THE LEDE

If you’d asked me two years ago who would win Iowa, I might have predicted roughly this week’s outcome — with one exception: Whatever you think of Pete Buttigieg, his rise has been remarkable.

The Media and the Party: The overwhelming impression you have in Iowa at this time of year is of a tiny, overwhelmed, and rusted-out party apparatus, overgrown and overwhelmed by a rainforest of media. That’s the big story of the past century of politics — how media has replaced the old structures — and one way to see the confusing mess was that the party failed to deliver results fast enough for its masters on cable news, and it will pay for it.

Bernie in Iowa: Many of us in the media dismissed Sanders in 2016, and it would be unreasonable not to step back from what's happening now and realize that he likely won the most votes in the most important early state. He did it by energizing his base of support without broadening it, traveling with high-profile, sometimes divisive, figures of the left like Michael Moore and Rep. Ilhan Omar.

The recent meltdown deepened his supporters’ sense of a system rigged against them — and while not all the specifics of those charges are true, there’s a broader way in which the Democratic Party’s failure to deliver what feels like legitimately democratic results makes his case for him.

READ RECEIPTS

Evan Henshaw-Plath

I texted this week with Evan Henshaw-Plath, better known as @Rabble, a web developer who was part of the team that wound up building Twitter, whose thread on what went wrong in Iowa was widely shared this week.

BEN SMITH: Hey - thank you for doing this, and I wonder if to begin with you could send over a selfie and tell me what you're working on in your day job today? IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Selfie of Evan Henshaw-Plath

EVAN HENSHAW-PLATH: Right now I'm working on a startup to create a better platform for social media, planetary.social. It's based on an open protocol so we can manage the public sphere as a commons instead of something any one person controls. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Tweet from @rabble reading: If you want to understand what happened with Shadow and the failure of the Iowa Caucus app you have to understand how electoral campaign tech work is done and funded. Let me tell you a story to make sense of it.

BEN SMITH: I'm reaching out because you had this very convincing thread, which I'll link to, about the failure of Democrats to build good tech. Was there a specific moment that opened your eyes to that?

EVAN HENSHAW-PLATH: Figuring out how to use technology for social change has been something I've been working on since the 90's, from electoral campaigns through advocacy and creating social media platforms. I did a bunch of work in the 2004 cycle which lead to tech platforms around text messaging, a tool we called txtmob, then we used that as one of the models for creating twitter. After leaving odeo (which created twitter) I worked with creating software for advocacy and civic tech.

EVAN HENSHAW-PLATH: It's something I've been around for years, but in 2016 I decided to get more involved and started working on the opensupporter.org standard to sync democratic party related constituent data between systems and created a tool affinity.works, which was only a very limited success.

After 2016, there was a lot of interest in improving the tech stack on the democratic side of the isle. I got to know funders, builders, and the users of the applications. As a technologist it's easy to assume the problem is the tech itself. In reality it's a institutional problem with the way we use, create, and fund technology. It's not just political and advocacy campaigns. The work of GDS in the UK, and USDS/18F/Code For America in the US are looking at solving the same problems of how we develop and use technology for government.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Tweet from @BCAppelbaum reading, ''I'm not super clear on why it's OK for the entire financial system to be online but somehow impossible to safely use the Internet for counting votes. BEN SMITH: (This, from the Times editorial writer, is a pretty common thing to say. Where's the mistake?'' EVAN HENSHAW-PLATH: The financial system is highly regulated with lots of third party checks and controls. It's also setup to allow for an acceptable level of fraud that we shouldn't accept in our electoral system.

BEN SMITH: You've been casting the Shadow mess as an operational/structural problem. A lot of Sanders supporters see it as a corruption problem, and perhaps as rigged specifically against him. Do you think that's at all true? EVAN HENSHAW-PLATH: ''Never attribute to malice which can adequately explained by...'' I hosted Sanders volunteers in my house for months in the 2016 cycle, although this cycle I'd be just as happy with Warren. I don't think it's as corruption against Sanders. What we have here is institutional failure to fund and support good and appropriate technology.

BEN SMITH: And finally -- what makes you most nervous about the November election?

EVAN HENSHAW-PLATH: I'm most nervous that we'll put our hopes on technology, quick fixes, the next social platform or tool. What wins elections is people organizing. It's what helped the democrats reclaim the house in 2018, and it's what will win the White House in 2020. BEN SMITH: Thanks for taking the time! EVAN HENSHAW-PLATH: No problem, thanks for reaching out.

ON THE TRAIL WITH BUZZFEED NEWS

If you were too busy thinking about Iowa and missed it, Trump was acquitted in the Senate. Here’s the coverage from the Hill team.

From Nidhi and Henry: Joe Biden really blew it in Iowa, so what happens now?

What did go well in Iowa? The Republican caucuses. More here from Miriam and Rosie.

Bernie Sanders is having a very weird week, Ruby reports.

Molly went to Pete Buttigieg’s rally in New Hampshire the day after Iowa, and he...did not mention Iowa at all.

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