Column: A god-awful week in American politics is finally over (via latimesopinion)
Of course, the drama in Washington was preceded by days of monumental screw-ups by Democrats in Iowa.
The first hint that things could go awry occurred two days before the state’s quadrennial caucuses when the much-anticipated Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll of likely caucusgoers, always released the Saturday evening before the voting,. In at least one instance, Pete Buttigieg’s name had been accidentally knocked off the list of candidates by an interviewer who had enlarged the font size on a monitor.
To their credit, the pollsters yanked the whole project. This was not just an inconvenience for outlets such as CNN, which had planned to devote its Saturday night coverage to the poll results. It also meant that candidates had no firm grasp of how they were faring in the state, and how they might best tailor their closing arguments.
The missing poll, however, was a glitch, not a disaster. The disaster came two days later, moments after the state’s nearly 1,700 caucuses ended. The caucuses went off with relatively few hitches, but then ... chaos. Caucus results, normally phoned in or dropped off in person to election offices, were supposed to be reported via a phone app this year.No shock there. It had barely been tested and caucus chairpersons had little or poor training. But phone lines were also jammed — it now appears by internet trolls who had posted the hotline number — making it impossible for legitimate callers to report the results.
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