LOL, rigged as hell. Pete donated money to the company who made the app that crashed and was counting the votes. Also this just proves the Dems will do anything to hurt Bernie, they don't want him to be the candidate against Trump. I never heard of this Buttigieg guy until this whole debacle. Sounds like they want him to win in order to keep Bernie away who at first glance seemed to be leading the polls.
Trump broke the Democratic Party when he won. It's like Trump is the Patriots, the Democrats are the Falcons and they are still trying to recover from their defeat in 2016.
Honestly this shows how deep the bubble effect goes. Pete's been in the top four for about a year now and the midwest is his strongest region. A lot of polls have been projecting that he'd win Iowa for a while. If you haven't heard of him then that just shows how insular the bubbles are these days. Bernie's one of three people who've been bouncing around at the top in the national polls for a while, but as you lot like to point out, the national vote is almost meaningless in the whole process.
The whole primary/caucus system is terrible for both parties and this one has been an utter shitfest even with the low bar these things set, but a crappy system doesn't mean it's a rigged system. This isn't the first time I've said that on this thread and I suspect it won't be the last (see you guys in four years when nothing changes). It's the same with NFL officiating - just because a lot of individual calls have been terrible doesn't mean the NFL's trying to force a certain outcome. Nor does it mean the referees are in an elaborate gambling ring.
I don’t understand this whole Iowa caucus procedure. Bernie is winning the popular vote but is in second. I guess they have something similar to an Electoral College in Iowa.
You're not the only one who doesn't understand it. Every party in every state does it differently and the result when you put them all together is a case study in what happens when archaic systems don't get updated as well as how ridiculous things can get when you leave everything to be done on a local level (it's the electoral equivalent of scrapping the US Army and instead giving every local government $2 million and telling them to defend themselves).
Pete Buttegieg is winning the popular vote in Iowa at the time of writing, but the primaries and caucuses are all about sending party delegates to the national convention to vote on the party's national candidate. One party in one state might split the delegates among the votes as evenly as possible while another party in the same state might make it winner takes all (so if three candidates each get 24% of the state's vote a fourth candidate might get 100% of the state's delegates by getting 28% of the vote). Or the party might just tell the delegates to not worry about the state's vote and just go with whoever they feel like anyway. So there's no rhyme or reason to it, and there's no real path to victory for any particular candidate. And that's before you get into superdelegates, who are delegates that aren't tied to a state but just vote for whoever they want at the conventions.
This guy explains it quite well.