What went wrong in Iowa?
Four days after the first vote of the Democratic primary race
we still don't know for sure who won
thanks to a catastrophic meltdown
of the app being used by volunteers to log the results.
What seems clear is that Pete Buttigieg and Bernie
Sanders are pretty much tied for first place.
But were the technological problems
all part of a wider conspiracy to keep Bernie Sanders down
as some of his supporters believe?
We've been asked exactly that question
by one of our viewers, Diego Arecha, who has asked:
"Is it possible that this Shadow" -
that's the name of the app - "was deliberately
programmed to malfunction in order to muddy the results
and help out one or more candidates?"
Well, this theory seems to stem from revelations
that both Joe Biden's campaign and that of Pete Buttigieg
have given money to Shadow, the company behind this app.
Could they therefore have been paying for the app
to malfunction and help out their candidates?
Well, actually, the explanation seems far simpler.
Both campaigns seem to have paid Shadow
for a different type of technology,
so-called peer-to-peer texting, which
allows their campaigns to send out thousands of text messages
to supporters and activists across the country all in one
go.
This kind of technology is going to be
very important for the 2020 campaign.
And Shadow is one of just three main companies that offer it
to Democratic candidates.
Moreover, the conspiracy theories don't quite stack up.
Arguably the person who would have stood most
to gain out of a clear result from Iowa
was Pete Buttigieg, whether he came first or second.
He was an outsider candidate who could
have done with the momentum boost of an unexpectedly
strong showing in the first result of the season.
The lesson I think that we should really
take from what happened in Iowa is
about the state of the Democrats' campaign technology.
Four years after the Clinton campaign was taken by surprise
by a more aggressive and more nimble Donald Trump's social
media campaign, many in the party worry that they are still
labouring under a patchy and occasionally faulty campaign
tech.
With nine months to go until the presidential election,
that should be the real worry for Democratic supporters.