Olivia Nuzzi Strikes Again

If you don’t know her work, you ought to:

“The Iowa caucus was supposed to be important. First in the nation, they love to remind us — the first place votes are cast; the contest that might predict the president. But tonight that’s all over, or so it seems right now. If you haven’t heard: We don’t yet know the results of the caucuses, due to some kind of fuckup involving a new app the Iowa Democratic Party decided to use, perhaps, or due to some other human error. Nothing is clear. Earlier, when the delay in reporting was becoming apparent and the first murmurs about What Went Wrong were trickling out, the Iowa Democratic Party held a call with representatives from each campaign to discuss the attempts at what it called ‘quality control.’ It ended with the party hanging up on everyone. Later in the evening, the party held a call with reporters that lasted for less than two minutes. It hung up on the reporters too. ‘They’re hanging up on everyone,’ someone here remarked.

[…]

Some campaign staffers and network embeds — the reporters who report on the candidates’ every word and step — have been living here for months. People upend their lives to serve and observe our democratic process, and early on, most of the attention is directed here, by virtue of the supposed importance. Iowa might pick the president, because statistically that’s been true for roughly half the nominating contests in modern history. But with no results, or with results that we can’t trust, it was all for nothing.

It’s Tuesday morning, and we have no answers. ‘Today is already today. Today is tomorrow. The future is now,’ one reporter said.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/the-iowa-caucuses-were-supposed-to-be-important.html