 12 delegates. This led to Sanders declaring himself the victor, but Buttigieg did the same even before the votes were counted. Senator Elizabeth Warren won 8 delegates, Vice President Joe Biden won 6, while Senator Amy Klobuchar won one. 

Although Iowa is a relatively small state with a relatively small effect on the final delegate count, the Iowa Caucus is an important benchmark that presents a chance for candidates to gain momentum or fall out of contention.