The Iowa fiasco keeps on fiasco-ing Welcome to the Maclean's Politics Insider: America 2020, launched for readers who crave U.S. political news during primary season. If you want to receive this new newsletter, take no action, it will arrive in your inbox every weekday at noon. If you'd rather not receive it, please unsubscribe here. Sanders, satellites, and Iowa: Remember how we were going to find out who won the Iowa Democratic caucuses? That seems like a lifetime ago. After spending days trying to fix the technical glitches that delayed reporting, organizers finally got up to about 97% of the vote, and the winner is... well, it's not exactly clear yet. While Pete Buttigieg was leading in partial results and declared himself the winner, the more recent results have Buttigieg leading Bernie Sanders by only a couple of delegates. Sanders performed very well with "satellite caucuses" — caucuses for Iowans who weren't in the state or couldn't show up in person for other reasons — and once they were added in, his delegate count shot up. Next up, New Hampshire: A sign that Buttigieg's early declaration of victory might have worked for him politically is a daily poll out of New Hampshire. Conducted by the state's 7News and Emerson college, it shows that the day after the Iowa caucuses, Buttigieg jumped four points, cutting into Sanders' still-comfortable lead. It's a reminder that Iowa results aren't significant in terms of delegate count, but because they come first, they can change the perception of some candidates, providing momentum to anyone perceived to have done well. The Iowa fiasco keeps on fiasco-ing: The New York Times had a look at the Iowa vote-counting process and discovered that the state party's self-declared "quality control" problems haven't exactly been fixed: According to a New York Times analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses. In some cases, vote tallies do not add up. In others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates. And in at least a few cases, the Iowa Democratic Party’s reported results do not match those reported by the precincts. The only reassuring thing the Times could find is that there isn't any evidence that the errors are breaking for or against any particular candidate. So it's not a conspiracy, but it does mean, in such a close race, that the public may never really know for sure who won. The Biden campaign starts firing people: Sometimes it seems like the only thing we know for sure about Iowa is that Joe Biden did very badly. After a distant fourth-place finish in a state that loved Barack Obama (whose legacy Biden is claiming to carry on), the campaign announced that Adrienne Bogan, who led their field operations in the state, would be dismissed from the campaign instead of being moved on to other states. Romney's anti-Trump vote draws mixed reactions in Utah: The only Republican Senator who voted to convict in Donald Trump's impeachment trial was Trump's predecessor as Republican presidential nominee, former Massachusetts governor and current Utah Senator Mitt Romney. Although Utah is a heavily Republican state, Republicans there are more divided on Trump's merits than their counterparts in other states, so the Associated Press found a range of reactions to Romney's decision: an older rural resident said he was "furious" and dismissed Romney as jealous of Trump's success, while a young suburbanite was happy that Romney stood up to the president. The Salt Lake City Tribune editorial board praised his decision, but Romney may still be lucky that he doesn't have to run for re-election until 2024. —Jaime Weinman | 
