A Missourian's first-hand observation of Iowa caucus

Tuesday was full of calls by political pundits and by the Twitterverse to eliminate the Iowa caucus system — after the reporting system of results for the nation’s first presidential contest failed Monday night.

CNN said the debacle — no results due to a failed telephone app — meant the venerable caucus system in Iowa is effectively kaput.

We’ll see.

Joe Biden’s campaign was said to be “livid” after unsuccessfully waiting hours to hear the verdict from the state’s nearly 1,700 caucus sites.

I was at a caucus in Keokuk, Iowa Monday with my eldest daughter.

The locale was a timeworn union hall in a city that is quite dark at night since Keokuk seems devoid of illumined streets.

We also went to a caucus there in 2016.

To get to the caucus room, we passed through a bar and pool room.

There was quite a mix of ages present.

Older people, folks in my demographic (60+), were in the majority but it gladdened me to see that younger people were there and engaged.

All were white - which is also characteristic of the state as a whole.

Seeing the political sausage as it is being made, as you do in the homey environment of Iowa, has long fascinated me.

A woman wearing a lime green tee shirt advertising her support for Elizabeth Warren went around the room handing out homemade cookies.

A man supporting Pete Buttigieg later made the rounds with plates of doughnut holes.

There were 72 people in the conference room, but it had all the feel of a cozy den.

After hearing the caterwauling on the radio on the four-hour drive home to Cape County, I can see in retrospect how the train went off the track.

The person who checked me in as an observer at the caucus site at the Keokuk Labor Temple was brand-new and apologized for not having more information for me.

The precinct captain, Deanne Enderle, told me she was new to the job and apologized if she couldn’t answer my questions — and I had a few.

Her precinct secretary also apologized.

When the leadership says it’s sorry even before the meeting is called to order, trouble may await.

The caucus itself, in precinct KE-1, seemed to go well in real time. We were finished in just over an hour.

The largest support went to Buttigieg — and Warren, Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang effectively tied.

Precinct KE-1 awarded Buttigieg two delegates to the Lee County convention March 21 and the other three candidates got one each.

Joe Biden didn’t reach the viability threshold of 15 % and his supporters declined to join another group during the “realignment” period.

By caucus rules, if your candidate doesn’t make the cut and you don’t “realign,” which is to say, throw your support to someone else, you must leave. They did.

Quietly. Politely. The Biden folks apologized to remainers as they brushed past them as they made their exit.

The Iowa way.

The supporters of the four Democrats deemed “viable” by precinct KE-1 got up and made speeches.

The energetic man backing Yang held up a large stack of fake cash as he made his pitch.

Yang’s singular campaign promise is to give $1,000 to every adult in America.

The entrepreneur calls it a “freedom dividend.”

It was a nice night for this reporter, full of friendly people making their preferences known.

What Iowa does is odd compared to Missouri’s primary voting but it sure does get people talking to each other.

Pleasantly. Without argument. Even if they disagree.

The nation needs to see this behavior more, not less.

All this good feeling was foiled in Iowa by a failed app.

If your radio goes bad in your SUV, you replace the radio, you don’t take the car to the junkyard.

Another way to say it is, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Here’s hoping a fine tradition by our neighbor to the north doesn’t get scrapped because people couldn’t figure out how to use their phones.

Fix the app. Teach people how to use it.

Abandoning traditions - like Iowa's - should be done with great deliberation and not because a candidate got upset or a pundit was enraged because information was not instantaneously transmitted.

The state’s Democratic Party should hire teenagers in every caucus next time and have them send in the results.

That might fix it. It’s worth a try, certainly.

Jeff Long is a sports reporter for the Southeast Missourian and semoball.com. He visited an Iowa caucus location Monday night.