Two months after kamala Harris’s campaign collapsed, the night of the Iowa caucus arrived. Bernie Sanders had every reason to expect good news. He was set to win.
The Vermont senator was deep in his election-night ritual, with his lanky, crooked frame stalking around a hotel suite filled with his family and Faiz Shakir, his campaign manager. Sanders constantly checked the television, refreshed news sites, and worked the phones to get the latest numbers, ideally ones that would confirm his victory. He peppered his people for scraps of information about the turnout.
“How are we doing?” Sanders asked, insistently and incessantly. “How are we winning?”
But the answers never came. Instead, everything went sideways.
Iowa was the beginning of the end for Bernie Sanders. A night where he imagined triumph ended in something even worse than defeat.
We captured the experience of Sanders and his top campaign staff through a series of interviews. Sanders came to the state expecting it to vault him towards the presidency. But a perfect storm of incompetence, technical glitches, and sheer bad luck opened old wounds and dealt a shattering blow to his quest to steer the Democratic Party on a revolutionary course.
He spent the evening at two hotels in Iowa’s capital city. The night started at the Hilton DoubleTree, which was Sanders’s standard destination in Des Moines. For the caucus, his campaign planned its main event at an airport Holiday Inn. At some point, Sanders switched between the two venues but it was hard for Shakir to remember exactly when.
The campaign trail is a grueling, lonely slog, particularly brutal in the key early primaries when life is lived almost exclusively in a dizzying succession of bland, dated hotel rooms. The off-white walls, fake woods, scratchy curtains, and bad abstract art begin to blend together in a dim haze.
Daytime offers small tastes of place glimpsed through rental car windows. Iowa’s flat, gray, wintry plains. New Hampshire’s high forests blazing bright with snow and ice. Nevada, baking in the dry heat of the desert under impossibly blue, wide-open skies, an overexposed photograph brought to life.
But nights are all the same: liminal hotel purgatory. Then there are the rallies.
People in pain made pilgrimages to Sanders’s speeches. His crowds at high school gyms, small colleges, and well-worn community centers were filled with men and women experiencing a melancholy American story: lost jobs, low wages, illnesses, and lost opportunity. They rushed towards him every time he stepped down from the podium, desperate to share their concerns. Their hands reached out from the crush eager to briefly touch a man who offered them hope.
But Sanders’s tent wasn’t just filled with the work-weary people his idol Eugene Debs, the turn-of-the-century socialist presidential candidate, had dubbed “Fountain Proletaire.” Along with tie-dyed Boomers and working-class heroes, Sanders’s rallies drew young people with boundless optimism about the fairer, more economically just society they could build if their man ran the government. In the final eight days of the race, polls showed Sanders a few points ahead of a crowded field thanks largely to support from those young voters. Their presence in his base hardened Sanders’s conviction that his path offered the best future for the country.
Sanders had the wind at his back. The centrist establishment that had tried to cut him down in 2016 was losing ground. Every Bernie event had become a swirl of adoring fans, cheers, bright lights, and cameras. When he looked out at the world, his own face stared back at him from T-shirts, front pages, and television screens. Journalists were—for the first time—calling him the front-runner. Sanders couldn’t help but imagine his improbable dream might actually be coming true. Victory was in sight.
It’s almost impossible to overstate how much the Hawkeye State meant to Bernie Sanders and his campaign at this moment. As Shakir put it months later, they had it “all plotted out” after a win in the traditional first caucus.
But that night, as Sanders paced in that Des Moines Holiday Inn, waves of bad news rolled in. Across town, in a squat, redbrick building that served as the nerve center for his campaign leadership, senior aides were panicking.
“There was chaos. Everyone was freaking out,” Sanders’s deputy campaign manager, Arianna Jones, recounted. “Bernie was pissed too.”
Back at the hotel suite, Shakir said he found the candidate sitting with his hands at his temples and a thousand-yard stare glaring from behind his glasses.
“The only thing I remember is towards the end of the night … how upset—like really upset—he was,” Shakir said of Sanders. The candidate grimaced with a mixture of what Shakir described as searing pain and “seething anger.”
“We were just despondent about the situation,” Shakir said. “He felt robbed.”
Political campaigns are delicate creatures.
An old adage compares them to a jumbo jet assembled on the runway during takeoff. To survive, a campaign requires a precise chemistry of talented people seizing fleeting opportunities. Presidential bids, some of which cost over a billion dollars, are the biggest—and most fickle—beasts of them all.
Sanders’s White House run was particularly audacious. Before rising to national fame, Sanders was one of just two independents in the US Senate and the only one in history to identify as a socialist, one of the most consistently demonized ideologies in American politics. Yet he was vying to lead the Democratic Party, one of two major political institutions that have dominated American government since the Civil War.
Sanders’s first presidential race, in 2016, was a bitter battle against Hillary Clinton, whose hundred-million-dollar fortune garnered from the global conference circuit and connections accrued over decades as First Lady, senator from New York, and secretary of state made her the living embodiment of the elite, centrist mainstream Sanders despised.
He almost won it, too.
Even though he was convinced the Democratic Party stacked the deck against him, Sanders’s little rebellion still took off.
He drew massive crowds at raucous rallies where he barked out a blueprint for a progressive transformation of the American government. In a gravelly accent that betrayed his Brooklyn roots, Sanders called for a political revolution that would transform America into a nation that taxed inequality out of existence, expanded the social safety net to include free college and health care, and fought the climate crisis instead of foreign wars.
But Sanders was no opportunist. He had pursued these goals for nearly half a century. The difference was that the country had finally begun to see the appeal (and the glaring logic) of his platform. A rising post–Cold War generation was more open-minded about socialism and disillusioned after decades of Wall Street excesses and foreign wars. Never giving an inch on his principles, Sanders went from an oddball underdog to a close second-place finisher against Clinton’s imperial machine. His vision of a new politics captivated millions and built him a base within the Democratic Party.
Four years later, Sanders had gone from a relatively obscure independent to a powerful senator with supporters in Congress, in city and state capitals around the country, and, with Clinton swept aside by Donald Trump, even in the party leadership. The same institutions that once tried to stop Sanders had begun to make concessions and work with him. Sanders was starting the 2020 race in a far stronger position, and a win in Iowa would establish enormous momentum out of the gate.
Compared to the rest of the field, Sanders had the biggest team in Iowa and the most money in his war chest. Next up was New Hampshire, which Sanders had won in 2016, and then Nevada, where his robust operation had connected with the state’s large Latino population. Based on the known poll numbers, a streak of three early state victories seemed almost inevitable. And, in a primary system where momentum is the coin of the realm, a trio of early wins could be enough to wrap up the Democratic nomination.
Sanders’s strategy—and route to victory—made sense, but it all depended on Iowa. And on that night, the state delivered Sanders and his staff an almost unthinkable outcome.
“Devastating is an understatement,” Shakir, the campaign manager, said when asked about what happened next. “I can’t tell you how much we invested to win that state.”
Iowa occupies a peculiar place in American politics. its caucus had been guaranteed primacy in the nominating process by both major parties since 1972. That special status has afforded voters in the state, who are less than 1 percent of the US population, an immense degree of influence over the last twelve presidential races.
Detractors of this system argue it’s wrong to give a relatively insignificant, overwhelmingly white, and rural group of voters such dramatic sway over our elections. Supporters of the caucus counter that Iowa’s Midwestern charms and small size mean candidates can reach each of the ninety-nine counties and be welcomed into voters’ homes without having to pay for luxuries like private jets and major market television commercials.
Caucus lore is filled with tales of long shots blanketing the state and winning over voters one by one on the way to Washington. Jimmy Carter famously biked his way through in 1976, shaking hands and propelling himself to the nomination. Iowa was also the place where Barack Obama caught fire in 2008.
Along with a special place on the primary calendar, Iowa has had an eccentric voting system. Caucuses are not simple votes. The Democrats’ process has involved people gathering at an appointed hour in over 1,600 sites around the state including churches, community centers, at least one meatpacker’s union hall, and a Shriners Temple.
Traditonally, when the action starts, there are speeches and the crowd separates into groups supporting each candidate. It’s like a high-stakes version of musical chairs. Then, administrators take a head count. Any contingent that falls below a designated viability threshold is disbanded. Supporters of the other candidates then lobby the members of the losing factions to join their side. The process can take hours. Ties are sometimes decided with a coin flip. It’s a messy, imprecise system—and it’s a major part of how America picks its presidents.
In years past, the Iowa Democratic Party did not announce the raw vote totals. Instead, for public consumption on caucus night, it solely reported a metric called “state delegate equivalents,” which was calculated based on the location of the site, turnout in recent elections, and lastly, the actual vote totals captured by the two head counts. Those figures were then filtered through a separate formula to determine how many of Iowa’s delegates will back a given candidate at the Democratic National Convention.
Those elaborate calculations include multiple points where numbers must be rounded, which pulls the state delegate equivalent figure further away from the raw vote total. Campaigns had previously reported discrepancies between the official results and their data from caucus sites, raising questions about how the state party volunteers executed the math. Small mistakes could make a major difference. In 2012, for example, the Republican caucus came down to one-tenth of a state delegate equivalent.
In 2016, Sanders’s loss to Clinton was tight as well—one-quarter of a percentage point in the state delegate equivalents. Sanders’s campaign compiled their own data from the caucus sites that year. Based on their internal numbers, some Sanders aides were convinced he won the popular vote and possibly the delegate metric as well. However, since the state party didn’t report the vote totals, there was no way to check.
With his strong showing and Clinton’s ultimate loss to Trump in 2016, Sanders earned a degree of pull behind the scenes. He used it to chip away at some of the structures that preserved backroom influence and, he was convinced, had cost him the White House, including the black box that previously surrounded the raw count. In 2020, after a push from Sanders and his allies, the Iowa Democratic Party had agreed to announce the number of actual votes along with the state delegate equivalents.
Some observers warned that this could lead to a mess where one candidate was victorious in the popular vote and another won more delegate equivalents. Of course, such messes were equally possible in previous election years. There had just been no way to prove it.
There was one other wrinkle in 2020. Along with reporting a whole new set of numbers, Iowa’s Democrats launched an app to transmit the results from the more than 1,600 caucus sites across the state. It was designed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with deep party ties, and it crashed spectacularly.
Hour after hour, as the caucus sites emptied out, folding tables were put away, and the world waited, the Iowa Democratic Party released no results. Television screens showed empty boxes where the candidates’ running tallies should have been—zero percent reporting.
As it became apparent something had gone very wrong with the caucus, an explosive battle erupted among Sanders’s staff as they scrambled to salvage the moment that was supposed to catapult him to victory. Sanders’s former senior adviser Chuck Rocha was one of many who remembered the debacle vividly—and painfully.
“I was in Iowa that night when all hell broke loose,” Rocha said.
A self-described “Mexican redneck,” Rocha was a swaggering presence who woke up early each morning to lift weights. Tall and gregarious, with a clean-shaven head, he ran a consulting firm that specialized in Spanish-language advertising.
Rocha boasted of buying a beaver fur cowboy hat that cost about a thousand dollars after he signed his first big contract with Sanders in 2016. He was blunt about the team’s failings and bombastic about its successes, which he usually attributed, at least in part, to his own work. In an East Texas drawl peppered with colorful euphemisms, he offered his assessment of the highs and lows of caucus night in Iowa: “There’s good. That’s about twenty percent,” Rocha said. “Then there’s eighty percent that is the most horrific thing I’ve ever lived through in my life.”
Rocha’s brash approach was emblematic of the entire Sanders team. On both sides of the aisle, political operatives are usually cut from a relatively similar cloth: well-scrubbed student-government-types. Straight-A kids who turn into cheerful stewards of the status quo. Sanders’s team was different.
The candidate himself was famously unkempt, sporting cheap suits, a skewed tie, and shocks of white hair sticking out from his bald pate.
Many of his allies and operatives were similarly uncomfortable in dress clothes. Their anti-establishment bent was apparent the second you walked into one of the campaign trail hotels. Sanders’s brain trust often crowded the lobby bars until late each night. A large contingent chain-smoked. Some opted for weed, which they all thought should be legal.
That night, Sanders’s senior team was mostly in the war room in the redbrick building in downtown Des Moines. Other staff gathered at the ballroom at the Des Moines airport Holiday Inn for the party. Ostensibly the election-night reception is a place for supporters to celebrate a victory or commiserate after a loss. But, as with so many other things in politics, the real purpose was to put on a show for the national media camped out in the back of the room. Election-night fêtes are an opportunity for the candidate to grab some free broadcast real estate, called “earned media,” with a speech either reveling in their triumph or spinning a loss.
These early primary contests are about “The Narrative” at least as much as the actual results. As results come in, particularly in a crowded race, campaigns begin jockeying with each other and the networks to secure precious on-air minutes to amplify their message about the contest. Ideally, a candidate is able to ice out their competitors and get on air early to claim some measure of victory. It would be Faiz Shakir’s job to coordinate this process for Sanders and bring him from the hotel suite to the ballroom.
A Harvard graduate with closely cropped black hair and boyish looks that made him appear far younger than thirty-nine, Shakir was an outlier on the Sanders campaign. He had not been on the team in 2016. During that race, he worked as a top adviser to Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid, the kind of politician who passed for progressive before Sanders’s socialism caught fire. Shakir informally consulted with Sanders’s campaign during that first race, which drew the ire of many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill, who were uniformly aligned behind Clinton.
While Shakir was a recent arrival to the inner circle, he was known as someone who could soothe Sanders, who often raged after missteps or defeats.
But even Shakir couldn’t keep Sanders calm on caucus night. Sanders was glued to his screens, his phone, and the TV in his suite. Frantic, he called the war room and yelled out to Shakir for updates, but there were none. Something was off.
Counting normally begins at 7 p.m. at most sites around the states. Caucus results typically start pouring in an hour or so later. With no numbers posting and party officials ignoring requests for information, Shakir began to realize the evening was becoming, as he put it—bowdlerizing himself—“kind of a cluster.”
“And then it just, clearly, it turns out to be like a much more massive cluster than we ever could have imagined,” Shakir said.
The other top Sanders staffers were mostly camped out in the downtown war room taking in reports from the field, putting out fires, and fielding Sanders’s constant requests for information. Often, the man on the other end of the line was Jeff Weaver. Sanders’s calls took on a panicked urgency as the hours dragged on.
“Jeff, why aren’t there numbers yet?” he implored.
Jeff Weaver never says a bad word about Bernie Sanders. A staunch loyalist since Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Weaver had been in charge of Bernie’s war rooms for decades. The laconic native of Vermont’s Northern woods was a former Marine with a white beard and a dry sense of humor. When discussing his boss, Weaver resorts to clipped understatement—if you can get him to talk at all.
Weaver had run Sanders’s campaign in 2016 and, this time around, was serving a more amorphous role as senior adviser. Multiple members of the team said that was, at least in part, because, amid mounting diversity pressure, it wouldn’t do to have a white man running the show. Yet while Weaver had formally stepped aside, his place in Sanders’s universe transcended title. Weaver was like family. He was both right-hand man and main attack dog.
Weaver’s sparring with the Democratic establishment had earned him a national reputation as a combative political operative. But for colleagues, he was—at least outwardly—a far steadier presence. Weaver’s ability to appear unruffled under fire would be sorely tested as the caucus night deteriorated.
Each time Sanders called, Weaver would offer a matter-of-fact reply, giving Sanders the information he had—which wasn’t much. It wasn’t enough.
Asked about his experience on that night, Weaver offered a typically spartan assessment, saying it was his job to “manage any problems” that came up.
“And, you know, the problems that occurred,” said Weaver, “I don’t think any of us could have anticipated.”
Others who were in the war room remembered the evening in far starker terms.
“Things started to go to shit,” Arianna Jones, the deputy campaign manager, recalled. “The vote wasn’t coming in.”
Sanders’s issues in the caucus began well before the Iowa Democratic Party’s app crashed, and many stemmed from his long-standing frustration with the Democratic Party itself.
The candidate’s 2020 launch speech framed his campaign as dedicated to fighting the “powerful special interests who control so much of our economic and political life.” Such “special interests” included the supposedly liberal party, which he felt protected the advantages enjoyed by the elites through mechanisms designed to frustrate the will of the voters, like the arcane superdelegate system that allowed insiders to pick presidential nominees at the national convention. The Iowa caucus, with its complex counting system and weighted delegates, was another party apparatus that thwarted majority rule.
Sanders and Weaver had little patience for the complicated formula and how it could weight votes from rural caucus sites more heavily than the bigger cities and college towns. They were confident the popular vote numbers would make him a clear winner now that the totals would be public.
While Sanders’s top staff shared his frustration, some feared that his disdain for the Iowa process could hurt his chances. Brendan Summers, who was Sanders’s caucus director in 2016, remembered difficulties trying to school Weaver on the complexities of caucus-ology.
“You can say I was a very bad teacher,” Summers said with a laugh. “Or Jeff may not have been the best caucus student.”
The disdain for the arcane delegate math set the stage for a dangerously close night. While Sanders had fixated on the popular vote, some of his staff feared that this had created an opening for a rival. Sanders would no doubt run up big margins in Iowa’s cities and college towns, but a competitor could outflank him in more sparsely populated corners of the state and earn a victory in the delegate count.
Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the caucus, one of his opponents, Pete Buttigieg, had gained in the polls with a barnstorming rural bus tour. With a crew cut, Rhodes Scholarship, and twinkling blue eyes, the former Naval intelligence officer was the fully evolved apex version of the typical, chipper Democratic staffer. Buttigieg’s position as the chief executive of South Bend, Indiana, earned him the nickname “Mayor Pete.” It was an impressive job for the thirty-eight-year-old Buttigieg, but not exactly preparation for being leader of the free world. At least that’s what some of Buttigieg’s critics felt—including Sanders and some of the other primary contenders—as they bristled at his rapid ascent.
But voters were charmed by Buttigieg. Many rallied behind the Midwestern mayor with the sparkling résumé and an inflection that seemed like a well-rehearsed imitation of Obama’s smooth cadence. The first openly gay candidate to mount a serious primary bid, Buttigieg carved a clear lane for himself as a moderate alternative to Sanders. Mayor Pete leapt from relative obscurity to averaging just a few points behind Sanders—and at times leading the polls—in the weeks before the caucus.
Sanders also had his own strategies for exploiting the process in Iowa.
Matt Berg was an election lawyer whose official title was “director of delegates and ballot access” for Sanders’s campaign in 2020. He was tasked with ensuring that Sanders qualified for the election in each state and territory. But Berg also used his mastery of voting laws to dabble in the political dark arts—identifying advantages for Sanders in locales that, like Iowa, employed a process that wasn’t a straight vote count.
“In the presidential primary you win … by winning the most delegates to the national convention,” Berg said. “If you are a competent campaign running in a presidential primary, you have to hire someone who is expert in understanding these rules.”
A thin, soft-spoken man with sharp features and waves of blond hair, Berg doesn’t come off as a political street fighter. However, his subdued nature belies his effectiveness. Berg’s ability to game various electoral systems was so significant that he was one of the only Sanders staffers Clinton brought on to her general election operation after their bitter primary fight in 2016.
Ahead of the caucus, Berg had a pet project. As part of its changes to the 2020 process, the Iowa Democratic Party planned a tele-caucus to allow state residents who were not home on the day of voting to participate by phone. The system didn’t survive a security check from the Democratic National Committee.
“The technology was so insecure,” Berg said. “It took them like a minute to hack it.”
In hindsight, that failure was an ominous indication of the Iowa Democratic Party’s preparation and technical prowess.
Following the failure of the phone system, the state party created a remote caucus plan with sites around the country—and even abroad. Berg quickly realized there was “an edge to be gained” by focusing on those so-called satellite caucus sites. Worried the race was closer than the campaign realized, Berg went to Weaver.
“I realize the goal is to win Iowa by like five points, Jeff,” Berg said. “But, if Iowa is a one- or two-point race, this is one or two percentage points.”
Weaver let Berg hire an operative to find Sanders supporters from Iowa who lived out of state and could organize satellite caucuses in Sanders-friendly territory. Berg’s operation was one example of how many resources Sanders had at his disposal compared to his opponents and to his 2016 operation.
“We were doing stuff like we would FOIA the student list from public universities and look for students with Iowa area codes and we would text them, and call them, and get them to show up to satellite caucuses,” Berg said.
The first votes were cast in the former Soviet bloc at a satellite site in the living room of a freelance foreign policy journalist in Tbilisi, Georgia. It turned out that Iowa expats tended to like Bernie. All three voters there went for Sanders, netting him approximately one-one-hundredth of a percentage point of a state delegate equivalent. Berg’s plan had given Sanders a strong start to caucus night.
As the voting rolled westward past Europe and over the Atlantic, it was all going his way.
The voting at these early events concluded before the majority of the caucuses in Iowa began. There were no apparent issues with the results. When the main event began, the party’s app cratered and a backup phone system became jammed. At this point, the Iowa caucus broke down.
Meanwhile, the Sanders campaign was experiencing technical difficulties with its own app.
Claire Sandberg, Sanders’s national organizing director, led a digital team that planned to use a project management program called Basecamp to have their caucus captains at each site report results. This would allow them to track the outcomes in real time rather than waiting for the state party’s official numbers.
Using an app that the Sanders camp built on Basecamp would provide a slicker, more high-tech version of what Sanders’s team did four years earlier—simply having caucus captains call in to campaign headquarters. Sandberg’s team presented the Basecamp app to Weaver and Rocha weeks ahead of the caucus. Rocha was skeptical and wondered, “What’s the backup?” According to him, the digital crew “hemmed and hawed” but he was insistent that “we’ve got to have a backup.”
“They were supposed to have fixed all of that,” Rocha recounted in his inimitable drawl. “Well, I’ll kiss your ass, none of that shit worked on caucus night.”
Berg was also wary of Basecamp and unsure whether the Sanders campaign implementation had ever been stress tested with hundreds of people trying to use it at once. And about forty-five minutes before the caucuses began, it went down.
“I could not log in to Basecamp,” Berg said, with the air of someone describing a great crime to a jury. “Our app did not work.”
For Berg, it was part of a long-gestating frustration with Sandberg and the digital shop. While he saw their work as “smoke and mirrors,” others on the team viewed them as indispensable. It was another example of the many fissures that wracked Bernieworld. Berg curtly told Sandberg the app would be abandoned.
“Rather than screaming my head off at Claire,” said Berg. “I just made a decision that we weren’t using her thing any longer, even if she got it up and running again.”
Part of Berg’s frustration came from a belief they could have developed an effective reporting system with more old-fashioned means. And that’s exactly what he tried to do as the clock ticked down to the caucus.
Berg scrambled to get an alternative system working with Tim Tagaris and Robin Curran, a pair of strategists who led Sanders’s fundraising operation and were there in the war room. Returning to a method the campaign had employed in 2016, they created eight different shared Google spreadsheets so the caucus captains at each site could log their results without so many signing in at once that it all went haywire. Then, they texted the sheets out to all of their people in the field, enabling them to begin inputting data.
Berg and his crew thought they had saved the day with the last-ditch maneuver. However, there was one more crucial technical error.
“At one point, we discovered that we forgot to turn one of them on,” Berg said of the shared spreadsheets. “One of the forms wasn’t set up to accept responses, but all of the other ones worked perfectly.”
This minor oversight—familiar to many people who work with online document sharing—was fixed as soon as it was discovered. But this issue with the ad hoc spreadsheet system had major implications; it meant Sanders only had incomplete internal data to rely on. That was crucial when the party’s data systems went dark.
Caucuses have their own rhythm. Typical election days mean frenetic activity from the morning when the polls open until the candidate’s speech late at night. In Iowa, little transpires until the caucus sites open, which means campaign staff have a quiet day before the storm breaks in the evening.
As Sanders’s team headed to work, they were feeling optimistic.
“We were like crushing the satellite caucuses,” Berg said, adding, “I think we all felt good. I think we all felt like we were going to win Iowa.”
Iowa’s winters are brutal, and caucus night in early February was no exception. Gusts of icy wind blew through downtown Des Moines past the redbrick war room building.
Sanders’s official headquarters was largely deserted. Local staff were out working at caucus sites and the main area of the office was strewn with signs and other election detritus.
Inside, tables were set up facing a television to watch the coverage. About a dozen senior aides filed in and out throughout the night. The caucus was well underway and it was obvious things were not going as planned.
Berg had been texting with Patrice Taylor, director of party affairs for the Democratic National Committee, and Dave Huynh, who is better known in political circles as “Delegate Dave.” Huynh was Berg’s counterpart working ballot access for Joe Biden’s campaign. Berg and the other aides initially were “cracking jokes at each other” poking fun at the Sanders camp’s persistent belief the party establishment was working against them.
“Is it just taking a long time because you’re waiting until Bernie’s not winning anymore to report the results?” he quipped.
But as one hour stretched into two, the text thread turned serious.
“The app crashed didn’t it?” Berg asked the DNC official.
There was no answer. According to Berg, Taylor “went dead.”
As the evening wore on, the Iowa Democratic Party leadership finally announced it would be having a conference call with all of the campaigns.
“That’s when we knew that it was, like, bad,” Berg said.
On that call, the officials admitted the party’s own app had failed. Nevertheless, the state party insisted the integrity of the results would not be impacted and that they would ultimately be able to declare a winner after recovering all the hand-counted results from the caucus sites. The campaign staffers were indignant and began to vent their frustrations. But the party leadership hung up. There would be no final results on caucus night.
That delay was critical. Tim Tagaris—Sanders’s fundraiser—was waiting for the final numbers to send out a mass email requesting donations. Every hour that fundraising message didn’t go out meant less cash would come in. It was agony.
“He knows that the later he sends out his fundraising email, the less money he raises,” Berg said. “The life is slowly draining out of Tim Tagaris as the night wears on.”
Tagaris and his partner, Robin Curran, had made a model showing they could have raised a decent sum even if Sanders came in second. “We would have raised a lot more money even if we had certainty of that result that night,” Tagaris said.
The odd ambiguity of not having any outcome at all was a different story.
“Uncertainty really cast a pall over the fundraising for a few days,” he explained.
Donations are the lifeblood of campaigns, which burn through vast sums each day. Tagaris’s anguish was palpable.
“You have staffers who spent eight, nine, ten months every day, every day, working,” Tagaris said. “You spend millions and millions of dollars, and it meant nothing.”
And the money was just one of the problems generated by the lack of a definitive result. There was also the question of The Narrative—and that led to a full-scale blowup in Sanders’s war room.
Ben Tulchin, the campaign’s pollster and one of its key strategists, was adamant Sanders should simply declare victory. Based on the partial numbers the campaign had received, they were certain Sanders was in a strong position—particularly when it came to the popular vote—and Buttigieg was in second. Tulchin wanted Sanders to get on stage, go on air, and claim a win before Buttigieg might do the same.
Tulchin was a veteran of progressive campaigns. He got his start with Howard Dean’s infamous insurgency in 2004. In an interview, Tulchin said he saw himself and Weaver as “the main holdover strategists” from Sanders’s 2016 run and as instrumental in “Bernie’s success, quite frankly.”
“If you look at the Democratic Party and the impact Bernie has had, Jeff Weaver and I are kind of major figures in that,” he said.
Tulchin’s desire to get on stage early was shaped by a memory of Sanders’s close Iowa finish with Clinton in 2016. While Tulchin had advocated for an early declaration of victory then, too, Sanders wanted to be “respectful of the process.” Rather than prematurely declare victory in 2016, Sanders called it a “tie” as Clinton ultimately came out ever so slightly ahead.
In 2020, with official results not only inconclusive but wholly unavailable, Weaver was insistent that Sanders refrain from making what might be an inaccurate victory speech. The failure of the campaign’s own Basecamp app (separately and in addition to the crash of the state party app) was a factor. It left them with limited data and shaky confidence.
When he called into the war room, Sanders was also reluctant to plant a triumphant flag on the night without official numbers. Residual trauma from 2016, when many establishment Democrats accused Sanders of being a bad actor, weighed on him. Shakir, the campaign manager, said Sanders was adamant his credibility would be ruined if he declared victory and didn’t win on every possible metric.
“He’s hyper aware and sensitive that, if we say we won, it’s going to be different than Pete saying he won,” Shakir said of Sanders. “In his mind, the media will eat us alive.”
Weaver was on the same page with Shakir and Sanders. He told an increasingly agitated Tulchin that, in the absence of official results, a victory speech was not happening.
Tulchin was already on thin ice—in two ways. For one, in Sanders’s view, he was too well paid. Sanders has an innate distrust for high-priced operatives. The candidate had always touted his appeal to average working people. He was intensely proud that most of his donations were modest ones, made by people with small bank balances. He hated to see their money wasted or funneled into any one person’s fortune. Sanders’s award-winning ad-makers from 2016 had stepped aside amid strategic differences including disputes over their fees. Now, Weaver and Rocha were crafting his television commercials.
The second strike on Tulchin was something he couldn’t do anything about: Bernie’s confidence in his own instincts when it came to polling. He often wondered why he should pay for advice rather than rely on his gut.
It was an odd paradox. Sanders, the political animal who studied his poll numbers at every opportunity, had little use for the people who generated the data. Tulchin, who worked out of his Bay Area office, often fumed that his ideas were marginalized on the campaign.
But Tulchin, wiry, with curly hair, and the standard Silicon Valley business casual uniform of button-downs and fleece, likely contributed to his own ostracization, often cranking the volume to eleven when it wasn’t called for. As the caucus fiasco unspooled, the pollster was apoplectic.
“It’s a classic Ben Tulchin,” Berg said. “We have to do this thing right now or the world is going to end.”
Weaver eventually lost his patience. His standard war-room calm shattered.
“I’ve never in my life seen Jeff Weaver scream at someone the way he screamed at Ben Tulchin that night,” Arianna Jones, the deputy campaign manager, said.
Bald head beet red, Weaver ordered Tulchin out of the room.
“At that point Ben took a step back like he was going to exit the room and sort of stood in the doorway but then continued to argue his points,” Berg said. “There was a lot of cursing and name-calling going on.”
Weaver got out of his chair. “Get out of the room now!” he bellowed.
“Ben’s flight instinct kicked in,” said Berg. “I think Ben thought Jeff was going to shove him through the door.”
While Tulchin confirmed the substance of the disagreement, he didn’t recall it quite the way Jones and Berg did.
“We had a difference of opinion,” Tulchin said, “but I think everyone was on edge is the way I would describe it. I mean, the whole party was on edge, everyone in Iowa—everybody was on edge.… The whole world was on edge. And here we are once again, getting screwed over.”
Weaver, ever the Sanders loyalist, offered a decidedly sparse assessment of the shouting match. “It was fine,” Weaver said. “He’s excitable.”
Excitable or not, Tulchin had a point. Buttigieg ultimately seized on the exact stratagem Tulchin had envisioned.
“We knew that we needed to meet reporters’ deadlines for the morning,” said Lis Smith, Buttigieg’s campaign manager, in an interview. “We also had to make a plane to New Hampshire because we had a full day of campaign events in New Hampshire the next day starting in the early morning, and so we had to get on that plane. So there were a lot of factors that were sort of pushing us to go out there, but we wanted to be a part of the story. And we did want that visual for the next morning, and for newspapers, of Pete in front of a throng of supporters claiming—not claiming victory, but claiming … a strong showing.”
There was one key difference between the two campaigns that boosted their comfort with the aggressive move. Buttigieg’s team, according to Smith, had been receiving real-time reports throughout the day. Their technology had not crashed, and they were confident in their internal data showing Buttigieg’s standing.
“We knew that we had built a really formidable operation in Iowa,” Smith boasted. “I think our internal reporting ended up being within one percent, or something like that, of the official reporting that came back, so it was really accurate.”
Shortly before eleven, Sanders took the stage at the campaign’s election-night party. As he approached the microphone, he quickly pumped his fist before taking a deep, frustrated breath and biting the inside of his lip. He stared down at the podium and gripped its sides for a moment before looking up to survey the crowd. Seeing the faithful gave Sanders a boost. He pulled Jane close and broke into a genuine smile.
“I imagine, I have a strong feeling that, at some point, the results will be announced,” Sanders said, dragging out each word in exasperation. “And when those results are announced I have a good feeling we’re going to be doing very, very well here in Iowa.”
Buttigieg was far less circumspect. After Sanders spoke, he took to Twitter and declared, “By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.” Soon after, on stage at his own event, Buttigieg reiterated his claim.
Smith pointed out that Buttigieg had used artful language, saying he was going to “emerge victorious,” which the campaign felt more comfortable defending, even though they weren’t sure whether Buttigieg would come out ahead of Sanders or not.
They were shaping The Narrative.
“We didn’t claim outright victory … but, by any standard, the fact the … thirty-eight-year-old openly gay mayor of a town of 100,000 people was either in first or really close second place, that’s victorious in anyone’s book,” Smith said.
Sanders didn’t watch Buttigieg’s speech.
As Buttigieg spoke, a staffer on Mayor Pete’s team fired off texts to leading reporters citing internal figures to reinforce the claim of victory. About ten minutes later, as tweets and cable chyrons began to spread Buttigieg’s confident assessment, the Sanders campaign sent an email with their own partial numbers, undercutting Buttigieg. Yet for all the posturing, neither side had the data to support a definitive declaration.
Sanders may have won the popular vote, but when the official results were finally announced three days later he was down by one-tenth of a state delegate equivalent. More importantly, he had also lost The Narrative and the momentum.
Tagaris, the fundraiser, said the uncertainty “denied” Sanders “any semblance of a bounce” in the polls or fundraising dollars.
“I think what every campaign hopes for out of Iowa is that earned media bounce, more than anything else,” Tagaris said. “Nothing convinces voters that a candidate can win more than watching them win.”
Instead, to the dismay of Sanders and his team, the boost seemed to go to Buttigieg.
“There was very little conversation about who had received more votes that night,” Tagaris said.
Questions remained about every aspect of the actual result.
While some news outlets followed the state party’s lead and declared Buttigieg the winner, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and others declined to name a victor due to issues with the party’s underlying data. The Democratic National Committee and the state party would proceed to battle in a blame game that went on for months.
On one of the many conference calls between officials and the campaigns that took place in the small hours of the morning after caucus night, Weaver unloaded on Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price. Weaver called the party’s initial explanations for the catastrophe “bogus” and blasted the impenetrable nature of the caucus.
“The whole process has been a fraud for one hundred years,” Weaver said on the call.
Even more than Buttigieg, the aspect of the fiasco that truly worried Sanders’s team was the way coverage of the chaos distracted from the fact Biden, once a front-runner, finished a dismal fourth place. In hindsight, it was the first of many strokes of luck for Biden.
“The person it saved was Joe Biden,” Tagaris said. “Just spared him from coverage of what should have been just an absolute, unmitigated disaster of a result.”
Shakir, the campaign manager, agreed that losing focus on Biden’s poor showing cost Sanders. “We get robbed of the opportunity to say that we won and we get robbed of the opportunity to stick daggers into the Biden campaign.”
Sanders’s Iowa implosion played a pivotal part in Biden’s ultimate ascendancy to the presidency. But Sanders still ended up getting his victory in the Hawkeye State—technically.
Though the party’s official results were questionable, they still dictated the makeup of Iowa’s delegation to the Democratic National Convention, which took place six months after the caucus. The razor-thin lead the official results gave Buttigieg meant he would get two more delegates than Sanders on the floor of the party’s nominating convention. Sanders and his team disputed one of these delegates and argued he earned the same number as Buttigieg in Iowa.
As Biden secured the Democratic nomination, Sanders was his sole remaining challenger. The pair took pains to avoid a reprise of the last election’s infighting, which included Sanders supporters staging protests on the floor of the quadrennial convention. This time, Sanders quickly and unambiguously endorsed. And Biden created a series of unity task forces designed to give Sanders and his allies input on policy. Their teams held talks ironing out every aspect of the convention.
Those calls found Berg back on the phone with “Delegate Dave.” During negotiations over a separate issue, Berg decided to ask for the disputed Iowa delegate. If Berg could pull this off, Sanders would have the same number of Iowa delegates as Buttigieg to go with his popular vote victory.
In other words, Berg was trying to belatedly win (or at least tie) the caucus for Sanders with the exact kind of backroom maneuvering the candidate had always abhorred. It worked.
“I gave him something that he wanted that I didn’t want to give up. And I said, ‘I’ll give this to you. If you give me my statewide delegates in Iowa,” Berg said of his talks with Dave, adding, “I wasn’t even fully serious about it. It was kind of a joke, but he gave it to me, so I took it.”
The caucus came to an end on that call. There was finally a result.