Iowa's nightmare revisited: Was correct winner called?

[pnwmom]

63. We have caucuses here and I worked on the referendum to switch to primaries.

(Which won, but the state democratic party successfully sued to keep the caucuses.) So I couldn't disagree with you more about the benefits of caucuses outweighing the disadvantages.

Maybe they're a fun little event in a small town. I wouldn't know about that, living in a metro area with a population in the millions.

As you have pointed out, caucuses don't give equal weight to each vote; delegates represent different numbers of voters in different districts. Caucuses preclude many voters from being able to participate at all, and they require enormous amounts of volunteer time, and too much time even for the voters.

And Iowa's caucus system, put in the spotlight as it was, has needlessly added to the anonymosity and suspicion between supporters of Bernie and Hillary. This was anything but helpful. Thanks to the caucus system, both sides now can think they were somehow cheated.

Since there were only 170K participants this time around, not anywhere close to Obama's numbers, and young people overall did not turn out in the numbers that they did in 2008, I think it is quite possible that Hillary had more support than shows in the delegate count. But we'll never know. What a lousy system. I wouldn't care except it started off the whole country's primary season on a bad foot.

And I consider my own state's caucuses one of the circles of hell.