Election Season

“Why, why why, could they not have had this reporting problem in 2004? Asking for a friend.”
 —Late Monday night tweet about the Iowa caucuses from Joe Trippi, veteran Democratic strategist who was Howard Dean’s campaign manager in 2004

Remember that old Chinese curse about living in interesting times? I wonder if whoever came up with that was thinking about something like the coronavirus. Or maybe early 21st-century election campaigns?

For the next few days I am in the interesting position of observing fascinating campaigns in both of my countries. The American one will go on quite a bit longer, but the Irish one will end on Saturday—closing an election period with the very civilized lifespan of a mere 25 days.

Usually, the only questions in an Irish election are as follows: will it be Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael that will form a government and will they have to find a coalition partner? If the polling is to be believed, however, things could be different this time. A major opinion poll released yesterday has Sinn Féin in first place with 25 percent, followed by Fianna Fáil at 23 percent and Fine Gael (the current government party) at 20 percent. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.8 percent.

Typical Irish election
social media humor

Opinion polls, of course, are not destiny, as people who dislike Brexit and Donald Trump know all too well. For whatever reason, Sinn Féin has historically underperformed its opinion polling, but of course that will continue to be true only until it isn’t. If Sinn Féin does indeed come in first, it will be huge. It will mean that Irish voters will have taken a major step away from the legacy factions of the 1922-23 Civil War toward a party that is a strange mixture of nationalist and socialist ideas and of which the primary raison d’être is the reunification of the island’s 32 counties. My own personal political intelligence (I follow a few college-age Irish people on Twitter) tells me that many young, as well as some not-so-young, voters are enthused about the prospect of a left-wing coalition that could comprise the Green Party, Sinn Féin, and a collection of other smaller parties and independents.

What about older—and generally more reliable—voters? The country is actually in pretty good shape in terms of employment and the economy, but there is a lot of unease over hospital waiting times and a persistent homeless crisis. Moreover, a string of spectacularly violent incidents involving feuding criminal gangs has created an impression of things spinning out of control. The polling might indicate that people are looking for change even if they little to complain about their own current personal circumstances.

Meanwhile, how about things in the U.S.? I have to confess that I got a frisson of déjà vu this morning when a radio bulletin informed me there was hiccup with the results of the Iowa caucuses. This follows the rather shocking discarding of the Des Moines Register poll, which is traditionally the final pre-caucus tea-leaves reading. If one is prone to conspiracy theories, one might be tempted to fear a cover-up or an attempt at massaging results. Other details that feed this paranoia: earlier polls were suggesting that Bernie Sanders would win and the fact that, in certain banana republics, delayed election results are a warning sign of mischief.

Worryingly, this is more likely to be something worse than vote tampering. It could be sheer incompetence. Think about it. The very same party that has been harping for more than three years about Russian hacking into social media and U.S. elections is not only the same one whose last presidential candidate was found to have been conducting all her government business on an unsecured email server in a closet in her home but which is now the same party that has attempted to collate its first 2020 voting results with a new app that did not work.

I’ll be honest. I’m getting very worried about the Democratic Party. Not only did it clearly fix its presidential nomination process four years ago for a pre-determined candidate, but this time around it seems determined to sabotage itself by frittering away its two-year term in control of the House of Representatives by doing nothing but relitigating the last election and offering no clear-cut vision for the next election. That is not to say that there are not new and interesting ideas out there in the Democratic Party, but the people who run the party seem determined to tap the energy of those ideas without seriously entertaining the ideas themselves.

For more than three years now Democrats have lectured us that President Trump is a threat to democracy because of his authoritarian tendencies. They impeached him for seeking an investigation of a political opponent. The problem is that half the country looks at the Democratic Party and sees it doing exactly what it accuses the president of doing: using its political office to launch endless investigations of a political enemy. What else does the Democratic congressional majority have to show for the past year?

If voters have concerns about the integrity of American elections, will they really be inclined to turn to the people in charge of this year’s Iowa Democratic caucuses? And which happens to be the same party that was so concerned about democracy that it engaged in a completely quixotic attempt to bar the other party’s president from being able to run for re-election?