Election season off to rocky start

All the hype leading up to Tuesday’s caucuses in our next door neighbor Iowa dissipated like a slow-leaking balloon when a new reporting process via app didn’t work correctly. As Iowa Democrats and the rest of the country waited to see who was going to get the big lift from the first state to nominate, results were delayed throughout the night.
    By Wednesday morning, we still didn’t know who the Iowa Democratic overall winner was with just 71% of the vote in.
    It certainly goes to show that technology doesn’t always work, and that you’d better have a good backup system. Iowa did have that system, and it’s counting individual ballots the old way.
    Of course, something like this hasn’t stopped the conspiracy theories out there, especially from the Bernie Sanders camp which believes it was cheated there four years ago. Hard to say I blame them.
    So, now the Democratic candidates for U.S. President are in New Hampshire, not really able to claim how “well” they did in Iowa. Not yet anyway. It kind of took the wind out of some of their sails.
    While I told myself I wouldn’t address it because that’s exactly what she wants, I have to say the efforts to come together in Washington D.C. were not helped by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s actions Tuesday night after President Trump’s State of the Union address.
    I was at a ball game so missed it live, but when I was home to see the reports, 75% of the coverage was video of Pelosi tearing up Trump’s speech in front of the world as he concluded. That’s just what she wants—coverage of her instead of Trump’s speech.
    If Republicans are smart, they’ll ignore her childish, and calculated performance, and move on—maybe to this week’s vote on the two articles of impeachment against the President, with an all-but-certain acquittal expected.
    If this start is a signal of what the 2020 election season will be like, that’s a sad statement about the country’s politics.