Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.
The laziest and most common campaign story right now is a version of the following:
“The Democrats are in disarray!”
“The Democrats are failing to coalesce around a single candidate!”
“The Democrats are handing this election to the Republicans!”
Add a story or two about the Iowa caucus-trophe, capture a few screenshots of online bickering between candidates’ supporters and throw in a quote from a primary voter who didn’t make up her mind about how she was going to vote until she walked across the parking lot at her polling place — and ta-dah! You, too, could write a story to match these recent headlines.
Politico: Trump’s ‘dream scenario’ unfolds: Dem disarray ahead of 2020.
Reuters: Democrats in disarray ahead of New Hampshire.
Axios: Democratic disarray, dysfunction.
The Hill: Democrats in disarray: 2020 election at risk.
A question: When were Democrats not in disarray?
Democrats have always been the collective curly mop top next to the lacquered comb-over. They may swirl and twirl, but even after a heavy rain, they bounce back.
My earliest memory of Democratic politics in our house was the election of John F. Kennedy — a Catholic! I was too young to remember the campaign, but I was familiar with my working-class father’s protestant prejudice at an early age. He was likely one of those primary voters for Adlai Stevenson.
What I do remember is how Dad bragged later about voting for Kennedy in the general election. He ordered a framed presidential portrait of JFK and hung it next to Jesus on a wall in our living room. That Jack-and-Jesus wall was a mainstay of my childhood. If Jesus ever voted, Dad said, he’d be a Democrat.
Another question: What month is it?
February — months and months away from this primary’s end, and even more months from the general election.
You’d never know that from discussion threads on Democratic voters’ Facebook pages, but that’s who we’ve always been — only now we’ve got emojis.
Each of us brings our own biases and emotions to the selection of a presidential candidate, which is why the primary can feel so personal. Our person wins; we feel affirmed. Ours doesn’t; we feel rejected.
When was the last time rejection brought out the best in you?
And now, a word about our impeached president.
Less than a week after all but one Republican senator voted to acquit him on both counts of impeachment, Trump has started seeking his revenge.
At the National Prayer Breakfast, he mocked the faith of Sen. Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon who cited his faith in his decision to vote to convict Trump of abuse of power. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a key witness in the House impeachment inquiry, was fired from the White House, along with his twin brother. Now Trump is calling for disciplinary action against him.
Last Tuesday night, four of the federal prosecutors working on the obstruction and perjury case of Trump’s friend, Roger J. Stone Jr., withdrew from the case after the Justice Department overruled their recommendation that Stone be sentenced to prison for seven to nine years. One of the prosecutors resigned.
As usual, Trump brayed about this conquest on Twitter:
“Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!”
He went after the judge who will be deciding Stone’s fate: “Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure? How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!”
He also posted a photo of him standing next to Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg on a golf course: “Mini Mike is a short ball (very) hitter. Tiny club head speed. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”
Meanwhile, the Republican senators who enabled this latest round of Trump’s menacing and possibly illegal behavior remain in hiding from America’s journalists.
But sure.
The Democrats are in disarray.
Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two nonfiction books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. Her novel, “The Daughters of Erietown,” will be published by Random House in spring 2020. To find out more about Connie Schultz (schultz.connie@gmail.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
Are frightened Democrats in the middle of an ugly fight to the death between the so-called progressive and moderate wings of the party? To observe the weeping and gnashing of teeth after the New Hampshire primary, you might think so. Let’s just say, that reaction is premature and missing the point.
Yet there are already calls from some in the Democratic establishment, such as it is, for consolidation of the moderates to fight a Bernie Sanders surge that would presumably cast the party into the electoral wilderness in 2020, when the main focus, the reasoning goes, is to beat Donald Trump. To be fair, that seems to be top of mind for all those who want Trump out of office. When I go to the market or gym, anyone of a certain political persuasion even vaguely familiar with what I do for a living asks me “who can beat Trump” before I get a “hello.”
I get the urgency with each passing day, as an emboldened president interferes with career prosecutors at the Justice Department, gloats as a Purple Heart recipient with shrapnel in his body is marched out of the White House or floats the possibility of overhauling programs such as Medicare, breaking his own campaign promise.
But I’m honest when I answer: “I don’t know, it’s early and anything can happen. Remember 2016.” Well, I guess they do remember, which is why they’re so nervous.
It’s more than a little insulting, though, to a lot of voters to want to wrap everything up before the Nevada caucus, the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday, before the diverse electorate that will determine who gets to stand onstage and accept that nomination has had a chance to weigh in. By the way, those are also the voters who could make the difference in November.
With 1,990 delegates needed to clinch the presidential nomination, and a neck-and-neck race with Pete Buttigieg at 22 and Sanders at 21, we should stop counting?
Especially after an Iowa caucus gone awry, the argument that Iowa and New Hampshire, with the power to make or break candidates, should not go first makes sense, despite being dismissed as sour grapes when former hopeful Julián Castro made it.
Before all the votes were cast in the New Hampshire primary, former Vice President Joe Biden was on the ground in South Carolina, perhaps anticipating his poor showing in the first-in-the-nation primary, and shoring up what has been called his “firewall.” Primary winner Sanders was heading that way, with events planned in the Super Tuesday state of North Carolina, preceded by appearances from campaign surrogates Nina Turner and Susan Sarandon. In South Carolina, Tom Steyer was visible in ads and mailings, creeping up in the polls and picking verbal fights with a Biden supporter.
Michael Bloomberg was everywhere, or at least he seemed to be, with ads and staffing across the country and his own Southern swing in the works.
Note that Andrew Yang, the only candidate of color on the last debate stage, has suspended his campaign, squashing the hopes as well as the dreams of the Yang Gang. Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, failing to gain traction, also bowed out, so, “poof,” all the African American candidates have disappeared.
Though the winnowing down is necessary and expected, does anyone wonder if the first states had been shuffled to include, maybe, Georgia and Texas, or New Jersey and California, Castro and Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris — and the issues they put front and center — might have drawn more attention and donor support, and survived to fight another day?
The question has been asked, why has it been so difficult for Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar to gain support from African American and Latino voters? Why not turn that around to ask why white voters have been so eager to support candidates who have shown little traction among black and brown voters?
When I expressed that thought, someone who presumably has it all figured out, testily lectured: “They,” meaning those black and brown voters, “will just have to suck it up.”
Paternalism is an ugly look, for Democrats as well as Republicans. It does not and should not work that way, and newly crowned front-runners should be prepared.
Klobuchar, riding high after a praised debate showing gave her campaign a boost and a strong, third-place New Hampshire finish, is getting another look and stronger vetting, including on the prosecutor past that caused some of Harris’ troubles. When a host on ABC’s “The View” grilled her about her past failure to prosecute officers in police-involved killings and one case the AP has reported on and reviewed that resulted in a young man in jail and lots of questions, Klobuchar’s answers leaned heavily on “systematic racism” boilerplate.
Based on Buttigieg’s deer-in-the-headlights reaction in the last debate when asked about disparate rates of marijuana arrests, based on race, in his time as South Bend, Indiana, mayor and his nonscripted follow-up that linked pot possession to gangs and violence and “slaughtering,” well, it will take more than the endorsement of South Carolina state Rep. JA Moore from Charleston, an African American, to move past his well-documented stumbles with voters of color and the word salad he offers when asked about them.
Guys, when you’re polling lower than the poster child for stop-and-frisk with black voters, you’ve got work to do.
That doesn’t let Bloomberg off the hook. He may have a raft of African American mayors, including Steve Benjamin of Columbia, South Carolina, on his side, and black voters who have been special targets of the current president are nothing if not practical. But as long as he’s a candidate, expect to hear Bloomberg on a loop, saying, “The way you should get the guns out of the kids’ hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them.” As someone who has a black son who has been profiled (and multiply that by a lot of black and brown folks), believe me, those words never lose their sting.
All the breathless prognostication and punditry expended on Iowa and New Hampshire doesn’t make it game over, as much as Democrats looking for unity might want to make it so.
Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
As new details emerge about what went wrong with the Iowa Democratic Party’s vote counting meltdown in its presidential caucuses, the Nevada State Democratic Party is racing to replace the app that failed in Iowa with new and untested online voting tools in its caucus on February 22—a scenario suggesting some difficulties seen in Iowa may resurface.
Meanwhile, in Iowa, where Bernie Sanders’ campaign has said it will seek a partial “re-canvass” (recount) after the IDP announced that Pete Buttigieg would probably receive 14 national convention delegates and Sanders would receive 12 delegates, the IDP has said that it will not be looking at the ballots (voter-signed presidential preference cards). Instead, the IDP will examine the summary sheets of vote totals signed by the caucus chair and campaign precinct captains, even though the New York Times has reported inaccuracies on those worksheets. That discrepancy implies that questions about the IDP’s vote counting will linger.
In other words, as party-run contests in Iowa continue and are poised to take the stage in Nevada, the riskiest, most controversial and possibly least assuring aspects of these 2020 elections are coming from decisions made by state party officials. These officials tend to be younger and more confident than skeptical of digital technology, and have sided with their vendors more than outside experts.
That state party role has not been recognized in the most detailed press reports offering explanations or more conspiratorial reports casting blame about Iowa’s meltdown. Yet top party officials in both states have resisted warnings from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) about the risks of debuting new digital voting systems. Those warnings have come from the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC), which oversees state delegate selection plans, the DNC’s technology staff, and an expert advisory board created by the DNC staff.
The RBC’s 2020 rules envisioned caucus states offering a remote participation option to voters who could not be physically present at the caucuses. But as the months progressed and the details of that system raised reliability and security concerns, the RBC reversed course. In late August, it rejected plans by Iowa and Nevada to offer voters a telephone keypad-based voting option. At the time, the RBC also warned these two states about using online voting systems.
However, Nevada and Iowa pressed ahead with retooling some of their digital voting systems, saying that these would be used by party officials and volunteers, not by voters. The states could push the edge of the envelope because the RBC has limited jurisdiction over how state party-run contests use technology.
“The Rules Committee jurisdiction has never involved counting the votes, because most of the time it is done by state law” affecting government-run party primaries, said Elaine Kamarck, an RBC member from Massachusetts and presidential scholar who said the panel’s main job is overseeing state plans to allocate delegates to the Democratic National Convention. “It never occurred to us to get into the business of [overseeing] vote counting.”
Thus, tech-friendly state party officials, more so in Nevada than Iowa, had a loophole of sorts and pressed on. The fact that state parties, not the DNC, pay for their presidential caucuses strengthened their resolve. So, too, did the months that they had spent developing the telephone voting option (before the RBC killed it).
As reported in most detail in the Nevada Independent, Nevada now plans to give every precinct caucus chair a party-programmed iPad that will import the results from four days of early voting (at the start of each precinct caucus), calculate the candidate rankings in two rounds of voting, and electronically file the results. (Iowa’s app failed to transmit these local results and to compile state totals.)
After the Iowa meltdown, Nevada State Democratic Party chairman William McCurdy II said in a statement, “We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus.” The Nevada Independent spoke to caucus chairs being trained in the newest system only days before it will debut. Those volunteers said that the party was describing the use of an iPad as not the same as an app.
“In the [training] video, a party staffer tells volunteers that the new mechanism ‘is not an app’ but should be thought of as ‘a tool,’” the Independent reported. “Asked by a volunteer how results would be transmitted from one place to another, the staffer demurred. ‘Those are all excellent questions, and we’re still working out some of the details around those so I’ll make sure that everyone has more information as we’re able to share it,’ she said.”
Late on Monday, February 10, four days before early voting is set to begin, the Nevada state party updated campaigns about their latest plans, according to the Independent. The party will be using party-provided iPads to check in voters using preloaded county voter rolls (as PDF files). Voters will fill out a paper presidential preference card, but also enter their information on the iPad as a Google form “which will be accessed through a URL,” the Independent reported, citing a party memo. Thus a paper and electronic record of their vote will be created.
The system is reliant on caucus chairs accessing Wi-Fi in 80 early voting sites across the state. It was not clear from the Independent’s report what elements of this system would be used or modified for use in hundreds of precinct caucuses on February 22. In Iowa’s precinct caucuses, getting online was an issue for several campaigns using sophisticated turnout-tracking apps, because attendees in those locations were widely using their phones and competing for the bandwidth.
The Nevada party was still recruiting precinct chairs for those caucuses, according to people with ties to Joe Biden’s campaign in New Hampshire. That update suggests that there may be issues with using an unfamiliar system while running the event.
Nevada party officials have not responded to Voting Booth’s request to comment.
Whether the DNC Rules Committee can step in and order Nevada to fine-tune the vote counting technology to be used—as it affects how 2020 national convention delegates are allocated—is an open question. Meanwhile, party officials from other states with government-run presidential primaries are watching and are frustrated.
“Just use paper ballots, count them by hand, and call in the results,” said an exasperated state vice-chair (a baby boomer) who said that she was friends with McCurdy, but was angry with her younger “techie” peers. (Those comments came before the latest details about Nevada’s early voting system were released.) The Iowa meltdown reminded her of the Obama White House’s rollout of the Obamacare website, where young staffers overlooked what could go wrong when a system debuts.
Iowa’s meltdown and Nevada’s continuing pursuit of untested digital voting tools are not, however, a stop-Bernie conspiracy by the DNC.
That allegation came from some progressives after the IDP app frustrated precinct chairs (many could not log in) and system software failed to tally results. Nor was it intentional sabotage because the CEO of the firm (ACRONYM) that funded the app’s developer (Shadow) is married to a Buttigieg consultant, nor because of meddling by Buttigieg’s wealthy donors, as others alleged.
“The DNC was doing what Bernie wanted. They were not trying to get rid of him,” said the state party vice-chair. “Accusing [DNC Chairman] Tom Perez of trying to get rid of Bernie Sanders is ridiculous. He has been trying to appease Bernie since the beginning.”
Those remarks refer to the DNC’s post-2016 effort to heal the divisions between centrists who supported Hillary Clinton and progressives who backed Sanders. The DNC’s Unity Reform Commission recommended, and the full DNC adopted, many of Sanders’ demands. The most high-profile was that so-called superdelegates (mostly elected officials who comprise one-sixth of the national convention delegates) will not get to vote on the first ballot—to elevate voters over party leaders.
Another Sanders demand, which is relevant for what is unfolding in 2020’s party-run caucus and primary states, is greater transparency in releasing the vote counts. In 2016, the IDP simply announced the delegate equivalents to their state convention without any further evidence. At 2:30 a.m. on the morning after 2016’s caucuses, the party chair announced that Clinton had won 699.57 “state delegate equivalents” while Sanders had won 695.49 equivalents.
Looking at 2020, the DNC and caucus state parties agreed to release the number of participants, results from two rounds of voting, and delegate allocations. That new transparency, in part, led Iowa and Nevada party officials to look to digital tools to accelerate more intricate reporting and statewide tallies.
Throughout 2019, party officials told the RBC that they were on track with their new voting systems, even though there was no finished product for the DNC’s technology staff to review until well into the fall. When cybersecurity exercises were finally held, they were done in academic settings—not in a real election with more voting-system stresses and unexpected snafus.
In other words, these state party officials were overly reliant on their contractors, some of whom had roles in Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns, and some of who had connections in Silicon Valley, who were overpromising. That mistake is a rookie error in the world of election administration. And given the existing climate of paranoia and mistrust, it increases the odds that mishaps will undermine public faith in elections and the democratic process.
“Vendors promise you the world. They say, ‘Just try it.’ That doesn’t work with [career] election officials,” said John Lindback, the former state election director in Alaska and Oregon, who was worried about all of 2020’s party-run presidential nominating contests—continuing with Nevada and several other states.
“They’re setting themselves up for some issues,” he said.
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.
The National Memo is a political newsletter and website that combines the spirit of investigative journalism with new technology and ideas. We cover campaigns, elections, the White House, Congress, and the world with a fresh outlook. Our own journalism — as well as our selections of the smartest stories available every day — reflects a clear and strong perspective, without the kind of propaganda, ultra-partisanship and overwrought ideology that burden so much of our political discourse.
