President Pete! President Pete! chanted the crowd, as ‘Mayor Pete’ was addressing them. He has a shot at it, to win the Iowa primary, but still faces formidable competition from former VP Joe Biden, and from Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the primaries of the other states.
The first of the 2020 United States presidential primary elections is taking place in Iowa tonight.
Iowa has (in my opinion) a super-complicated caucus process. On top of that, the Democratic Party has not been able to get the results out as quickly as expected by everyone. (They are planning to report out an expanded set of voter tallies, and that has evidently slowed the process down).
Anyway .. we will know eventually which of the Democratic candidates prevailed in Iowa, and may he or she go on to do well elsewhere as well. The orangutan in the White House needs to go.
Here’s a caucus scene, one of some 1,700 locations in the state of Iowa. I think this one is a high school gym. Caucus-goers show their support for a candidate by going to the candidate’s post on the floor (lots of support for Buttigieg, Sanders & Warren here; not so much for the other candidates). Candidates that do not get 15% of the total caucus-goers are considered non-viable, and their supporters have to make a second choice (or they can choose to go home). These ‘free agents’ can get lobbied by the other groups, or engage in horse-trading. ‘We will give you 5 people, in return for one state delegate’ (each location has an allotted number of state delegates). At the Iowa state level, all the delegates are then added up to determine the winner of the Iowa caucus, and the No 2, No 3 place and so on. We don’t have a person of color in there with a shot to be the Democratic candidate this year, but we have two women in contention, and wow .. what a ground-breaking campaign from first-ever gay presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.
The first of the 2020 United States presidential primary elections is taking place in Iowa tonight.