Iowa

Welcome to Thunderdome, where I have good news, everyone — we have a podcast now! The Spectator’s long-standing DC-focused podcast, The District, is going all Thunderdome for the 2024 primary season. Every week, I’ll be breaking down the latest in the 2024 contests with a pair of Washington insider friends who will give us their experienced political takes on the state of play. In our first episode, we talked about Ron DeSantis’s Iowa launch, Donald Trump’s Covid revisionism, Chris Christie and Mike Pence, and whether RFK Jr. is the start of something bigger on the Democratic side. Listen here today!

Democrats in Washington, DC and Iowa are now led by a pair of election deniers. Following a disastrous cycle, Iowa Democrats have elected one of their party’s most prominent 2020 election deniers to helm them into a critical 2024. The decision comes weeks after House Democrats threw out their old leadership and elected veteran election denier Hakeem Jeffries to run their caucus. In Iowa, Rita Hart — whose 2020 House campaign ended in a six-vote defeat at the hands of now-Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks — won a contentious vote held over Zoom to run the Democratic state party. In the months after the 2020 election, Hart mounted a dubious challenge to Miller-Meeks’s win where she asked the US House of Representatives to overturn her defeat and install her in office anyway.

Who knew Joe Biden was so fortunate? Forget inflation, gas prices, the prospect of World War Three, his regular memory lapses and his son’s indiscretions: it seems the 46th president is in fact the luckiest man in America — as evidenced by the appearance of a bird pooping on him while he delivered a speech on Tuesday. President Biden was at the podium in deep-red Iowa, where his aim was to “visit an ethanol plant, pledge to use executive tools to throttle inflation and explain to his audience how Washington is helping rural communities,” according to the Hill. But if anyone really hit their mark that day, it was the winged assassin above the president, despoiling his sports jacket from a range of several feet... https://twitter.

Asked the morning after the chaotic Iowa caucuses to render judgment about the Hawkeye State’s voting system, Illinois senator Dick Durbin called it 'a quirky, quaint tradition which should probably come to an end'. Why would 'people who work all day, pick up their kids at daycare' head to a caucus site to spend their evening at a stuffy high school gym with a bunch of random strangers? Why indeed, when a relaxing evening binging on Netflix awaits? The fate of the Iowa caucuses is probably sealed. The consensus among all factions of Democrats seems to be that primary elections are easier, safer, more accessible to voters. Head into a voting booth at a convenient time, close the curtain behind you, pull a lever, go home. But that’s exactly the problem.

The results from Iowa are still trickling in, but however much confusion there is in Des Moines, the choices that lie ahead for Democrats are clear. There are some questions the party’s leaders and voters can’t put off answering for much longer. How long will they prop up former Vice President Joe Biden? Whoever is ultimately crowned the winner in Iowa, Biden was among the losers — a distant fourth place finish from the nominal frontrunner and establishment favorite in the kind of state he is supposed to be able to win back from President Trump. We’ve seen establishment candidates survive weak showings in the early states only to right the ship in a state like South Carolina before, usually on the Republican side. But nobody has had to do so from such a position of weakness.

Come on, guys, we all know that Mayor Pete doesn’t come out on top, no matter what the internet says. The dwarf from South Bend is already claiming victory in the disastrous Iowa caucus debacle, but there is absolutely no way Mayor Pete is a viable candidate for the Democratic party for one glaring reason: blacks. Mayor Pete doesn’t even register on polls among black Democrats. That’s 0 percent support. In order to show how down with the struggle Mayor Pete is, he’s posed for the cameras with fried chicken and Al Sharpton, drank malt liquor from a brown paper bag on the streets of Inwood, attended black churches in the Carolinas, and sent out surveys to his staff about microaggressions. White people were prohibited from filling out the survey.

The next time Elizabeth Warren offers you a beer, be sure not to turn your back on her lest she crack you across the back of the head with it. That's the message the Warren camp has sent out with the latest Liz-Bernie spat — just in time for the seventh (I know!) Democratic debate in Iowa tonight. Pulling a dirty trick worthy of Roger Stone, Warren's associates briefed CNN about a December 2018 meeting between the two senators, during which Sanders allegedly said 'he did not believe a woman could win.' Saagar Enjeti of The Hill lays out the apparent Warren strategy nicely: 'Progressives. Allow me introduce you to the media ecosystem that has bedeviled conservatives in the Trump age: Step 1) Leak a bullshit smear sans any real confirmation to CNN.

'Why are you so hooked on that?' Joe Biden asked a reporter in Iowa Thursday. She’d asked him to label President Donald Trump a white supremacist. 'You want me to say the words so I sound like everybody else. I’m not everybody else. I’m Joe Biden.' 'I’ve always been who I am,' the former vice president said. 'It’s like everybody wants everybody to call someone a liar. And then you say - "I don’t call people liars." I say they don’t tell the truth. You want me to say "liar" so you can put it out and you can say "Biden called someone a liar." That’s not who I am. You got the wrong guy.' https://twitter.com/JTHVerhovek/status/1159561051601612802 Of course, this prompted howls of indignation on social media.