Brackeen at Biden HQ in Iowa.
Darryl Brackeen Jr. saw the Iowa caucus up front Monday — and came away persuaded that there must be a better way to start selecting a president.
And not just because the party screwed up the vote count.
Brackeen, a New Haven alder, traveled to Cedar Rapids to serve as a precinct captain in a Democratic nominating caucus for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. He was assigned to corral 40 committed Biden supporters to a Monday evening caucus in the town of Marion, right outside Cedar Rapids.
“I knocked on the doors of everybody” on the Biden list over the weekend, Brackeen reported in an interview Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Then on Monday he returned to make sure they made it to Marion City Hall, where the precinct’s caucus was taking place in the combined council/mayoral chambers.
Thirty-seven of the 40 made it to the caucus and held firm for Biden, getting him over the threshold of 15 percent of the 116 eligible caucus participants present to earn the campaign a delegate.
Bernie Sanders drew more support in the room, Brackeen reported. Elizabeth Warren didn’t make the 15 percent threshold in the first round. But in a second round of voting, Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang supporters — and even three Sanders first-round backers — moved over to Warren’s side to win her a delegate. Biden gained no new supporters in the second round.
Brackeen with Biden in Iowa.
So Brackeen knew the Marion results when he left the building. But by the end of the night no one had any official results from any caucuses in Iowa. For a variety of reasons, including a new app that apparently crashed, the vote-counting process was thrown into chaos.
“Should Iowa be the first one out of the gate? Should the caucus” process pick delegates? Brackeen asked rhetorically Tuesday in the WNHH interview.
His answer: no. Not just because of the confusion over the counting. But because of the fact that 91 percent of the Iowa caucusgoers statewide were white, only 3 percent African-American.
“We need a more diverse lineup,” said Brackeen, who is African-American. “The state is not diverse.” He said he and his wife Chaz Brackeen, who also worked for Biden for the caucus, “were little sprinkles” in the white Iowa sea.
(Brackeen also offered his Iowa take in this interview with WBUR’s “Here & Now.”)
Brackeen is returning home for a couple of weeks. Then he plans to head south to work for Biden’s campaign in the North Carolina and South Carolina primaries.
Click on the video to watch the full interview with Darryl Brackeen Jr. on “Dateline New Haven.” The episode also included an interview with contractor/activist Rodney Williams.
This AM I heard an interview on PBS with an Iowa official who said that her group's attempt to report the votes via the App failed and waiting in the telephone queue took so long that they tried the App again and realized a mistake had been made in using the App, but were able to report easily on the second try.
Training on the App was optional and it may be that most users never took the training.
There was no hacking or failure of the App if this is true.
Still the caucuses are an awkward way to determine votes.
Ranked Choice Voting is straightforward in comparison.