In step with U.S. politics in the last few years, the first states to vote on the democratic nominee for president—Iowa and New Hampshire—had their fair share of drama.
On Feb. 3, candidates, supporters and the media eagerly awaited the results from the Iowa Caucus. Iowa is the first state to vote in the Democratic primary, which will determine the Democratic nominee for the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Unlike Colorado, for example, Iowa does not vote in a primary, but caucuses instead. Voters gather in precincts to debate and discuss candidates and eventually split into groups to communicate their preferences. Because it is the first state in the 2020 presidential nomination process, Iowa is taken seriously because of its ability to legitimize and set the stage for candidates hoping to garner votes in the subsequent states.
However, Iowa’s de facto role as stage-setter was spoiled this year. On the night of Feb. 3, no precincts had reported which Democratic nominee they had voted for, so many of the candidates gave their own victory-like speeches to maintain momentum. They did so because the reports from each precinct were delayed. The Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) announced that the reason for the delay was a malfunction with their reporting app. All the votes had been tallied, but communicating those tallies to the American people was proving difficult. Correct results trickled in, and final results were released by the IDP a whole six days after the election. They showed Mayor Pete Buttigieg with 564.302 of the state delegate equivalent which is equivalent to 14 national delegates. Sen. Bernie Sanders received 12 national delegates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren received eight, former Vice President Joe Biden received six and Sen. Amy Klobuchar received one. Even now, the winner of the Iowa caucus is unclear. Because the Sanders and Buttigieg campaign had a 0.9% vote-tally-difference between them, they both exercised their right to ask for a recanvas which is “a check of the vote count to ensure the results were added correctly.”
Associated Press—the news organization that is relied upon to make political race calls—has not declared a winner for the Iowa caucus yet for this reason.
Though Buttigieg appears to have narrowly won in Iowa as of now and gained a small margin of clout, the many candidates declaring victory, the ensuing chaos and the recanvas mean that the momentum or legitimacy that candidates could have gotten from Iowa is largely a wash.
Candidates turned to New Hampshire, the next state to vote in the 2020 Democratic primary which voted on Feb. 11. New Hampshire provided the first clear win of the contest, with Sanders narrowly beating Buttigieg. It also gave a renewed look at Klobuchar, who had an unexpected third-place finish. Warren came in fourth. Biden came in fifth, which was relatively surprising, considering his support from party insiders.
In a statement to the Clarion, Dr. Seth Masket—political science professor and the director for DU’s Center on American Politics—discussed Biden’s performance in Iowa and New Hampshire. He said, “Party insiders, to the extent they made a choice, largely signaled that they were backing Joe Biden prior to the Iowa caucuses. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t seem to care. This doesn’t mean Biden is out of contention—he still has a lot of areas of strength across the country. But all the advantages he carries didn’t seem to matter much in the early states.”
After poor showings in New Hampshire, entrepreneur Andrew Yang, Governor Deval Patrick and Senator Michael Bennett—the Colorado senator—dropped out of the presidential race.
Masket, who was in both Iowa and New Hampshire during their respective votes, reflected on the outcomes saying, “The contest so far is incredibly fluid. Buttigieg got a modest bounce between Iowa and New Hampshire, and Klobuchar got a pretty big bounce thanks to the most recent debate. But all the groundwork done by the campaigns over the past year only seemed to matter modestly, and much of it got washed away by recent events.”
Though it might look like the race is shaping up to be between Sanders and Buttigieg, there are still 48 states left to go in the nomination process, states that are more diverse and do a better job representing the nation than Iowa and New Hampshire. Colorado’s primary is on March 3, the final states vote on June 2 and the eventual nominee is still largely unclear.
