DES MOINES — When asked to summarize the past several hours for the Iowa Democratic Party, Dr. Steffen Schmidt, a political professor at Iowa State University, used one word: disaster.
Iowa Democrats have not been able to provide results to the media from caucus night, citing a coding issue in the reporting system, which, according to the party chair, has been fixed.
In the meantime, political analysts both local and national are talking about what happened caucus night and what it means for Iowa. Local 5 caught up with our political analyst Dr. Schmidt Tuesday morning to recap what happened and what this means moving forward.
“That’s the Titanic for the Democratic Party of Iowa,” Schmidt said. “It’s the one thing that they couldn’t afford to do. Last time, four years ago, there were questions about flipping coins and about whether Bernie Sanders was discriminated against. And they tried really hard this year to not have any glitches. And the big mistake they made is in the reforms, they made the process so complicated, and they used an app which was relatively untested. I mean, they said they tested it, but you know, it just crashed and then their redundancy system failed, which was the telephone system, and the party is now humiliated. The Iowa caucuses are discredited, frankly.”
Local 5 will continue to follow this developing story.