This year’s caucus results were chaotic and confusing but finally came to a consensus.
What happened that made it so different than the others in the past? The Democratic party used a smartphone app that took the blame for the indecipherable results.
With little understanding of how the app worked and more frustrations that continued to stack with the app, workers moved on from the high-tech registration and went back to what they knew best, calling in the results. With a high demand of about 1,700 precincts calling in to report, the phone lines became overloaded with calls forcing many to wait more than an hour on caucus night and the next morning.
All in all, for the Iowa Democratic Party, it was a headache. But as of Feb. 9, we can finally say, with clarity and positivity, the final results of both caucuses.
With a landslide of more than 31,038 votes, President Donald Trump won with a total of 97.1% of Iowa votes allowing him to win 39 delegates. Bill Weld came in second with a total of 426 votes, which is 1.3% of votes and one delegate. Joe Walsh had a total of 348 votes, 1.1% of votes and no delegates. One hundred fifty-one votes represented votes for other candidates.
For Sioux County, Trump received 403 total votes, Walsh received 15 votes, Weld received eight votes and two votes were cast for others.
“We had over 50 people at our caucus,” said Kaelin Alons, a Northwestern student who participated in the Republican caucus. “It took just under an hour when all things were said and done.”
As for the Democratic caucus, things were slightly different.
With a total of 2,500 campaign events for the 2020 election, the final results were closer than the Republican party. For the entire state of Iowa, Pete Buttigieg won with a total of 564 State Delegate Equivalents (SDEs), 26.2% of the SDEs and 13 delegates. Bernie Sanders came in second with a total of 562 SDEs, 26.1% of the SDEs and 12 delegates. Elizabeth Warren was the final person to make it on the podium with a total of 388 SDEs, 18% of the SDEs and eight delegates. The last to make it on the top five were Joe Biden with a total of 340 SDEs, 15.8% of the SDEs and six delegates, and Amy Klobuchar with a total of 264 SDEs, 12.3% and one delegate. Andrew Yang only got 22 total SDEs leaving him with 1.0% of the SDEs in Iowa.
In Sioux County, Klobuchar had 166 SDEs. Warren had 158 SDEs. Sanders had 131 SDEs. Buttigieg had 123 SDEs and Biden, 79 SDEs. With no movement from the state total, Yang had 44 SDEs.
Caleb Arnett was one of the many NW students that went to the Democratic caucus. As someone that had done the mock caucus prior, he had an exceptional understanding of how it felt doing everything.
“The Democratic caucuses in Orange City went insanely well, with a record turnout of about 300 voters across the two precincts. Many of those voters were first-time Democrats,” Arnett said. Overall, he said the caucus only took an hour and a half.
While they began with a rocky start, the Iowa caucuses were still a witness to other states, as they started the wave of voting for this year’s presidential election.
