BY DECEMBER WE HAD SOME eighty people in Iowa. The design of the Iowa caucus is such that it requires considerable staffing and organization to be successful.
On voting day, caucusgoers are in fact electing delegates to go to a convention at (usually) the county level. That county convention then elects delegates to a congressional district–level convention. And then those present at that convention elect delegates to the statewide Democratic convention—which in turn picks the delegates from that state who will go to the Democratic National Convention. There is some variation between the various caucus states—something that desperately needs to be made more consistent from one state to the next—but that’s the basic process.
A campaign not only has to turn out caucusgoers on election day but also must make sure that at each convention the previously elected delegates actually show up. It is possible to win the greatest number of delegates at the first level but to then lose that advantage at the county convention if a large number of those delegates don’t show up.
In Iowa, there are almost 1,700 precincts at the local level. Each precinct is assigned a number of “state delegate equivalents” based on Democratic voting performance in that precinct in the last two statewide elections. That number of state delegate equivalents in each precinct is then converted to a whole number of county convention delegates. There can be any number of county delegates, as long as they are in the right proportion. Confused yet? It gets better.
Some precincts are very small and are worth a fraction of a state delegate equivalent. Others are much larger and could be worth, for instance, seven state delegate equivalents. The system is designed to ensure that a candidate have support in precincts across the state to be successful—because even if you triple the turnout in a certain precinct over its past performance and win 100 percent of the vote there, you cannot win more than the allotted number of state delegate equivalents. In practice, the system means that it is far from a one-person, one-vote process. Because turnout fluctuates, a person’s vote in one precinct may represent much more than a person’s vote in another precinct.
This is a problem that could easily be remedied by assigning state delegate equivalent values to precincts based on the actual relative turnout between the precincts on caucus day itself—rather than relying on historical performance. But doing so would require a much more well-run caucus process than we experienced in 2016.
Assigning state delegate equivalents after caucus day would also remedy another problem created by the Iowa caucus system. The assignment of state delegate equivalents ends up helping to dictate the candidate’s schedule and the campaign’s resources. That’s because the process becomes one of accumulating state delegate equivalents rather than votes.
And here’s why. In a precinct where only one county convention delegate is being chosen, the winner in an essentially two-person contest is the person with the majority. If you are ahead by 10 points or behind by 10 points in that precinct, field resources are less likely to be allocated there. In a precinct with two delegates, you are guaranteed to split the delegates with your opponent if you get over 25 percent of the vote.
A candidate must get over 75 percent of the vote to capture both. So if you are at 49 percent of the vote in that precinct, you are not likely to fight to go over 50 percent, because there’s no benefit. You are 26 points away from another delegate. However, in a three-delegate precinct, a candidate who breaks 50 percent gets two delegates, while the opponent gets one. As the number of delegates in a precinct gets larger, the number of percentage points needed to get an additional delegate goes down. For instance, in a ten-delegate precinct, moving from 44 percent to 50.1 percent gives you an additional delegate.
And that is where the margins are made in the Iowa caucus—in precincts with odd-numbered delegates and those with the greatest number of delegates. Aggregating precinct results for purposes of state delegate equivalent allocation to create pools with larger numbers of delegates and preferably odd-numbered totals would give each precinct a greater equivalency in terms of having campaigns reach out to them. This would be true even if you did not lower the overall number of precincts.
Unlike most other states with caucuses, the Iowa Democratic Party refuses to release the raw vote counts. (Iowa’s Republicans do.) The Iowa Democratic Party only reports the relative performance in winning state delegate equivalents. You could lose the popular vote by thousands of votes in Iowa and be declared the winner (more on that later).
This refusal to release the popular vote totals also severely disadvantages candidates whose campaigns have not yet taken off—because of the caucus night process for assigning delegates. As in most states with caucuses or primaries, the Iowa Democratic Party requires that a candidate arrive at a certain threshold in order to receive statewide delegates. That’s not unusual, and in fact the national Democratic Party rules require it. What is unusual is how that process is carried out in Iowa, coupled with its refusal to release the popular vote totals. This process doomed Governor Martin O’Malley’s campaign.
When caucusgoers show up, they are separated into preference groups (including “uncommitted”). The numbers in the various groupings are then compared. This is followed by a process called “realignment.” During realignment, if a candidate has not reached the threshold in the first round (which varies depending on the number of delegates at stake, but for larger precincts is 15 percent of the votes cast), then that candidate’s supporters are asked to join the group supporting another candidate—and a new round of counting takes place. When the evening’s results are posted from that precinct, the “nonviable” candidate is reported as having received 0 percent from that precinct. In theory, a candidate could get 14 percent in every precinct in the state and have his or her performance reported on caucus night as 0 percent.
In addition, realignment leads to gamesmanship on caucus night. This clearly has nothing to do with the will of the voters. Because of the way the math works, it is sometimes advantageous to push some of your own supporters into another candidate’s group during realignment; the delegate that would thus be won would come from an opponent. On caucus night, our precinct captains had an app on their phones that allowed them to plug in the caucus counts for each candidate and calculate what the correct move was to maximize delegates—how many new people were needed to win an additional delegate, or how many people had to be asked to stand with another candidate’s group and which candidate that would be. The Clinton campaign used a similar app.
Realignment also adds considerably to the length and complexity of the caucus. Campaign supporters not only have to show up to caucus, but they must stay through all the proceedings, then be counted, then stay through realignment, and then be counted again. For working people, these extra hurdles are considerable.
This process of realignment should be abolished. It lengthens the caucus tremendously, leads to mathematical gamesmanship by the campaigns, and underreports the strength of less successful campaigns—thereby hiding the true intent of caucusgoers. The Iowa Democratic Party could still have viability thresholds for assigning delegates, as do other states, but the counting would be limited to one round. Coupled with releasing the raw vote totals, you wouldn’t hide the true intent of Iowa caucusgoers in an unnecessarily complicated system that’s great for political pundits, consultants, and insiders but not great for Iowans.
I do not mean this as a wholesale indictment of caucuses. Caucuses have many advantages. They allow people in a community who are interested in politics to come together all at the same time. Their iterative convention system ensures that presidential campaigns stay engaged in the state long after the original caucuses are over. Their open process, whereby in most cases a voter can change his or her party affiliation at the caucus itself, allows an easy way to grow local party organizations. Caucuses are not burdened by the voter suppression laws being passed by so many states. But real reform is needed.
By December, Bernie’s numbers in Iowa showed him moving up. But we were still behind with those voters who were most likely to go to the caucus. It became clear that to do well in Iowa, we not only had to work on persuading those voters, but we had to add additional voters on top of those most likely to attend. Our polling and modeling showed that as the number of people attending the Iowa caucus went up, the additional voters were disproportionately likely to support Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. Our goal, therefore, was to win by changing the composition of the electorate on caucus night.
Even with eighty people on the ground in Iowa, we needed more. I called Becker and asked him how many more people he could absorb into his organization if I authorized them. He said he could use 150 people. I gave him the go-ahead. If we were going to bring out less likely caucusgoers—who by definition would need more attention to get them to attend—we had to have more people on the ground. We also wanted to make sure we had the capacity to recruit and train Iowans to be precinct captains at the almost 1,700 caucus locations—with emphasis on those where a realignment was more likely to take place.
In addition, because Bernie did so well with younger voters, I asked the Iowa team about reaching out to those seventeen-year-olds who would be eligible to participate in the Iowa caucus because they would be eighteen by the time of the general election. Their initial response was that there was no way to contact those potential caucusgoers. They would not be on the voting rolls, because they had not previously been eligible to participate, and we couldn’t get a list of them because they were minors.
I wasn’t convinced. It is a sad reality of the modern era that it is big business to meticulously track the buying habits of Americans. High school seniors buy many things that identify them as such: class rings, caps and gowns, high school yearbooks, college admissions and testing materials. That’s not to say that I knew that the purveyors of any one of these products had a list on the market. But I was confident that a list did exist somewhere. Someone had one.
We began asking list brokers whether a list of high school seniors was available. It took some digging, but in fact a mailing list did exist. It was not for sale, but it was for rent. The distinction is that when you buy a list, the list is turned over to you for your use. In a rental situation, the list is generally for a onetime use, and it is actually never delivered to you. Instead it is sent to a mail house, which then addresses whatever materials you want sent to people on the list. If you want to send subsequent mailings, then the list must be rented again. (For the couple of Iowa parents who called the campaign asking how we got their son or daughter’s name, I can assure you that we never had the names or addresses—but there are commercial list companies that do.)
We rented the list and prepared some targeted mailings. In this case, because the people on the list were minors, the list broker had to preview our materials to ensure that there was nothing inappropriate.
I know that there is a political mail professional reading this right now and scoffing at us for sending mail to high school seniors. The conventional wisdom is that young people don’t read their mail, and that it is a waste to try to reach them in this way. Much better to use online advertising (we did that, too). But my theory was that, while it might in general be true that as a group younger voters do not pay a lot of attention to mail, high school seniors living at home with their parents are different. In fact, in that environment, receiving personally addressed mail would be more significant. In the end, we mailed the people on the list three times. We paired it with a web page that encouraged the young voters to defy expectations by attending the caucus.
Senator Obama did well with young Iowa voters in the 2008 primary. But because of jockeying among the states that year, the Iowa caucus was pushed so early that Iowa colleges were still on winter break. That meant that the students (the vast majority of whom are Iowa residents) would be voting in their home precincts rather than at college. Given the need to do well everywhere to prevail in Iowa, having college-age voters spread across the state rather than in a smaller number of college precincts was a huge advantage. Our outreach to high school seniors was an attempt to overcome that fact that colleges would be back in session during the 2016 Iowa caucus.
We had considered a program to transport college students back to their home precincts on caucus day—a program known internally as Go Home for Bernie. Our modeling showed that moving a relatively small percentage of students to their home precinct would significantly affect the allocation of state delegates in our favor. But the logistics were daunting. It would have meant diverting a tremendous amount of staff time away from other voter outreach. The Iowa staff was not enthusiastic about the prospect. While the program moved far along in the planning stages, including development of various college-themed web pages and research into transportation options, it was never put into operation. In the end, it might not have succeeded anyway due to the bad weather in parts of that state that day.
As time went on, the Clinton campaign started incrementally increasing the number of points it had on television. Points are a measure of how much an ad is viewed. An ad run for 100 points will be seen by the average viewer once; an ad run at 1,000 points will be seen by the average viewer ten times. Television programs with more views have a higher point value (and cost) than programs with a lower viewership. You can put a lot of ads on very cheaply in the middle of the night, but you won’t reach many people.
In Iowa and New Hampshire, we generally tried to match the point value of whatever the Clinton campaign buy was in the effort to achieve local superiority. Let’s not forget that they had a three-month head start on us in terms of television advertising. Whenever the reports came out that the Clinton campaign was raising its buy, we would follow. (The converse was also true. There was a period in New Hampshire when the Clinton campaign lowered its buy, which we also matched. Julia Barnes, our New Hampshire state director, was not pleased. When they pushed it back up, so did we.)
Over the course of a three-day period in Iowa, Hillary for America pushed its ads up each day—not by huge amounts, but it was significant. On day one, I told Tad to match it. On day two, I said the same. On day three, I told him to exceed it. They stopped raising their buy. I can’t know if the decision to top them on day three convinced them that they were in a race they didn’t want to engage in or whether it was pure coincidence.
I told Tad that we were all in in Iowa. “It’s Stalingrad, Tad,” I said. Stalingrad was the World War II battle that marked the turning point of the war on the eastern front in favor of the Soviets. Both sides poured personnel and resources into the fight in a no-holds-barred bid to win the city, with the Soviets ultimately surrounding and destroying the German Sixth Army. Tad asked jokingly, “Are we the Russians or the Germans?” “I’ll let you know on caucus night,” I replied. (For the record, on caucus night I reminded Tad of the conversation and answered his question. We were the Russians. It’s a bit ironic in hindsight, because it turns out that the Trump campaign was the Russians, but in a very different sense.)
The other important move we made was to reach out to Iowans, particularly rural Iowans, on the issue of the Bakken oil pipeline. It had first come to my attention as an issue as we were driving into Iowa from Minnesota. I saw a sign on some farmland made from two 4 × 8 foot pieces of plywood: “Don’t Take Our Land.” After inquiring I found out that many rural Iowans were upset by the use of eminent domain to force property owners to allow the Bakken oil pipeline to be put across their land.
Bernie and I talked about it. We both understood its importance. Allowing big companies to come in and essentially take land is the kind of thing that enrages rural communities. It is felt deeply as a violation of something fundamental to the rural way of life: the relationship of people to their land. In this case it was especially problematic: An oil pipeline not only occupies one’s land but has the potential to damage it severely in the event of a leak.
Bernie was calling for a green energy revolution as part of the larger political revolution. He came out against the Bakken pipeline as he had the Keystone XL pipeline. Hillary Clinton had been late to the party in opposing Keystone, and she never came out against the Bakken pipeline. We ran television ads against the Bakken pipeline and sent targeted mailings to voters in counties along its proposed route. Bernie held a town hall meeting focused solely on Bakken. Iowa, it should be noted, is a leader in the green energy revolution. It is one of the leading producers of wind power in the country, and home to many wind power–related manufacturing facilities. At the end of the day, given the resonance of Bernie’s anti-Bakken message, we should have highlighted it even more.
By the end of December, all the pieces in Iowa were in place. The leadership team—Robert Becker, Pete D’Alessandro, Rania Batrice, Justin Huck, Brendan Summers—were executing on the ground. The field staff was growing. Bernie continued to be enthusiastically received everywhere. We were competitive on the airwaves. We were advertising in small weekly papers around the state. Our Iowa mail program—handled by Maverick Strategies + Mail’s Jessica Vanden Berg and Kristian Denny Todd—was proceeding well.
One of the themes that we used in Iowa mail, which never really became as big a part of the broader messaging in the campaign as it should have, was the connection of Bernie’s transformative agenda to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s. In truth, what Bernie was advocating was merely the logical progression of what FDR had accomplished and what FDR acknowledged had been left unaccomplished during his tenure.
In his 1944 State of the Union speech, as the world was still engulfed in a global war, the president spoke strongly in favor of a new Bill of Rights that would fulfill the promise of our country’s founding. (Note: This is dense quoted material I have been warned you won’t read. I have more faith in you. Plus, far more so than all my musings, this speech is critical to understanding our campaign, the unfinished business of the modern Democratic Party, how far the party has strayed from its modern roots, and Bernie’s place in the continuity of the party and American political thought.)
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.
One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis—recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.
Is there much difference between President Roosevelt’s call for creating a new set of rights that would allow all Americans “the pursuit of happiness” and the presidential platform of Bernie Sanders? Is not Bernie’s message the continuation of a great legacy in the Democratic Party—a legacy abandoned during the Democratic reaction of the 1990s and abandoned today by many of the party’s institutions? FDR’s warning—that returning to the gross income and wealth inequality of the 1920s would put us in danger of yielding “to the spirit of Fascism here at home”—seems to have been borne out in the outcome of the 2016 election, as does his observation that “people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
As reported by Kevin Hardy of the Des Moines Register, Bernie did invoke FDR during some of his speeches, including at a Boone, Iowa, event in August 2015. During his 1936 Madison Square Garden speech, FDR called out the forces arrayed against him as “the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.… They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” Bernie’s paraphrase of those words linked directly back to that FDR speech: “And let me echo that today: If the Koch brothers and the billionaire class hate my guts, I welcome their hatred. Because I am going to stand with working families.”
Bernie as inheritor of the legacy of FDR is a topic that we revisited—most explicitly during the New York primary with our ad “Sons of New York,” which drew the connection between the two. But it was a connection that we might have stressed more thematically throughout the campaign. Bernie Sanders represented a rediscovery of the values of the Democratic Party’s modern roots and an articulation of the unfinished business of the New Deal. By contrast, the neoliberals are a recent aberration.
Hillary Clinton would often say that she was not running for either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama’s third term. That has been debated quite a bit. But what was not sufficiently articulated by us was that in many ways Bernie was running for FDR’s fifth term.
Bernie spent most of his time in December and January in the first four states, with Iowa getting a huge percentage of it. We leased a bus and wrapped it in a campaign design, and the Bernie Bus became the mobile command center as he crisscrossed the Hawkeye State. As the Iowa caucus neared, our internal polling and modeling continued to get better and better. But one of the issues that we had was the constant drumbeat of talking heads on the cable news channels who were almost exclusively public Hillary Clinton supporters. Mark Longabaugh and I ran into Mark Preston in Iowa after one of my interviews. Mark Preston is the executive editor for CNN Politics. We dealt with Preston many times during the campaign; he was also the point person for their debates, and we always felt he was a fair guy. Longabaugh asked him, “Hey, Mark, why is it that almost all of the political commentators on CNN are Clinton supporters and there’s no Bernie people?” Preston replied, “That’s a good point. I was thinking about calling Bill Press anyway.” And Preston promptly lined up Bill Press (who had hosted the early pre-campaign meetings at his house) to appear regularly on CNN. At least there would be one Bernie person on the air.
I ran into Joel Benenson, the Clinton campaign’s pollster, after one of my on-air appearances on CNN, within days of the Iowa caucus. He volunteered that we were going to lose by several points. In fact, the Clinton team was telling the media that they were up 5 percentage points. It sure didn’t feel that way on the ground. Bernie’s crowds were surging at events being held on very cold Iowa winter nights all over the state. It was hard to believe that all these people were just coming out to see Bernie so close to the caucus but were not going to come out for him on caucus night. But this was our first presidential contest. Maybe we were just wrong and Benenson was right.
About a week before the Iowa caucus, as it became a closer and closer race and it appeared Martin O’Malley was not going to reach the 15 percent threshold for getting delegates in most precincts, I reached out to Dave Hamrick, the O’Malley campaign manager. I wanted to propose a caucus night agreement whereby during the realignment we would set up ground rules: Each campaign would help the other maximize delegates, provided it didn’t hurt the other. These types of arrangements were common in years past in the Iowa caucus—another aspect of the gamesmanship created by the realignment process. He said he’d think about it.
I didn’t hear back from Dave, so I reached out again as the caucus drew near. I called from my cell in the hallway between the lobby of our hotel and the attached restaurant. It became clear during the conversation that we weren’t the only ones reaching out to him; nor would I have thought otherwise. I laid out my case: Martin O’Malley was not going to win many precinct delegates on caucus night. And because the Iowa Democratic Party doesn’t release raw vote totals, O’Malley’s strength was going to be grossly underreported. Given that, his best hope was in New Hampshire. But if Hillary Clinton had a big win in Iowa, she might sew it up. It was in O’Malley’s interest to have Bernie win (or at least to not have Hillary Clinton win big) in Iowa. Dave summed up my position: “So you are asking me to help you win today so that I have a chance to win tomorrow?” “Exactly,” I said. “Let me discuss it with O’Malley and get back with you,” he replied. In the end, Martin O’Malley decided to not make an agreement with either campaign.
The day of the Iowa caucus, when I walked into our campaign headquarters, I stopped first to talk to Ken Strasma, the head of our modeling effort. He and his team were in a little side office. They were all sitting around a table with their laptops opened. “How’s it look, Ken?” I asked him. His reply: “It’s right down the middle.” Not exactly what I wanted to hear.
We knew from our polling and modeling that the outcome in Iowa was all going to come down to turnout. If the turnout was small, it would favor the Clinton campaign—it would be comprised mostly of party regulars. If the turnout was larger, the additional people would be much, much more likely to be Bernie supporters.
In the weeks beforehand, Ben Tulchin had been providing horse-race numbers based on projected turnout. By caucus day, his projection was that if turnout was 160,000, we would lose by 2 points. If turnout was lower, we’d lose by more. On the other hand, if turnout reached 180,000, we would win by 2 points. And the more people who voted beyond 180,000, the higher our margin would be.
The cavernous campaign headquarters was buzzing with staff and volunteers. The huge Iowa volunteer contingent was supplemented with people who had driven in from all over the country, and even people who had shown up from foreign countries. All around the state, our GOTV operation was in high gear. But would it be enough?
In the afternoon, Tad and I heard the depressing entrance poll number that we were down 12 percent. Tad and I walked into the senior staff room to monitor the results. Everyone was gathered around a large-screen TV. Bernie was in the DoubleTree hotel by the Des Moines airport. Our caucus night celebration was booked for the Holiday Inn not far from there. We had booked a suite at the Holiday Inn where Bernie could wait while results were coming in.
Even though each of the precincts holds its caucus at the same time, the results don’t come in all at once. Smaller caucuses or caucuses where there is no realignment come in sooner. Each precinct is supposed to have a chair appointed by the Iowa Democratic Party to run its caucus. However, that was not the case. A senior Clinton official who went to observe one of the Polk County caucuses later related to me that when people arrived, there was no one there to run it. So a couple of people who had caucused before stepped in to help.
Once the results of a precinct’s caucus are determined, they are relayed by telephone to the state party’s office. We had instructed our precinct captains to report the results of each caucus to us directly as they were reported. That way, we could see exactly which locations’ results were being included in the television reporting and which locations were yet to come. We could also compare the results in terms of state delegate equivalents in each precinct against the outcome our models had predicted.
As the first returns were reported on TV, we were down considerably. It seemed that maybe the entrance polls had been right after all. But as our precinct captains started calling in to HQ directly, the modelers could see that a lot of the early results were coming from places we expected the Clinton campaign to do well in.
As the minutes ticked by, every update ate into Hillary Clinton’s lead. We started having back-and-forth phone calls with Bernie, who understandably wanted information as quickly as possible. At one point in the evening, as results were entered, our model predicted that we would get more state delegate equivalents than Hillary (remember that they don’t release the popular vote totals in the Iowa Democratic caucus).
At the same time, as on every election night, the reports of process problems started to roll in. There were reports of coin-toss issues (when a precinct is tied in Iowa, the result is determined by coin flip). Some reports had the Clinton campaign winning almost all of them. Others reported that we had won the vast majority. In some cases, the results that our precinct captains were calling in didn’t match the information that the state party had. In a few cases, the reported numbers were nonsensical on their face. For instance, in one precinct only one person showed up. He was for Bernie, but the precinct result showed Clinton winning. Given how close the caucus was turning out to be (the closest in its history), every one of these issues mattered.
As the evening wore on and the race remained close, Tad and I headed to Bernie’s suite at the Holiday Inn. The mood in the car as we drove out of the parking lot of the campaign headquarters was far different than it had been when we drove in just a few hours earlier. Instead of being a campaign-ending defeat, Iowa was shaping up to be the validation of the viability of Bernie’s run for the White House. Those Iowa storm clouds weren’t our bad omen.
As Tad and I entered the suite, Bernie greeted us with a huge smile. Jane and much of his family were watching the results in the living room area of the suite. Everyone wanted to know if we had more information about how it would turn out.
“Well,” said Tad, “it’s going to be close no matter how it turns out. And I think you have to go out there and declare this a victory, because it is a victory.” Bernie and Tad went into a side room to work on remarks. I was on the phone with our folks camped out at Iowa Democratic Party headquarters. They were working to resolve the problems we had identified in several places. The party was helpful to a point. They could not reach some of their precinct chairs by phone, which seemed odd—there must have been times in the past when numbers had to be verified. Or maybe not.
Reports of problems poured in. The Iowa Democratic Party refused to release any paper records from the precincts and, as a matter of tradition, refused to release the statewide vote count (no doubt they knew, as most suspected, that Bernie had received the support of more Iowans than had Hillary Clinton). The party’s refusal to be transparent elicited a scathing editorial from the Des Moines Register: “What happened Monday night at the Democratic caucuses was a debacle, period.”
The editorial went on to call for an audit of the results, a release of any paper records, and a release of the popular vote count—all the items we were requesting. Even though the paper had endorsed Hillary Clinton, they were rightly standing for a fair and transparent review of the caucus so that the process could be improved and, importantly, preserved. They even went so far to call out Dr. Andy McGuire, the party’s chair, for her refusal to act: “Her actions only confirm the suspicions.”
Admittedly, the state party had a strong incentive to call the race that night rather than to hold off until everything could be resolved (as did McGuire, a strong Clinton supporter). Later that night, over our objection, the Iowa Democratic Party put out a statement stating that Hillary Clinton had won the most delegates.
But even all the irregularities and the party’s lack of transparency could not dampen the mood that night. As the evening played out, everyone knew who had “won” the Iowa caucus. Hillary Clinton gave a short six-minute speech in which she never declared victory. Robby Mook would later describe the night of the Iowa caucus as the worst night of their primary campaign. (In fairness, I’ll tell you my opinion of our worst night when we get to it later.)
Bernie’s event was like a pep rally. And it should have been. He had started 50 points down and fought to a photo finish. He showed that the Summer of Sanders was no fluke. People weren’t just coming out to rallies. They were coming out to vote.
But we had a plane to catch. For the first time ever, we had a full-sized charter jet, which would transport Bernie and Jane, their family, a huge number of staff, and a large media contingent from the Hawkeye State to the Granite State.
The final turnout in Iowa was some 170,000 caucusgoers. According to our pollster, we would lose by 2 at 160,000 and win by 2 at 180,000. The number came in right down the middle, and so did the result. “Maybe this Tulchin guy really does know what he’s doing,” I quipped.
February 1 was not the only day we almost won Iowa, however. The number of national delegates won in many caucus states is not locked in until the precinct delegates who are elected on caucus day go to their county conventions and state delegates elected at county conventions go to the state convention. In Iowa, the national delegate numbers for the 2016 nominating contest weren’t locked in until June.
We worked hard to turn people out for the subsequent conventions. At the Polk County convention in April, we almost flipped the state for Bernie. He won the first round of voting there, even though we had not won Polk County on caucus night. We just turned our delegates out, and the Clinton campaign did not. Then the Clinton campaign, not content to live with the results of their failure to turn out their delegates, threw a monkey wrench into the process. They decided to challenge the credentials of every delegate to the county convention—even their own!
Becker called me while this “process” was going on. “We won the first-round vote, but they are stealing it right now,” he said. The problem was that there was no one to appeal to. The state party chair was certainly not going to be any help. Even after being criticized on the Des Moines Register editorial page, she never produced the appropriate audit of caucus night, or the paper records, or the popular vote count. What could we do? Call the DNC?
Verifying the credentials of hundreds of delegates took hours and hours and hours. As the time dragged on, some of our people had to leave. When the count was done again after the credentials challenge, the Clinton campaign won narrowly. While we were what can only be politely described as disappointed, we couldn’t know that the shenanigans at the Polk County convention were just a preview of the goat-rope that the Nevada conventions would become.