Mike Bloomberg won the Iowa caucuses [View all]

[Zorro]

The Democratic candidate who gained the most from the unmitigated debacle in Iowa is not Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders, though both have claimed victory there. The biggest winner was Mike Bloomberg.

The billionaire former New York mayor entered the race with a novel strategy of skipping the first four states, hoping the results were a discouraging muddle, and using television ads and paid campaign staff to put himself in contention on Super Tuesday. This approach was, and remains, a real long shot. But the morning after the Iowa fiasco, Bloomberg announced he would double his spending on television ads, which had already approached saturation levels. He does not have a reputation for knowingly throwing good money after bad. The impossible now looks merely improbable.

From Bloomberg’s point of view, the campaign thus far has gone better than he had a right to hope. His stated thesis for his campaign is that President Trump must be defeated at all costs and that none of the other candidates is likely to beat him. He hopes to sell himself as the genuine article to Trump’s fakery: an actual billionaire with the management skills to turn the country around. If one of the candidates who competed in Iowa were emerging as a strong front-runner, Bloomberg could look more like a self-indulgent ego-tripper than a potential savior. But that hasn’t happened. And the chaos in the Democratic Party and Trump’s White House are making Bloomberg’s argument for him.

In a misguided attempt to make the caucus process more transparent and efficient, Democratic Party officials in Iowa inadvertently made it into an embarrassing display of dysfunction. They altered procedures that Iowa voters were accustomed to, and not everybody understood the new rules. They made it unclear how victory would ultimately be measured. Most fatefully, they threw an untested cellphone app into the mix. What could possibly go wrong?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mike-bloomberg-won-the-iowa-caucuses/2020/02/06/aa110f1e-4928-11ea-b4d9-29cc419287eb_story.html