Why I Donated to Elizabeth Warren Today

200125-elizabeth-warren-mn-1140_6de994e52181233ebf528c412dd6d726.fit-760w Ever since the New Hampshire primary, the punditariat has written many a premature obituary for the campaign of Elizabeth Warren. And I get it. According to their narrative conventions — which they love to misname the ‘conventional wisdom’ — Iowa and New Hampshire are supposed to winnow the field down to two or maybe three candidates. And even though there are supposedly only three tickets out of Iowa, one of which Elizabeth Warren won, her poor showing in the widely divided field in New Hampshire has supposedly ‘put a stench of death’ on her campaign, at least according to an unnamed campaign aide quoted by one of my favorite writers.

To which I say: All. My Bollocks.

Here is Dylan Matthews at Vox, giving up the game:

“The only reason to care about the early primaries is that they drive media narratives, perceptions of candidate viability, and thus later primaries in states that actually matter for delegate count. Iowa and New Hampshire just don’t award enough delegates to be important on their own (41 and 24, respectively) without that perception effect.”

Ninety-eight percent of delegates to the nominating convention (which is the metric, just or not, by which score is kept in this game) remain unpledged. Ninety-eight percent. That’s like, almost all of them. Never mind that virtually no people of color have had a chance to weigh in (which seems like it might change the dynamics for, say, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar). Nor have many union members, who might not like the current front-runner’s health care plan (FWIW, I do endorse it, myself, though I think Warren’s got a better plan for getting there). Hell, in New Hampshire, whose influence is even more outsized than usual thanks to Iowa’s self-immolation, the primary is open. Republicans and Independents can cast votes for the Democratic nominee. That may or may not be a good thing, but one thing is clear: it means New Hampshire — white-as-snow, soi disant libertarian New Hampshire — is even less representative of the Democratic party than Iowa.

All of which is to say that while the punditariat may indeed prefer a two- or three-person race (and put a thumb on the coverage scale to make it happen), we the voters are in no way obliged to oblige them. Quite the contrary. There are enough primaries left, enough voices yet to be heard, I think all the viable candidates should keep running.

There’s a lot at stake come the general election. But there’s a lot at stake, too, in the Democratic primary. Not only do we need a champion to face Donald Trump come November, we need to flip the Senate and bolster our House majority. The person who can lead that wave might be any of the top contenders.

Me, I think that person is Elizabeth Warren. I think she’s got the intellect, temperament, experience, and plans to carry us forward into the interesting times ahead, and I’m not the only one. Even most people for whom she’s not the top choice put her as their second choice. Far as I can tell, her only negatives are among billionaires and the Extremely Online folks who think she doesn’t go far enough on M4A. She’s got a thousand staffers and millions in the bank, and she’s in the fight for all the right reasons. So things going badly isn’t going to slow her down, nor should it.

Put it another way: Nevertheless, she’ll persist.

And so will I in supporting her as she continues to run. And if, come June, there’s no clear winner, and we have a contested convention, well, then even if she doesn’t get the nomination, I want Elizabeth Warren at the table, with as many delegates as she can get in her pocket, to make sure the people and policies she’s fighting for get their fair share.

Another Example of Why Elizabeth Warren is My Jam

One good thing about Iowa’s lack of expected results is it lets us see how the candidates react to the unexpected, sort of a Rorschach test of their character, if you will. I’m not gonna comment on other campaigns: judge them as you will. But this, this is what I want from my next President, and I submit that maybe you ought to, too:

Seriously, what’s not to love?

Some Quick Reminders for the Iowa Conspiracy Theorists

First and foremost: There’s a paper trail — for the first time, btw, so put that in your pipe and (retrospectively) smoke it — so the results will come in, and probably be reasonably accurate. That they will be muddled because of how many ways the totals are gonna be split, and because — for some reason — they are reporting not one, not two, but three metrics by which a winner might be declared would have been the case even if things went smooth like butter.

Second, and I can’t stress this enough: Iowa doesn’t really matter! The state accounts for a whopping 1% of convention delegates, which is how the party decides who gets the nomination. In fact, the first four states (IA, NH, NV, and SC) only account for about 5% of delegates (the latter two were moved up to help counterbalance the, ahem, whiteness of the traditional first two). The media likes to pretend they matter more than they actually do, because it gives them fodder to create narratives (and winnow the field). But really, we’re not going to have a good idea who’s ahead, behind, or viable going forward til Super Tuesday, when about half the delegates will be allotted in one big day of primary voting.

Third: Of course the app went wrong. It’s a brand new piece of bespoke tech — developed for a complex, idiosyncratic process — that couldn’t be field-tested beforehand because how would you even do that? Add to that that rules were changed in the way the caucuses work (because this ain’t the first time they’ve had problems calling a winner the night or even the week of), and remember that the vast majority of poll workers are retiree volunteers who don’t know a whole lot about the cyber, and the likeliest — even inevitable — outcome is what happened.

Fourth, and really more of an aside: The changes that are fucking this all up were implemented after complaints from Sanders supporters in 2016, who wanted a more transparent process with a paper trail and yadda yadda yadda (instead of, you know, getting rid of these arcane, uninclusive, undemocratic rituals in favor of the simplicity of a primary vote). That these selfsame people — and the bots who love them — are making the biggest stink about what’s going down is both extremely on-brand and perfectly in tune with the tragilarious irony that has characterized this blighted timeline since the Large Hadron Collider was turned on and everyone lost their goddam minds.

Fifth: While the various conspiracies — Russian/Republican ratfucking, DNC scale-tipping against Bernie/Joe/Pete/whoevs — are not unplausible, I urge you recall Hanlon’s Razor, which says, simply:

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So, deep breaths, everybody. Relax. For once, we’ve woken up the day after Iowa without a handy narrative to shape perceptions about the race going forward. The voting’s just started, the race is still tight. Which, you know, accurately reflects the reality.

This is a good thing.

One Good Thing About the Iowa Democratic Caucus Snafu

440px-Private_SNAFU It’s a tossup, right now, whether tonight’s app-related debacle for the Iowa Democratic party is the result of ratfucking — be it Republican or Russian — or just standard issue Democratic rake-stepping, or even just the semi-inevitable buggery when a new tech gizmo is deployed for the first time. Either way it’s giving all of us agita while we wait for the paper/pics of paper to be tallied. The whole thing is pretty on-brand for the twenty-first century.

But there is one silver lining, which is in every explainer published instead of the vote totals (or whatever) and what it all means analysis they all expected to go with, everyone’s finally admitting that Iowa doesn’t mean shit, delegate-wise, and is only important because the caucuses, simply by being first, help shape perceptions and narrative.

“Yet the power of the caucuses is that they can change that state of play. Based on Iowa’s results, candidates believed to be in the top tier can either solidify that status or stumble, and underdogs can either break out or fall flat. Iowa has this effect because it greatly influences the perceptions of the political world — the media, activists, party insiders, donors, the candidates themselves, and voters — about who can win.”

And that, my friends, is a righteous good thing.

All of punditry has been waiting for this night, when they can finally say who’s up or who’s down, who’s a contender, who beat or missed expectations, who should throw in the towel. Every four years, a few hundred thousand white people performing an arcane ritual that has people sorting themselves into physical groups and then performing arcane calculations to allocate delegates who will themselves meet later to perform calculations to allocate delegates, who will themselves blah blah blah so that, come June, 40-odd of 4000-odd delegates to the Democratic Convention can yell their candidate’s name. It’s a ridiculous, outdated process (I, myself, have attended two caucuses, which were such complete shit-shows that I ended up running both precincts because, well, someone had to), a relic from a bygone era of not picking candidates by popular vote. Which is not a good look for a party that takes its name from the word ‘democracy’.

Look, I got nothing against Iowans. But they aren’t even remotely representative of the people who make up/vote for the Democratic party. They’ve had a good thing going these last fifty years, what with the quadrennial boost to their economy. But a tiny, empty, rural state performing an outdated political ritual to allocate their near-inconsequential number of delegates isn’t much better than strange women in ponds distributing swords when it comes to picking a candidate for President.

It’s not like that’s a big secret. But it’s nice to see it said out in the open like that.

Terrell Jermaine Starr on the Iowa Caucuses’ Role in Privileging Whiteness

In the wake of the DNC (“Stepping on our own dicks since 1972!”) changing debate qualifications so Mike Bloomberg gets his moment to shine after almost all the candidates of color have dropped/been forced out — and in these first days of Black History Month — this piece at The Root by Terrell Jermaine Starr resonates even more:

“Basically, Iowa allows white men to shoot their shot when they really shouldn’t even think about trying.

But it does something else far worse: kill the campaigns of non-white candidates. Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker were two of the most resume-ready candidates for president in recent memory and their melanin was icing on the cake. However, neither of them were able to sustain their candidacies, which depended on prioritizing the black voters who were supposed to buoy their campaigns. Julián Castro, a Latino and former Housing and Urban Development secretary who championed racial justice more than any other person on the trail, dropped out in December.

[…]

One has to wonder if any of these candidates would still be in the race if, say, South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi were the first primary states, where conversations around reproductive rights, infant mortality rates and combating racism would be at the top of black voters’ minds. Invariably, candidates would have to center black issues in the early stages of their campaigns and national media would have to shape coverage around these issues because it’s simply too many negroes in those states not to.

[…]

‘Iowa is considered ‘real America’ by far too many journalists and politicians where heartland, Middle America and rural are all proxies for whiteness and centering white political priorities,” Greer said. “And then New Hampshire just one week later presents a lopsided account of the needs, wants, and values of the entire party.’”

https://www.theroot.com/iowa-becky-the-hawkeye-state-is-gentrifying-black-peop-1841387214