DES MOINES After Iowas Democratic caucuses melted down into a long night of technology glitches and error-riddled results, Laura Hubka, the chairwoman of the Howard County Democrats, got up the next morning and faced the aftermath at the grocery store.
The Democrats she met in the aisles of her local Fareway were edgy: How had it gone so wrong? And, more important, what did this mean for November?
Aside from hoping to beat President Trump in a state he captured from Democrats in 2016, Iowa Democrats are trying to hold on to two newly won congressional seats and unseat a Republican senator. And now conservatives were crowing: If Iowas Democrats could not even run their own first-in-the-nation caucus, what shot did they have at their bigger election-year goals?
Its not been an easy week, Ms. Hubka said. Im just kind of tired.
A week after the caucus fiasco, the hangover lives on. Iowa Democratic Party leaders are still mired in questions about their leadership and the accuracy of the caucus results as the campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., asked for reviews of dozens of precincts.
In an instantly symbolic moment on Monday, Troy Price, the state Democratic chairman, was speaking at a news conference in Des Moines when the partys logo fell off his lectern and clunked to the floor.
Until last week, Democrats were hopeful about their recovering fortunes in Iowa, which has been a bellwether in the last three presidential elections. In 2018, they won two of the states four congressional seats from Republicans.
But in a state where Democrats say they are also fairly accustomed to disappointing election nights, some said last weeks debacle would not dampen their enthusiasm this fall. They were motivated to vote by far more urgent issues, such as protecting their Medicaid coverage, struggling crop prices and the toll of the administrations trade war on farmers.
Ill still vote, said Becci West, who manages a pizzeria in Marshalltown and has a 13-month-old daughter. She was one of the last mothers to deliver her baby before the local hospital shut down its obstetrics ward. Health care is important to me.
Four years ago, Ms. West said, she voted Libertarian when Marshall County swung by 18 points into Mr. Trumps column. Two years after that, in the midterms, the county was part of a Democratic surge that unseated a two-term Republican congressman and elected Abby Finkenauer, a Democrat who stressed her rural roots and familys union ties. Now, like so many counties spreading east from Des Moines to the Mississippi River, it is a jump ball.
Democrats across Iowa said they worried the caucus turmoil would amplify the problems of a disappointing turnout. The caucuses were attended by 176,000 people, about 3 percent more than those who showed up in 2016, and far less than the 300,000 some campaigns had prepared for.
In some rural precincts, volunteers were distressed that only 15 or 20 people showed up to school gyms and civic-center basements where twice that many had come in past years.
I do fear that people who came on Monday will never caucus again, said Debra Zupke, who volunteered to run her tiny precinct caucus in Scott County, in eastern Iowa. Who tried to become involved and were turned off by what happened. But I do think there is a good core of people who are energized.
In Marshalltown, Kristal Acevedo De Bogue, 30, caucused for the first time last Monday, supporting Mr. Sanders, who won the county. Afterward, she said she grew increasingly suspicious of the entire process as she tracked the halting release of results that have been revised and corrected and re-examined again and again.
It did make me a little leery of the whole thing, Ms. Acevedo said. I dont have a lot of confidence in the results.
In West Des Moines, Judy Zobel was ready to dump the caucuses she helped to run.
I feel so unengaged now, she said.
She said she received no training in how to use the faulty results-reporting app, and then gave up trying to phone in her precincts results to a jammed-up hotline. She ended up driving them over to a local Democratic collection point.
I think the best thing in the world is just to do away with the caucuses, she said. Take a vote and have a paper backup.
But several rural Democrats said they were troubled by the idea of moving the first contest of the presidential primaries out of Iowa.
Yes, they acknowledged, the caucuses can feel like an anachronism: complicated, time-consuming, exclusionary to anyone who cannot afford child care or a missed shift.
But they said losing a monthslong parade of candidates who stream through tiny towns to talk farm-country issues could be a death blow for rural Democrats, who are still struggling to convert anti-Trump sentiment into local election wins in places where the president remains popular.
Several Democrats said they were frustrated by the partys response up and down the line and impatient for an independent investigation to explain the cascading problems. One county chairman has called on the state and national leaders to resign.
In Tama County, Dave Degner, a truck driver and county Democratic chairman running for State Senate, was less concerned about any long-term damage when the country seemed to have such a short-term memory.
Were living in an era where therell be another scandal, another tweet, something thats going to have everybody wound up, he said. And the caucuses? Just another blip in the news cycle that nobodys going to remember.
Michael Wines contributed reporting.
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Can Iowas Democrats Rebound From the Caucus Fiasco? - The New York Times