The Iowa Caucus Post

Everything you need to know about Pete, Bernie, and my 2007 Chevy Impala

The Iowa Caucus Never Truly Ended. The 2020 Democratic Primary is, to this day, still being relitigated in my Twitter feed and I expect this reflection to intensify as we get closer to the 2028 Primary season. I regularly see bad information about Iowa floating around online. And I don’t feel like the media has ever correctly explained what really happened on Caucus Night in 2020. So this post will attempt to lay out, to the best of my ability, what really went down.

Des Moines, Iowa

Beggars Night, 2019. Three months before the Caucus. Two days before the Iowa Democratic Party’s annual Liberty and Justice Dinner.

I had been with the campaign for a couple of weeks at this point. In theory, I was sleeping in the half-finished basement of a massive mansion on the west side of town. In practice I wasn’t sleeping.

The family that lived in the mansion was a young couple with adorable children. They both worked as surgeons in the hospital, I think. They supported Pete Buttigieg because he represented a more hopeful future for their two young children.

Their basement was a labyrinth of carpeted bedrooms, wood-paneled closets, and cement-floored storage rooms that I nosily poked my head into as my colleagues got ready for bed. Our “Supporter Housing” as it’s called, was probably the nicest home I’d ever stayed in. In fact, this family probably could have housed half the campaign if they’d wanted to but, for tonight, they put up four of us.

The next morning was Halloween.

One of the other organizers, Conor, played with our host family’s daughter on the floor of their kitchen while the rest of us ate breakfast. She was dressed like a fairy princess and he was dressed in a bright yellow campaign-issued T-shirt that I doubt anyone wears in public anymore. Conor was great with kids and this little girl really took a liking to him. I was great at eating toast and we both stuck to our respective specialties that morning.

Conor and I had gone to Harvard together but I didn’t actually know him there. I’ve been told he was busy during undergrad jet-setting around the country with his girlfriend, Taylor Swift. But he didn’t talk about that and I didn’t want to pry. The only thing I knew about him was that he was somehow related to John F Kennedy and his dad was supposed to be a little crazy.

Conor was ostensibly in Iowa to gain political experience; I guess all Kennedys need to do that. But I got the sense that he was mostly trying to find himself in America’s windswept plains. If that’s true, I suppose we were there for the same reasons. Years later Conor would leave the country to fight alongside the Ukrainian Foreign Legion against Russia’s invasion of Donbas. I always thought it was funny that he went from carrying the yellow and blue Pete Buttigieg banner through Iowa’s corn country to hoisting the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag in the wheat fields of eastern Europe. Maybe “funny” isn’t the right word.

Anyway, we spent the day in training alongside the other Buttigieg organizers. They explained the significance of the Liberty and Justice Dinner (also called “the LJ”): in short, Barack Obama brought a massive parade to this event in 2008. He led a drumline and brought out John Legend to perform, and he filled the Wells Fargo Arena with cheering supporters. Obama’s “show of force” inspired positive press coverage and outside observers noted that he had “won” the LJ. The young senator rode that enthusiasm to victory in the Caucus a few months later and that snowballed into him eventually taking the White House.

Pete Buttigieg’s Team wanted to accomplish the same thing, so we modeled everything after Obama ‘08. We bought up a ton of LJ tickets and gave them out to supporters from across Iowa. We threw a block party that doubled as a political rally. And we set up a plan to “paint the town Pete” with banners, flags, and signs.

That evening, they sent us out into the starless night to plaster Des Moines in Pete for America banners. My friends and I started off in a group but we gradually peeled away from each other as we each searched for plots of ground that could support Buttigieg signs. Lots of spots had already been snatched up by the Amy Klobuchar campaign earlier in the day. That’s why we were out in the middle of the night; tomorrow morning, organizers from across the country would fan out across the city, only to find that we’d beaten them to the best locations.

Staring down an empty boulevard, I tried to imagine what tomorrow would look like. There would be crowded speeches and parades. There would be TV cameras and New York Times journalists and surprise celebrity guests. And the campaign wanted everyone to see clearly and definitively that Pete Buttigieg was Iowa’s preferred choice.

But for now, the streets were empty, save for a single man in a trenchcoat standing outside his hotel. It was difficult to tell under the cold glow of the streetlights, each spaced too far apart, but he seemed to be fiddling with a lighter.

In my thick gloved hands I clumsily hauled about a dozen yard signs, each perfectly proportioned two feet wide by one and a half feet tall. When it was bright out, the signs radiated a warm yellow and blue, evoking sunshine and corn fields and Iowa. But in the limited white light I had to strain my eyes to make out the bold letters, square and squat: “PETE.”

The air was so cold that tomorrow’s sunrise felt impossible. I identified a large street planter in front of a hotel where one of my signs could lord over the long-dead flowers. I hunched over to identify the right spot to wiggle some metal prongs into the soil. The earth, I discovered, was firmly frozen.

“So you work for Pete?” the man asked dryly. I turned to look at him and found he wasn’t really looking at me. His focus was fixed on a small flame in his fist. A cigarette in his other hand began to glow, illuminating his tired eyes.

“I do!” I responded, lending more cheer than the man had wanted. I hadn’t been campaigning for long but I noticed that everyone in the business radiated an obnoxious level of half-faux positivity. “Are you a Pete supporter?” I asked him.

“I’m not allowed to support any candidates.” he rasped, as if it was an immutable fact of the universe. He stared across the empty street and said “I’m Troy Price, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party.”

Troy Price, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party lifted the cigarette to his mouth and inhaled desperately.

“Wow,” I exclaimed, surprised. “Small world!”

“I guess.”

“It’s going to be a big day for you tomorrow, then.” I remarked, as I tried to bore my yard sign into the frozen soil.

“You too,” he said. “This job is . . . a lot.”

“I’m sure it is,” I tried to empathize. Was I supposed to be trying to win this guy over for Pete? “Thank you for organizing everything. We’re really excited to share Pete’s vision for America tomorrow and . .”

“You don’t need to give me the spiel,” he muttered. Mr. Price dropped a glowing butt onto the sidewalk. “Don’t tell my husband you saw me smoking a cigarette.”

I hammered the yard sign into place with my insulated palm as the man in the trenchcoat turned and walked back into his hotel.

Neither of us knew it at the time but we’d both be unemployed come February.

–

The Iowa Caucus is dead now.

Thank God. In one sense, the Caucus was a logistical nightmare, haphazardly designed, and incompetently administered. The entire experience was clumsy, complicated, and crazymaking. And I worked on one of the good campaigns.

In another sense, the Caucus was a romantic expression of hope. Idealistic young people from every corner of America (and even a few from abroad) descended upon Iowa’s small towns like bees in a meadow. Through sheer industrious passion, they sought to persuade the locals to support their vision of the future. And wielding a distinct zeal they toiled to ensure that the right people showed up to the right high school gymnasium to caucus on the right night.

I lacked the requisite earnestness that every campaign organizer needs. I have cared about politics and policy for as long as I can remember but my undergraduate political science education dissuaded me from investing my hopes in any particular great man. “It is structural forces that shape outcomes on this Earth,” the Harvard Government Department decreed. But it was difficult to explain to voters that I supported Pete Buttigieg because of “structural forces.”

The more time I spent in Iowa, the more I asked myself “why are we even doing this?” The answer always seemed to be “because all of the other candidates are.” I was out knocking doors in Anita, Iowa (population 898) because Elizabeth Warren had an organizer out knocking doors there. And Elizabeth Warren had an organizer knocking doors because Amy Klobuchar had an organizer knocking doors. The whole thing was a wasteful ouroboros that had little to do with the complex Washington DC budget negotiations that I had studied in college.

Over and over, I couldn’t help but wonder, “surely there’s got to be a better way of picking our leaders?” Maybe if there was, John Delaney would end up as President. I liked John Delaney because he had decided early on that his political brand would be “the candidate that’s right about everything.” He had the right policy stances, the right messages for the general election, and a strong understanding of what America’s economy most needed. But John Delaney was a goofy rich guy that never gained traction with normal people. He wasn’t going to win the election, so I went looking for a similar candidate with better odds. I applied for jobs with Pete and Joe and Amy. And I took the first offer that came my way.

The six months I spent harassing people in rural Iowa were some of the most stressful of my life. I braved blizzards, dirt roads, coffee that was too strong, and more than a few gun-toting Republicans irate that a Democrat was knocking on their door. Sometimes all on the same day! The Caucus left me so tired and disillusioned that, at points, I considered quitting politics altogether.

And of course, Caucus Night, itself, was a massive shitshow that ended in conflict, confusion, and conspiracy.

–

There are a few things you should understand up front.

First, the Iowa Caucus is different from typical primary elections. Instead of filling out a secret ballot, caucus-goers are expected to actively participate in a public deliberative process alongside other Democrats in their community. A group of people from your neighborhood show up in the same high school gymnasium every four years, and they all split into different groups based on which candidate they support. This is followed by some politicking and a little bit of math and, by the end of the night, several members of the community are chosen to represent their preferred candidates going forward.

“Going forward?” you might be asking. Yes, while the media skips town the next morning, the Iowa Caucus actually continues for several agonizing months, in an unending kafkaesque nightmare.

• Every voting location (sometimes called a Precinct) has the opportunity to send one or more (depending on the Precinct’s size) delegates to their County’s Democratic Party convention.

• There, the participating delegates run the whole caucus over again, and a small subsection of them are chosen to become delegates at a third Caucus, this time for their County’s respective Congressional District.

• At this District-level Caucus, Delegates are chosen to attend Iowa’s State Democratic Convention.

• There, the State Delegates vote to determine which candidate the Iowa Democratic Party will support at the Democratic National Convention; the supporters of that candidate are then chosen to attend the DNC.

All this means that, technically, nobody knows who won the Iowa Caucus until the State Democratic Convention, which usually occurs in June, five months after Caucus Night.

State Delegates also vote to create a platform that the Iowa Democratic Party will bring to the DNC to pitch to the rest of the country. In theory, those ideas could end up in the National Democratic Party’s platform. Meaning any Democrat in Iowa can show up at their Precinct with a policy idea, support a winning candidate, and bring that idea to their County Convention. They can continue to pitch their idea all the way up to the DNC, potentially getting it incorporated into the National platform. This idyllic holdover of Iowa’s small town democracy is emblematic of the Caucus’ whole vibe: idealistic and cute yet bureaucratic and antiquated.

I tried to explain this process to a group of Andrew Yang supporters on Caucus Night. I told them that if they came over to support Pete, we’d be willing to put UBI up for a vote at the Guthrie County, Iowa Democratic Convention. They were, understandably, not convinced.

In practice, we can usually estimate who won the Iowa Caucus based on the precinct-level results. Each Precinct elects a certain number of Delegates based on their size. Each County and Congressional District does the same. Number crunchers boil down the math ahead of time to determine how many State Delegates each Precinct Delegate is likely to yield. Thus, each Precinct Delegate is worth a predetermined number of “points,” based on where they are elected. Those points are called “State Delegate Equivalents” or SDEs. The candidate with the most SDEs is generally crowned the winner by the media, even though there’s no way to officially know the winner until much later.

One quirk of the Caucus system is that, while Delegates are sent to their county conventions to support a specific candidate, they are only bound to support that candidate during the first “round” of voting. After that round, they’re allowed to peel off and caucus for someone else, so long as their first candidate did not surpass a 15% viability threshold in the first round. In theory, the day after the big Caucus, everyone in Iowa politics can decide that they messed up, and that they now support John Delaney for President.

(They could then choose to caucus for him, even though they were all sent to the County-level Caucus as supporters of other candidates. They could still decide to miraculously throw it to John Delaney. John Delaney can still win. Never give up, Delaniacs! I hate this system. Here’s how John Delaney can still win. Vote for John Delaney. I loathe this with every fiber of my being. John Delaney 2020! John Delaney 2028! John Delaney forever!)

You might have noticed, at this point, that the Iowa Caucus is complicated and stupid and bad.

For one, trying to assemble a bunch of Iowans in a central location on a Monday night in February is an inherently lousy idea. Everyone hates Mondays and Iowa Winters are cold, dark, and unforgiving. In the three rural counties that I covered during the Iowa Caucus, two different campaign organizers (one representing the Warren Campaign and one representing the Trump Campaign) died in car accidents. I, myself, slipped off the road on several occasions; at one point the ice took me into oncoming traffic and I thought I was going to die for Pete Buttigieg.

Nobody should die for Pete Buttigieg.

As an introvert, I hate that the Iowa Caucus requires people to show up and talk to each other face to face. It’s an unpleasant experience that clearly skews the voting base towards a specific kind of person (namely, childless extroverts that work regular hours and are free on a Monday evening). I can’t tell you how many people I met that wanted to make their voices heard but didn’t happen to be free on the evening of February 3rd, 2020.

–

The Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) was aware of the unrepresentative nature of the Caucus system. Back in 2016, the Bernie Sanders Campaign came surprisingly close to beating Hillary Clinton in the state. Many of his supporters felt that, had he won the Caucus, Iowa might have provided Bernie with the momentum that he needed to take the nomination and ultimately defeat Donald Trump. After their loss, the Sanders camp used their large number of State Delegates to push for changes within the IDP.

They emphasized that the Caucus disenfranchised young people (especially those that left the state for college), elderly people with limited mobility, workers on the evening shift, immigrants with limited English proficiency, and American troops deployed abroad, among others. They requested that the IDP find a solution. And the State Party came back with an innovative idea: Virtual Caucuses.

The IDP planned to implement a new kind of remote caucus that allowed participants to dial in via phone. In August of 2019, they held a conference call with the Democratic National Committee where they hoped to demonstrate some of their new procedures. The DNC’s cybersecurity team was able to immediately hack the conference call and, given fears about Russian interference in the 2016 election, they recommended that the Virtual Caucus plans be jettisoned. The IDP felt that the DNC’s assessment was premature but they ultimately followed the recommendation.

Instead, the Iowa Democratic Party had to scramble to implement a new system. What they came up with was “Satellite Caucus Sites.” These were 87 special Precincts set up in disparate locations to accommodate Iowans that might otherwise struggle to make their voices heard. These special Precincts included:

• 11 sites designed for Iowans with diverse language and cultural needs.

• 12 sites in other States (including one in DC), meant to accommodate Iowans spending the winter in other parts of the country.

• 14 sites meant to accommodate Iowans in large workplaces with evening shifts.

• 24 sites on college campuses across the country.

• 29 sites that accommodated accessibility needs, most of which were at retirement homes and hospitals.

• There were also a number of caucus sites in other countries - Paris, Glasgow, and Tblisi, Georgia all had caucus locations.

(You’ll notice that these numbers add up to more than 87. The Iowa Democratic Party has scrubbed much of the information related to the Satellite Caucus Sites from the internet, and the remaining external sources disagree on the numbers. It’s my assumption that some of the workplace sites doubled as language access sites and could be counted twice. If you Google around and find better information, please send it to me.)

The Satellite Caucus Sites were a poorly-structured compromise. The Party had limited time and resources to deliver on the vision. And determining which proposed sites got to participate was a political and administrative nightmare (the IDP accepted just under half of all the sites that applied). I would not have wanted the unenviable job of determining which voters deserved special representation and which did not.

The Pete Campaign’s theory about these Satellite Caucus Sites was that they were probably more trouble than they were worth. They didn’t have that many SDEs tied to them and each Satellite Precinct was logistically difficult to organize in its own special way. We weren’t going to hire someone to hunt down every Iowan in Paris, for example. Finding an organizer that specifically spoke Oromo to help us coordinate caucusgoers in one rural meatpacking plant would have been an expensive investment for a campaign that was tight on cash. So we largely ignored the Satellite Caucus Sites. And we assumed that the other campaigns would reach a similar conclusion.

Instead, the Pete Campaign poured most of its resources into organizing Rural Precincts.

–

The Iowa Caucus does not rely on the Popular Vote. Rather, the winner is the person with the most SDEs. Each Urban community is worth more SDEs than any Rural one. But Rural communities, in aggregate, are given a disproportionate weight, much like in the Electoral College. This means that, if a candidate overperforms in Rural communities (as Pete did), they can win the Iowa Caucus without winning the popular vote.

There are many within the Democratic Party that feel that this system is fundamentally unfair. They argue that the winner of the Caucus should be the person that turns out the most caucusgoers. I am of two minds about this. I agree that “one person one vote” is a preferable system for American elections. However, we do not have such a system in the General Election.

Again, the Electoral College exists and the Democratic Primary process is supposed to help us identify a nominee that can win the Electoral College. Unfortunately for all of us, one of the things we’re selecting for in a candidate is the ability to navigate a fundamentally arbitrary and stupid electoral system that weighs the votes of Rural people above those of Urban people. So, I’d argue that it’s actually helpful for the Democratic Party of Iowa to design their Caucus to favor the votes of Rural People in a way that’s both arbitrary and stupid.

I agree with the critics that feel the Iowa Caucus is unfair. But it was designed to be unfair in a way that prepares Democrats for the General Election. And while the Caucus is unfair to individual voters, it’s perfectly fair for the Candidates. After all, the rules of the game were established well before any of them declared their candidacy. They knew how the Caucus would work going in, and they had every opportunity to build their campaign in a way that accommodated the established rules.

(Except for John Delaney. John Delaney started running for President in 2017. Three years before the Iowa Caucus. Well before the Iowa Democratic Party finalized its rules in 2019. And it’s totally possible that they saw he was running and they changed up the rules right from under him! They could’ve rigged it! They probably rigged it! The Iowa Caucus was rigged against John Delaney. You heard it here first! John Delaney would’ve won!)

There are some Leftists on Al Gore’s Internet that will insist that Bernie Sanders is the rightful winner of the Iowa Caucus because he won the popular vote. They argue that the Iowa Democratic Party built a rigged system to stop him from winning. The truth is that Bernie Sanders, having run for President in 2016, had more influence over the institutional design of the Iowa Caucus than any other 2020 candidate. Unlike Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, or Joe Biden, he had hard-won delegates from 2016 in the room when these rules were decided. Bernie’s team helped design the Iowa Caucus. I will not tolerate any whinging from his supporters about the Popular Vote.

–

Now that I’ve explained how the Caucus works, let’s talk about the Candidates.

Pete Buttigieg followed Barack Obama’s playbook to a T. The Campaign’s theory of the case was that Pete needed to win Iowa, and probably New Hampshire, so he could steal momentum away from Joe Biden, who was polling ahead of everyone else. Then he could challenge Biden in the debates, in much the same way Barack Obama challenged Hillary Clinton. As a young candidate representing generational change, he could capture the 2008 magic in a bottle and lead the Democratic Party to a massive electoral landslide; he would then magically avoid all the mistakes in governing that Barack Obama made and that would allow him to fundamentally remake American politics for generations to come.

(To many people’s surprise, the Biden Campaign largely sat out Iowa and New Hampshire. Biden had internal polling suggesting that those were bad States for him, so they tried an innovative strategy of just kind of ignoring them. Biden poured resources into South Carolina and Super Tuesday contests. Unrelatedly, Amy Klobuchar had a strong debate performance just before New Hampshire, which cut into Pete’s support at just the wrong time. This screwed up his momentum, just as everyone was running out of money. After New Hampshire, none of the moderate alternatives to Biden had enough cash or enthusiasm to win, so they all dropped out. Biden absorbed their support and went on to win the nomination and the Presidency.)

Pete’s Iowa team deliberately targeted small Rural communities. They focused on getting lots of organizers on the ground, generating a wide footprint, and they trained those staffers with innovative “relational organizing” techniques. Relational Organizing means leveraging a volunteer’s personal relationships to find more volunteers. It’s basically a multi-level marketing scheme but for Democracy. The Pete Campaign went out of their way to put a real person in front of prospective caucusgoers. And they worked to empower supporters to recruit their friends, family, and neighbors to caucus for Pete too.

This was extremely effective, especially in small towns where everyone knows everybody. Early on, I identified a local socialite and hosted a Pete Party in her home. She sent out invites to her entire network, and I leveraged those relationships into yet more Parties. In the end, the focus on Rural communities paid off. If you look at this map (ruthlessly stolen from Wikipedia), you will notice a sea of Yellow counties where not that many people live.

Each of those counties mean SDEs for Pete! Look at this beautiful, electorally-efficient, coalition.

You’ll notice that the Bernie Campaign (marked in Green on this map) won far fewer counties.

To the untrained eye, this probably looks like a walloping. “But wasn’t the Iowa Caucus super close?” Well . . that’s where things get really interesting.

The Bernie Sanders Campaign was also very well put together. I don’t have nearly as much inside info on the Bernie Team but, based on everything I saw, they definitely earned my respect.

For the most part, Bernie’s people were focused on turning out their base of energized “infrequent voters.” This group included young people, new immigrants that might not speak English yet, a small group of disenchanted Left-Populists/Socialists that were tired of the Democratic establishment, and a slightly larger cadre of eclectic weirdos that didn’t pay much attention to politics but liked Bernie’s personal brand.

You can say what you want about Bernie Sanders but his organizers did the work. They found a lot of people that probably wouldn’t have voted. They trained them up on Iowa’s complicated Caucus system. And they successfully turned out more caucusgoers than any other campaign.

But those caucusgoers were concentrated in specific places - Urban areas (with lots of young people) and Counties with low college-attendance (Sanders did better with voters that did not go to college). Because Sanders’ supporters were often bunched up, he received fewer SDEs than he probably should have. But again, he knew the rules of the game going in.

–

This is as good a time as any to elaborate on my primary focus during the Iowa Caucus. As an organizer, my job was to identify and connect Pete Supporters in my assigned turf. But more than anything, I was tasked with finding and training a volunteer to lead our efforts in every one of my designated Precincts (25 of them in total). These people, called “Precinct Captains,” would then lead the Pete Supporters at their Caucus location on Caucus Night.

It was extremely important that every single Precinct had a designated Captain. Without a trained volunteer on the floor rallying people for Pete, our supporters were likely to get picked off by better organized campaigns. We expended a lot of time and resources to ensure we had representation at every Precinct.

We provided our Precinct Captains with talking points to help persuade other caucusgoers. And we taught them all the rules of Caucus procedure, so they could be prepared for any situation. We also provided them with a helpline to report potential irregularities at their Precinct. Most importantly, we required them to keep track of the results at their Caucus location and report them up to Campaign HQ as soon as the voting finished.

This parallel reporting infrastructure allowed the campaign to track the Caucus results in real time. Headquarters could compare our data with what was being reported in the media to fill out our understanding. The system wasn’t perfect but it gave the Pete campaign far more information than any average layman would have. It’s my understanding that many of the campaigns implemented a similar system.

–

I was not in campaign headquarters when the numbers were being compiled (I was in a high-school gymnasium in Guthrie County, Iowa). But I’m pretty confident I know what happened in HQ that night.

Late in the evening on February third, all of our internal data was pointing towards one conclusion: Pete was easily 26 or more SDEs ahead of Bernie. We had accurate data from almost every precinct, and we could compare it live with the data that was being reported by the IDP. We could all see the map on CNN, and it was clear that it would be functionally impossible for Sanders to catch up.

The Pete Campaign had thrown this big election night rally in Des Moines, it was getting pretty late, people around the country were starting to go to sleep, and the energy in the room was dying down. The networks weren’t calling the election but the guys in HQ had to make a call; they sent Pete out onstage and he said the now infamous line: “Iowa, you have shocked the nation . . .”

And then the Satellite Caucus Site results started to come in. Recall that the Pete campaign discounted the Satellite Sites as more trouble than they were worth. On Caucus Night, we learned that the other campaigns agreed with that assessment. With the notable exception of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

I have yet to read an article that accurately explains what went down with the Satellite Caucus Sites. It turns out the Sanders Campaign spent special attention on them. They sent designated staff to organize the remote locations, including staff that spoke niche languages where applicable. In some cases, they met people outside the Precinct Site and swayed them at the door before they went in. In short, they did the difficult, labor-intensive legwork that everyone else thought no one would be willing to do. Of the 42 or so SDEs up for grabs at Satellite Caucus Sites, Bernie took 25.48 of them. In contrast, Pete won 1.67.

I sometimes hear people complain that Pete Buttigieg “gamed” the Iowa Caucus by focusing on Rural communities. But, if we’re running with the video game analogy, I think it’s important to recognize that Bernie Sanders pulled 26 SDEs out of his ass by engaging with a game mechanic that nobody else bothered with. This was a special parallel track of the caucus that had never existed before and (because the Iowa Caucus is dead now) will never exist again.

The Bernie Team pulled off a last-minute miracle. Except, on their end, they probably knew it was going to happen. They were tracking their own data, just as the Pete Campaign was. They knew that the lopsided Satellite results were going to make this a tied race. I don’t think Pete’s people did. So the Bernie folks were, understandably, pissed when Pete Buttigieg declared victory on the night of February 3rd. They couldn’t do much about it except send their candidate out to declare victory too.

Pete, for his part, believed he had a commanding lead, and was probably frustrated that the Sanders camp wasn’t willing to concede he’d won. So much of Buttigieg’s campaign was wrapped up in the goal of building momentum in Iowa. If you’re looking at the flawed data that the Pete Campaign had, Sanders appears to be embracing blatant election-denial in the hopes of undermining Pete’s hard-won vibe-shift (election denial used to be looked down upon in American politics).

In short, because of disparities in the information environment, both campaigns concluded that the other side was screwy.

–

The issue was compounded by the Twitter wars.

The Pete Campaign took an innovative approach to online community building, with designated digital organizers focused on cultivating a warm, inclusive brand. The goal was to impose a top-down ethic on Pete’s community of supporters focused on Midwestern friendliness - Try to uplift Pete without putting down the other candidates. Win over new supporters by engaging positively with Pete-curious people - The online organizing program was top-notch and helped to shape Pete’s wholesome reputation. I highly recommend you check out the work of Stefan Smith, the Online Engagement Director that led those efforts.

In contrast, the Sanders Campaign had , , , less success developing a positive vibe online. Bernie’s supporters tended to be more negative, on average. They loudly denigrated the other candidates, supporters of the other candidates, and media figures that dared to cover the other candidates. Their criticisms often morphed into insults, and then occasionally turned into targeted harassment. Things got so bad that the term “Bernie Bro” has its own wikipedia page.

Sanders’ online supporters were not happy that their candidate was neck and neck in the polls with the small-time Mayor of South Bend Indiana. Bernie had come in second during the last Democratic Primary, and his supporters had helped to write the rules of the Iowa Caucus this time around, so many supporters expected him to be the frontrunner in this election. The biggest threat to that status was former Vice President Joe Biden, and he was polling awfully in Iowa. There was good reason to believe that Bernie would win this thing. Until some nobody from Indiana showed up and started outrunning him.

The Bernie Bros latched on to any shred of negative news they could to take Pete down. Sanders’ supporters embraced a bullshit story claiming that Buttigieg had somehow increased the price of bread in Canada during his early work at Mckinsey. And so did at least one New York Times editorial board member, who was turned into a meme. It is true that a Canadian supermarket chain, Loblaw’s, attempted to fix the price of bread. But Buttigieg was a freshman in college when the scheme went into effect. A few months before the Caucus, Loblaw’s released a statement revealing that, not only was Pete not involved, Mickinsey wasn’t even involved in the bread pricing scheme. That didn’t stop the tweets, however.

Sanders’ supporters were especially pissed on Caucus Night. After all, Bernie had decisively won the popular vote and his campaign claimed that they were on track to win the most SDEs. Then, in the middle of their celebrating, Pete Buttigieg walked onstage and declared that Iowa had “shocked the nation” by choosing him. The Bernie Bros immediately turned Pete’s declaration of victory into a meme. To this day, I still occasionally see them sharing this GIF when someone declares something preemptively.

It wasn’t long until they’d concocted another conspiracy theory.

The Pete Buttigieg Team knew that things could go wrong on Caucus night. One of the main reasons we built a parallel reporting infrastructure was so we could independently verify the results that the media reported. The Caucus process is complicated and, with so many precincts running Caucuses at the same time, there were bound to be mistakes. It made sense to be prepared.

One thing nobody prepared for was a total breakdown in the IDP’s reporting process.

We had just spent months wrestling with a proprietary software that allowed us to text Iowans in our database more efficiently. This software, to put it succinctly, sucked balls. It barely worked and was constantly crashing. Every organizer on the campaign hated it. The software was created by a company called Shadow Inc.

Shadow was a tech firm that sought to improve the digital capacity of Democratic campaigns. Several candidates used Shadow’s services, including Kirsten Gillibrand and Tom Steyer. In an unfortunate coincidence, the Iowa Democratic Party had also hired Shadow Inc. to build them an app that was supposed to make the Caucus more efficient. The volunteers in charge of running the Caucus would record the results in Shadow’s app and the data would be automatically updated to the Iowa Dems HQ, where they could tabulate everything and tell us the winner.

Unfortunately, the app they built for the IDP was even worse than the texting app they built for us. The software crashed immediately and the reporting structure collapsed. The IDP scrambled to figure out what was happening at their Caucus locations and, in some cases, the various campaigns probably had more information than they did. It took time for official results to come out. And with a Presidential Debate coming up in just a few days, candidates needed to know where they stood. New Hampshire was supposed to vote a few days after that and the voters there needed to know where the candidates stood.

A group of Bernie Bros found out about the Pete Campaign’s Shadow Inc. texting software contract (campaigns are required to disclose their expenditures in public statements), and claimed that Pete had paid his Big Tech™ friends to sabotage the Iowa Caucus and steal the election from Bernie. That wasn’t true and I found it especially funny because we all hated Shadow. Plus, why would we want to delay the reporting of the Caucus results? Pete needed a decisive win on Caucus Night to deliver on his momentum story. We had bet the entire campaign on Iowa; the last thing we wanted was an uncertain quagmire going into New Hampshire.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we got.

–

The day after the Iowa Caucus, I was told to drive to Council Bluffs to help close down our office there. The place was bedlam - papers everywhere, piles of clipboards, posters ripped off the wall. It looked like the aftermath of some secret police raid from the Spanish Civil War. And it felt vaguely like the fall of Rome. Working late into the night, I helped move mountains of campaign literature into the dumpster around back before raiding the kitchenette for its leftover hot chocolate mix.

Throughout the campaign, I met countless Iowans that wanted free yard signs but did not want to help me phone bank or knock doors. (This phenomenon is a running joke on organizer Twitter.™) The general consensus at the time was that we should try to withhold yard signs from supporters until we could get a volunteer shift out of them. Ironically, the day we evacuated Iowa, I learned that we had hundreds of yard signs sitting unused in our back room.

My supervisor pushed me to fill my trunk with signs but I drew the line at sixty. There was no plan for what would happen to them from there and I didn’t want to be responsible for their disposal. I managed to convince one of my volunteers to take them the next morning. At this point, he had more faith in Pete Buttigieg’s electoral prospects than I did. He told me that he’d distribute them to his neighbors during the general election. I suppose they’re probably still in his garage somewhere.

A few days after the Iowa Caucus I was asked to call each of my Precinct Captains. I thanked them for volunteering with us and I let them know that Pete was grateful for their contributions. There were a few Precincts in my turf where the results were being disputed and, in those cases, these calls served a dual purpose.

The Campaign needed me to ensure that each Captain had properly recorded the data from their Caucus site and that they had sent the information to Headquarters via phone and via a paper form, which they put in a Pete-provided postage-paid envelope.

Shortly before making my calls, the Campaign informed me I would not be moving on to the next State. I was being laid off.

To be fair to the Pete Campaign, I had grown exhausted with field organizing. I was isolated, anxious, and cold. Two months before the Caucus, I put in a request to move to a different department, which my manager promptly denied. A week before Caucus Night, we were all asked to let HQ know which State we’d prefer to be moved to post-Iowa. I wrote in the form that I wanted to try something in policy or comms or digital - anything but knocking doors again. They likely read that as carte blanche to fire me. After all, without the decisive momentum of an Iowa win, our fundraising was starting to dry up. The campaign needed to downsize and I made myself easy to let go.

I called my grandmother to let her know that I needed somewhere to sleep; then I climbed into my 2007 Chevy Impala and road-tripped back to West Michigan.

That job was a lot.

–

I’d like to close with the story of Jed and Donna Kuwalsky.

Donna used to work for the Federal Government but she and Jed are both retired now. Her claim to fame is that she has caucused for the winning candidate in every Iowa Caucus in her lifetime. When I first met her, she told me “Pete is going to win the Iowa Caucus. I have never been wrong.”

Donna is active in her local Democratic Party and she graciously allowed me to host a Pete Party in her living room. She was, by far, our strongest supporter in her Precinct and she was the obvious choice to serve as the Pete camp’s Precinct Captain.

Unfortunately, she was also the obvious choice for the County Dems when they went looking for volunteers to administer the Caucus. They couldn’t well have the referee for the event also coordinating supporters for a specific candidate. So I needed to find someone else.

The Kuwalskys lived in an especially rural part of Iowa. Their house is on a dirt road off a dirt road off a dirt road. I navigated the surrounding fields, knocking the doors of every farmhouse and ranch in the area and I simply couldn’t find anyone that would replace Donna.

I told my supervisor about the situation and she told me “look, if the County Dems have stolen your Precinct Captain, that’s their problem. You need to drive to her house and steal her back! They’ll find someone else to replace her.”

This sounded profoundly unreasonable to me. I often found that my field organizing tasks involved asking people to do unreasonable things. When I say that I wasn’t earnest enough to be a field organizer, this is part of what I mean.

Still, I had my marching orders and I’d exhausted all other options. I got in my car and I drove to Donna’s house. Or at least, I tried to. My poor 2007 Chevy Impala slid into a ditch on the second dirt road off a dirt road. I tried to reverse out but it was of no use.

When I first started working on the campaign, I was issued a small fasces of pencils tied together with a rubber band and a cardboard box full of clipboards. I grabbed the box and tore it up and attempted to maneuver the cardboard underneath my vehicle’s wheels, in the hopes of gaining traction. I used the clipboards to dig at the snow and the pencils to chip at the ice. There was no phone service that far out in the stix; I knew I was on my own to either liberate my car or restart society in the ditch.

Eventually an SUV came by. It was Donna’s son and daughter-in-law, with three children in tow. They explained to me that they were hoping to go out on a date tonight, so they were swinging by grandma’s to impose surprise babysitting duty.

“What a coincidence!” I exclaimed. “I’m also about to show up unannounced at your mom’s and ask her to change her plans.”

The Kuwalsky clan pulled me out of the ditch and we formed a small caravan dedicated to the mission of inconveniencing Donna. I arrived at the squat ranch style house and we had a chat over the kitchen table. We went back and forth for a bit, trying to identify a solution. But it was clear from the beginning that Donna could not abandon the County Dems.

“What if I did it?” asked a voice from across the room. Jed stepped in.

Jed Kuwalsky is an apolitical man. He didn’t identify as a Republican or a Democrat. It’s entirely possible he’d never voted in his life. He was content in retirement, spending his days working in his pole barn, riding his lawnmower, and playing with the grandkids. He lived a simple life. And one probably more blissful than mine or yours.

“Really, Jed?” Donna asked. “Are you sure?”

“Well, you’re going to be there anyway. No point in staying home by myself. And if it solves your conflict, why not?”

Just like that, Jed Kuwalsky became the official Captain of his Precinct for the Pete Buttigieg campaign. I ran him through the training right then and there. (Donna took notes.)

A few weeks later, the Kuwalskys caucused for Pete at their precinct and something astounding happened. There was a tie on the Caucus floor. The Klobuchar Campaign had brought exactly as many supporters as we had. If Jed had stayed home that evening, they would’ve taken the Precinct, along with its only delegate.

But Jed was there and now the tie had to be broken. According to the IDP’s Caucus procedure, the correct way to determine who wins in this situation is to flip a coin (In contrast, Nevada resolves ties in its caucus system by drawing from a deck of cards). So Donna handed her husband a quarter and he flipped heads. Jed Kuwalsky, American Hero, single-handedly won the precinct for Pete.

When all the statewide results were finally collected, tabulated, and audited, we learned that Pete Buttigieg led Bernie Sanders by just one SDE. Meaning that I can credibly claim that Jed Kuwalsky won Pete Buttigieg the Iowa Caucus. Hell, I can credibly claim that I won Pete Buttigieg the Iowa Caucus.

Pete went on to become Secretary of Transportation. He’s almost certainly going to run for the White House again in 2028. He might even win! I think it’s probably fair to attribute all of that success to me, specifically, and me alone. That feels fair. I think.

After all, if I hadn’t stepped in, maybe John Delaney would have won.