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The Iowa caucus fiasco is a metaphor for the state of US democracy

Every droplet of publicity over this embarrassment is ingraining the notion of Democrats – their candidates, by unfair association, as well as their electoral organisers – as hapless amateurs who couldn’t oversee a church tombola without recourse to legal action

Matthew Norman
Tuesday 04 February 2020 14:30 GMT
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US Election: What is the Iowa caucus?

It was always likely to require an event of epic oddity to turn Bernie Sanders into the world’s oldest and most Jewish Will.i.am tribute act. That event (more precisely, that non-event) duly arrived in Iowa a few hours ago.

Bernie had a feeling, he told supporters in an inter-caucus debacle speech, that tonight’s gonna be a good night. A good good night.

Whether the day after justifies that optimism remains, at the time of writing, unknown. But hypernerds like me who devoted that entire night to listening to CNN’s capacious panel of talking heads talking about nothing will wearily assume that in no way was this a good night for anyone other than Donald Trump.

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