The Democratic Primary is Upon Us! - Biden is the Presumptive Nominee

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I've really cooled on Bernie mainly because hes got some really stupid economic takes and his fanbase is full of idiots that are just as big babies today as they were in 2016, what with the "I refuse to vote for anyone besides Bernie, whaaa whaaa whaaaa" let trump be "elected". I'm throwing my support behind Warren, despite her problems. But ultimately in the general, anyone besides trump.

More Bernie supporters voted for Hilldog than her supporters voted for Obama back in 2008. You're spouting false narratives.

I've heard enough lefties online really pushing the Bernie or bust thing still that it just turns me off his whole deal. Hassan is probably the most annoying, but hes also rather stupid.

Just keep in mind that just because someone says something from a certain perspective, that's not evidence that they're really a Bernie supporter and not someone trying to make his supporters look bad or a republican in disguise trying to troll liberals in a creative way or a 12 year old kid having fun.

 

[Overhead]

The mainstream media and other establishment groups will make it obscenely ugly, exposing themselves as hypocrites when it comes to "blue no matter who". [---]

Here's a question: will the newsmedia count superdelegates in their reports of primary results even though they can't vote in the first round? Can't wait to find out.

The media hated Trump in the last election. Yet he won. It makes me wonder if media support is that critical, and if in some parts of the electorate media support is actually a mark against a candidate.

Any news is good news for candidates, especially in primaries where boosting name recognition is key. Trump got a disproportionate amount of media coverage which helped boost his recognition amongst Republicans and drown out the competitors in what was a very crowded field.

 

[Tireseas_v1legacy]

Reports [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/iowa-caucuses-2020-live-updates/2020/02/04/23561bd6-4707-11ea-bc78-8a18f7afcee7_story.html?itid=hp_hp-bignews3_iowa-ticker%3Aprime-time%2Fpromo] state that the Iowa Caucus results will be posted later on Tuesday following a hand recount after inconsistencies with the reported numbers.

 

[Seanchaidh]

Mayor Pete tried to Juan Guaido it, which is honestly not precisely what I was expecting.

#MayorCheat is trending on Twitter, heh. Maybe he needed more warpstone to properly pull it off.

This might be what's going on:

[tweet t="https://twitter.com/EuroYankeeBlog/status/1224643315812925442"]

Whatever the case, a clusterfuck. Bernie's app for recording results, at least, seems to work-- and shows him winning, though he only released the results for 40% of precincts last I checked. I expect he'll produce more since he had precinct captains at every location. Either that or the IA Democratic Party gets its shit in order.

[tweet t="https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1224561674679488513"]
[tweet t="https://twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/1224599983208439808"]
[tweet t="https://twitter.com/LeftistWonk/status/1224583997273100289"]

Once again, the problem is capitalism:

[tweet t="https://twitter.com/PrettyBadLefty/status/1224688058815205376"]

 

[Silvanus]

I've really cooled on Bernie mainly because hes got some really stupid economic takes [...]

What would those be?

 

[Agema]

Wow, the Democratic Party really are a right bunch of tools: way to make yourself look like a bunch of incompetent morons in your high profile first state caucus, guys (#4moreyears).

 

[Tireseas_v1legacy]

Wow, the Democratic Party really are a right bunch of tools: way to make yourself look like a bunch of incompetent morons in your high profile first state caucus, guys (#4moreyears).

Caucuses are, by their very nature, not the best means of getting fast clear results. Last night was particularly bad (it looks like they rolled out an app to assist with the process and understaffed the back-up phone system) to the point that there's some serious calls to end the Iowa Caucuses completely [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-results-delayed-no-winner-should-first-vote/4653321002/]. The official Iowa State Democratic Party [https://apps.npr.org/liveblogs/20200203-iowa/share/iowa-democratic-party-blames-coding-178.html][footnote]one of the weirder things about the US political system is that the central parties wield relatively little power, particularly in the primary voting process, and much of the boots on the ground power is actually in the respective state parties, though that has been waning substantially over the last 50 years as well [https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/28/political-partisanship-is-vicious-thats-because-political-parties-are-too-weak/].[/footnote] statement is blaming a coding error for producing incomplete results, resulting in going to the hard paper back up system that is being used to verify totals today. The grand irony is that a system that was supposed to give clarity and transparency to the results produced no results to be clear on.

It should be noted that chaos at the Iowa Caucus is surprisingly routing, as there were similar issues in 2016 [https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/how-iowa-democrats-couldnt-handle-a-two-candidate-race-218934] and a particularly bad one in 2012 resulting in three different calls during the caucus process [https://www.businessinsider.com/ron-paul-wins-iowa-caucuses-2012-6].

 

[JamesStone]

Establishment Democrats are as amoral as Republicans but absolutely fucking suck at it, more news at 11.

God, what a shitshow. Americans should take the streets and demand for the dismantling of this travesty, the more I learn about the Electoral College and the 1-year-long freakshow it has become the more I wish I didn't.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Wow, the Democratic Party really are a right bunch of tools: way to make yourself look like a bunch of incompetent morons in your high profile first state caucus, guys (#4moreyears).

Caucuses are, by their very nature, not the best means of getting fast clear results. Last night was particularly bad (it looks like they rolled out an app to assist with the process and understaffed the back-up phone system) to the point that there's some serious calls to end the Iowa Caucuses completely [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-results-delayed-no-winner-should-first-vote/4653321002/]. The official Iowa State Democratic Party [https://apps.npr.org/liveblogs/20200203-iowa/share/iowa-democratic-party-blames-coding-178.html][footnote]one of the weirder things about the US political system is that the central parties wield relatively little power, particularly in the primary voting process, and much of the boots on the ground power is actually in the respective state parties, though that has been waning substantially over the last 50 years as well [https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/28/political-partisanship-is-vicious-thats-because-political-parties-are-too-weak/].[/footnote] statement is blaming a coding error for producing incomplete results, resulting in going to the hard paper back up system that is being used to verify totals today. The grand irony is that a system that was supposed to give clarity and transparency to the results produced no results to be clear on.

It should be noted that chaos at the Iowa Caucus is surprisingly routing, as there were similar issues in 2016 [https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/how-iowa-democrats-couldnt-handle-a-two-candidate-race-218934] and a particularly bad one in 2012 resulting in three different calls during the caucus process [https://www.businessinsider.com/ron-paul-wins-iowa-caucuses-2012-6].

I think that, upon learning that an ex Hillary chief of staff, a dark money PAC and #mayorcheat's campaign were the parties involved in funding the creation of the app, to claim that it was created to help anything legitimate is at best naive. The correct thing to say here is that that is the spin they want to put on the app.

Oh and nobody here seems to be mentioning that Biden seems to have come out 4th, which is pretty bad.

 

[Tireseas_v1legacy]

Wow, the Democratic Party really are a right bunch of tools: way to make yourself look like a bunch of incompetent morons in your high profile first state caucus, guys (#4moreyears).

Caucuses are, by their very nature, not the best means of getting fast clear results. Last night was particularly bad (it looks like they rolled out an app to assist with the process and understaffed the back-up phone system) to the point that there's some serious calls to end the Iowa Caucuses completely [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-results-delayed-no-winner-should-first-vote/4653321002/]. The official Iowa State Democratic Party [https://apps.npr.org/liveblogs/20200203-iowa/share/iowa-democratic-party-blames-coding-178.html][footnote]one of the weirder things about the US political system is that the central parties wield relatively little power, particularly in the primary voting process, and much of the boots on the ground power is actually in the respective state parties, though that has been waning substantially over the last 50 years as well [https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/28/political-partisanship-is-vicious-thats-because-political-parties-are-too-weak/].[/footnote] statement is blaming a coding error for producing incomplete results, resulting in going to the hard paper back up system that is being used to verify totals today. The grand irony is that a system that was supposed to give clarity and transparency to the results produced no results to be clear on.

It should be noted that chaos at the Iowa Caucus is surprisingly routing, as there were similar issues in 2016 [https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/how-iowa-democrats-couldnt-handle-a-two-candidate-race-218934] and a particularly bad one in 2012 resulting in three different calls during the caucus process [https://www.businessinsider.com/ron-paul-wins-iowa-caucuses-2012-6].

I think that, upon learning that an ex Hillary chief of staff, a dark money PAC and #mayorcheat's campaign were the parties involved in funding the creation of the app, to claim that it was created to help anything legitimate is at best naive. The correct thing to say here is that that is the spin they want to put on the app.

I'm not writing this twice, so you're going to need to deal with my copy-pasta from another thread on this

It's a bit unclear, what exactly is going down in Iowa? Am not American, and that sounds way more interesting and useful than another hot air poll.

At this point, the results have been severely delayed, there have been many inconsistencies so far, and one of the candidates who hadn't been particularly popular and whose on-site numbers weren't looking too good has declared his victory before the results came in and he seems to have taken a good number of votes. Incidentally that very same candidate had his campaign finance the company who developed the app to count the results, a company called Shadow.

The only reporting I can find on that is coming from the conservative Washington Examiner [https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/buttigieg-campaign-paid-firm-that-developed-voting-app-blamed-for-iowa-caucus-delays], and even then the link is extremely tangential in that the campaign bought a software licence for text messaging services to reach supporters (essential for any campaign) for a little more than $42,000 from a company that also invested in the app development, though it is unclear when that investment took place and if the app was even still in development when the campaign paid for the licence.

Considering the amounts of money involved, I would genuinely be shocked if any investment fund could be bought for such a small amount of money. Sanders spent more than that in a single transaction [https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?data_type=processed&committee_id=C00696948&two_year_transaction_period=2020&min_date=01%2F01%2F2019&max_date=12%2F31%2F2020&disbursement_description=software] for a single piece of campaign software (which is only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands he spent on various other software services during that same reporting period). $40k is not even couch cushion change in digital development.

Can we maybe not just spread conspiracy theories willy-nilly?

Oh and nobody here seems to be mentioning that Biden seems to have come out 4th, which is pretty bad.

Unfortunately, until the offical result come out, we have no idea how bad it is, but there is general consensus that Biden did not get what he needed out of the caucuses last night [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2020/02/04/daily-202-a-bad-night-for-biden-in-iowa-is-good-news-for-buttigieg-klobuchar-and-bloomberg/5e390df288e0fa7f82543cb6/]. Because every source saying "we have the data" is closely tied to the various campaigns, no one knows whose is legitimate and who is blowing hot air using partial data (or who is misreading their own data), so no one knows what the results are for sure. What almost everyone (including the Biden campaign) can say is that if Biden was aiming for a large-margin victory to force other moderates out of the race, he didn't get it.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Wow, the Democratic Party really are a right bunch of tools: way to make yourself look like a bunch of incompetent morons in your high profile first state caucus, guys (#4moreyears).

Caucuses are, by their very nature, not the best means of getting fast clear results. Last night was particularly bad (it looks like they rolled out an app to assist with the process and understaffed the back-up phone system) to the point that there's some serious calls to end the Iowa Caucuses completely [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-results-delayed-no-winner-should-first-vote/4653321002/]. The official Iowa State Democratic Party [https://apps.npr.org/liveblogs/20200203-iowa/share/iowa-democratic-party-blames-coding-178.html][footnote]one of the weirder things about the US political system is that the central parties wield relatively little power, particularly in the primary voting process, and much of the boots on the ground power is actually in the respective state parties, though that has been waning substantially over the last 50 years as well [https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/28/political-partisanship-is-vicious-thats-because-political-parties-are-too-weak/].[/footnote] statement is blaming a coding error for producing incomplete results, resulting in going to the hard paper back up system that is being used to verify totals today. The grand irony is that a system that was supposed to give clarity and transparency to the results produced no results to be clear on.

It should be noted that chaos at the Iowa Caucus is surprisingly routing, as there were similar issues in 2016 [https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/how-iowa-democrats-couldnt-handle-a-two-candidate-race-218934] and a particularly bad one in 2012 resulting in three different calls during the caucus process [https://www.businessinsider.com/ron-paul-wins-iowa-caucuses-2012-6].

I think that, upon learning that an ex Hillary chief of staff, a dark money PAC and #mayorcheat's campaign were the parties involved in funding the creation of the app, to claim that it was created to help anything legitimate is at best naive. The correct thing to say here is that that is the spin they want to put on the app.

I'm not writing this twice, so you're going to need to deal with my copy-pasta from another thread on this

It's a bit unclear, what exactly is going down in Iowa? Am not American, and that sounds way more interesting and useful than another hot air poll.

At this point, the results have been severely delayed, there have been many inconsistencies so far, and one of the candidates who hadn't been particularly popular and whose on-site numbers weren't looking too good has declared his victory before the results came in and he seems to have taken a good number of votes. Incidentally that very same candidate had his campaign finance the company who developed the app to count the results, a company called Shadow.

The only reporting I can find on that is coming from the conservative Washington Examiner [https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/buttigieg-campaign-paid-firm-that-developed-voting-app-blamed-for-iowa-caucus-delays], and even then the link is extremely tangential in that the campaign bought a software licence for text messaging services to reach supporters (essential for any campaign) for a little more than $42,000 from a company that also invested in the app development, though it is unclear when that investment took place and if the app was even still in development when the campaign paid for the licence.

Considering the amounts of money involved, I would genuinely be shocked if any investment fund could be bought for such a small amount of money. Sanders spent more than that in a single transaction [https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?data_type=processed&committee_id=C00696948&two_year_transaction_period=2020&min_date=01%2F01%2F2019&max_date=12%2F31%2F2020&disbursement_description=software] for a single piece of campaign software (which is only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands he spent on various other software services during that same reporting period). $40k is not even couch cushion change in digital development.

Can we maybe not just spread conspiracy theories willy-nilly?

Oh and nobody here seems to be mentioning that Biden seems to have come out 4th, which is pretty bad.

Unfortunately, until the offical result come out, we have no idea how bad it is, but there is general consensus that Biden did not get what he needed out of the caucuses last night [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2020/02/04/daily-202-a-bad-night-for-biden-in-iowa-is-good-news-for-buttigieg-klobuchar-and-bloomberg/5e390df288e0fa7f82543cb6/]. Because every source saying "we have the data" is closely tied to the various campaigns, no one knows whose is legitimate and who is blowing hot air using partial data (or who is misreading their own data), so no one knows what the results are for sure. What almost everyone (including the Biden campaign) can say is that if Biden was aiming for a large-margin victory to force other moderates out of the race, he didn't get it.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e390191c5b687dacc722824


Here's the deal. It was payment for the app and the app was still being worked on up until very recently whereas the payments occurred back during summertime.


Either way, when you have a former head of Hillary's campaign being charged with developing the app that counts the votes in the election Bernie's participating in, you can't help but feel something shady is going on, something which is not helped by the company literally being named "Shadow".

 

[Tireseas_v1legacy]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e390191c5b687dacc722824


Here's the deal. It was payment for the app and the app was still being worked on up until very recently whereas the payments occurred back during summertime.


Either way, when you have a former head of Hillary's campaign being charged with developing the app that counts the votes in the election Bernie's participating in, you can't help but feel something shady is going on, something which is not helped by the company literally being named "Shadow".

If your basis is "there were people involved with Clinton" (which describes more than half the Democratic party because she was the goddamn 2016 Democratic nominee and has been active in US politics since a good chunk of the people in this forum were born) and a "spooky name," you'll excuse me if I find the evidence lacking?

Okay, let's presume this conspiracy is true. What does Buttigieg get out of it? "Something shady" isn't exactly concrete and I'm not seeing what the benefit is there. Iowa had a paper backup in place to audit the results regardless [https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/3/21117038/2020-iowa-caucuses-app-results] (largely to prevent the risk of outside tampering as was the concern following the 2016 Russian hacking campaign), and multiple other state parties bought services from the company [https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?data_type=processed&recipient_name=Shadow+Inc&two_year_transaction_period=2020&min_date=01%2F01%2F2019&max_date=12%2F31%2F2020], so clearly it wouldn't be to mess with the results. So what does the campaign get out of it?

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e390191c5b687dacc722824


Here's the deal. It was payment for the app and the app was still being worked on up until very recently whereas the payments occurred back during summertime.


Either way, when you have a former head of Hillary's campaign being charged with developing the app that counts the votes in the election Bernie's participating in, you can't help but feel something shady is going on, something which is not helped by the company literally being named "Shadow".

If your basis is "there were people involved with Clinton" (which describes more than half the Democratic party because she was the goddamn 2016 Democratic nominee and has been active in US politics since a good chunk of the people in this forum were born) and a "spooky name," you'll excuse me if I find the evidence lacking?

Okay, let's presume this conspiracy is true. What does Buttigieg get out of it? "Something shady" isn't exactly concrete and I'm not seeing what the benefit is there. Iowa had a paper backup in place to audit the results regardless [https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/3/21117038/2020-iowa-caucuses-app-results] (largely to prevent the risk of outside tampering as was the concern following the 2016 Russian hacking campaign), and multiple other state parties bought services from the company [https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?data_type=processed&recipient_name=Shadow+Inc&two_year_transaction_period=2020&min_date=01%2F01%2F2019&max_date=12%2F31%2F2020], so clearly it wouldn't be to mess with the results. So what does the campaign get out of it?

He gets to coyly proclaim victory on a losing night under the cover of ambiguity, so when later it is shown that Bernie actually won, his celebration is muted by comparison to how much publicity it would have generated were it to occur on the actual day of the voting.

Iowa is only important due to this publicity it generates for candidates and not for the amount of delegates it provides so Pete can just steal that publicity and gain that significant benefit even if he ends up coming short on the delegates. It's a strategy for the long run, aiming to boost him moving forward.

 

[Trunkage]

Well Dems, just pack up and go home. You've literally proven everything that Trump says about you as true. Don't bother with the election. You've already lost.

What a clusterfuck

 

[Overhead]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e390191c5b687dacc722824


Here's the deal. It was payment for the app and the app was still being worked on up until very recently whereas the payments occurred back during summertime.


Either way, when you have a former head of Hillary's campaign being charged with developing the app that counts the votes in the election Bernie's participating in, you can't help but feel something shady is going on, something which is not helped by the company literally being named "Shadow".

If your basis is "there were people involved with Clinton" (which describes more than half the Democratic party because she was the goddamn 2016 Democratic nominee and has been active in US politics since a good chunk of the people in this forum were born) and a "spooky name," you'll excuse me if I find the evidence lacking?

Okay, let's presume this conspiracy is true. What does Buttigieg get out of it? "Something shady" isn't exactly concrete and I'm not seeing what the benefit is there. Iowa had a paper backup in place to audit the results regardless [https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/3/21117038/2020-iowa-caucuses-app-results] (largely to prevent the risk of outside tampering as was the concern following the 2016 Russian hacking campaign), and multiple other state parties bought services from the company [https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?data_type=processed&recipient_name=Shadow+Inc&two_year_transaction_period=2020&min_date=01%2F01%2F2019&max_date=12%2F31%2F2020], so clearly it wouldn't be to mess with the results. So what does the campaign get out of it?

I don't personally think there was a conspiracy but do think:

1) There is enough shady shit here that is probably incompetence but that could be malignancy that it should be investigated just because the democratic process is so important. For pretty much any out-there conspiracy that actually turned out to be true (Project Ultra, Watergate, etc) people probably wouldn't have believed it at first either, I don't think I would have. Though that's not to say people should jump to conclusions here either.

2) People will take advantage of this based on their biases. Do you think Biden would be trying to hide the results if he did well? Are candidates like Buttigieg using the ambiguity of the result to misrepresent how well they've likely done? Sure. This is damaging even if unintentional as it allows people to act in bad faith and change what should have been a a relatively straightforward set of results into a whole mess of unknowns.

Lastly I'd just note that according to the FEC data Pete's campaign made the second and third biggest transactions with Shadow Inc, so it's not really evidence of his lack of involvement.

 

[CaitSeith]

Either way, when you have a former head of Hillary's campaign being charged with developing the app that counts the votes in the election Bernie's participating in, you can't help but feel something shady is going on

Shady? Why? Is Hillary a candidate in this Democratic Primary?

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Either way, when you have a former head of Hillary's campaign being charged with developing the app that counts the votes in the election Bernie's participating in, you can't help but feel something shady is going on

Shady? Why? Is Hillary a candidate in this Democratic Primary?

She has come out and expressed animus towards him, publicly, more than once. It doesn't take a genius to surmise that people whom she'd allocate the head position of her campaign would move in similar but potentially more covert and more damaging ways to undermine Bernie than she herself is moving, despite not running. Hillary people are basically pro-establishment so it's as good as being people of any of the establishment candidates that they can see as being a viable way of maintaining the status quo that butters their bread.


Look at what's happening right now, they "reported" the results but it's actually just 62% of the precincts, so we don't know who ACTUALLY won, but in the part that's reported so far Pete is up in first, so even if it comes out that Bernie won in the end, he's gonna be robbed of a grand ole chunk of his deserved publicity.

Why wouldn't you wait until you have 100% of the results before reporting when you've already delayed this mess for a full day anyhow?

 

[Tireseas_v1legacy]

Initial results from Iowa are coming in. Early results indicate it being neck and neck between Buttigieg and Sanders at 25-26% each (I'm seeing conflicting reporting on who is leading), followed by Warren at 20-21%, and then Biden at 13%, with Klobuchar at around 12%. Some counties are still outstanding.

I'll update once the totals stabilize and the national delegate equivalent esimates looks the same from multiple courses.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e390191c5b687dacc722824


Here's the deal. It was payment for the app and the app was still being worked on up until very recently whereas the payments occurred back during summertime.


Either way, when you have a former head of Hillary's campaign being charged with developing the app that counts the votes in the election Bernie's participating in, you can't help but feel something shady is going on, something which is not helped by the company literally being named "Shadow".

If your basis is "there were people involved with Clinton" (which describes more than half the Democratic party because she was the goddamn 2016 Democratic nominee and has been active in US politics since a good chunk of the people in this forum were born) and a "spooky name," you'll excuse me if I find the evidence lacking?

Okay, let's presume this conspiracy is true. What does Buttigieg get out of it? "Something shady" isn't exactly concrete and I'm not seeing what the benefit is there. Iowa had a paper backup in place to audit the results regardless [https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/3/21117038/2020-iowa-caucuses-app-results] (largely to prevent the risk of outside tampering as was the concern following the 2016 Russian hacking campaign), and multiple other state parties bought services from the company [https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?data_type=processed&recipient_name=Shadow+Inc&two_year_transaction_period=2020&min_date=01%2F01%2F2019&max_date=12%2F31%2F2020], so clearly it wouldn't be to mess with the results. So what does the campaign get out of it?

I don't personally think there was a conspiracy but do think:

1) There is enough shady shit here that is probably incompetence but that could be malignancy that it should be investigated just because the democratic process is so important. For pretty much any out-there conspiracy that actually turned out to be true (Project Ultra, Watergate, etc) people probably wouldn't have believed it at first either, I don't think I would have. Though that's not to say people should jump to conclusions here either.

I'd be more surprised if they didn't do an audit (at this point, they should just schedule that in advance considering they need it every cycle).

I just really really really hate that the exact people I suspected would be spreading these kinds of conspiracy theories are doing exactly what I expected them to do. The funny thing? People were more worried that Sanders was going to do exactly what Buttigieg did [https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/02/berniesanders-campaigniowa-results-110318].

2) People will take advantage of this based on their biases. Do you think Biden would be trying to hide the results if he did well? Are candidates like Buttigieg using the ambiguity of the result to misrepresent how well they've likely done? Sure. This is damaging even if unintentional as it allows people to act in bad faith and change what should have been a a relatively straightforward set of results into a whole mess of unknowns.

Lastly I'd just note that according to the FEC data Pete's campaign made the second and third biggest transactions with Shadow Inc, so it's not really evidence of his lack of involvement.

Oh, I'm aware. I ended up reviewing the FEC records of the company to rebut a lot of things on more than a few platforms. Ironically enough, one of the other campaigns that paid Shadow, Inc was Biden's campaign and I'm not hearing anything about them (though apparently they're being quite mum overall given the results).

 

[Marik2]

They are rigging the elections! reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

 

[Overhead]

The official Iowa Democratic caucus results are Sanders has won the popular vote but Buttigieg has more electors (Democracy!): https://results.thecaucuses.org/

However it's notable that although 62.3% of precincts have come in, the largest county by far (Polk - has 177 precincts compared to the average precints per county of 17) is so far Pro-Sanders in electoral vote and electors, but is underrepresented in terms of precincts currently counted. Black Hawk (62 precincts, only 31% reporting in so far) is another county with a lot of precincts which has gone Sanders but most of the precincts haven't yet been counted towards the totals. On the other hand smaller rural areas like Hamilton which have gone to Buttigieg have 100% of their precincts returned. There's a good possibility that these results are skewed by the precincts which haven't reported in yet.