The Iowa Caucuses exist in a netherworld now, sort of like Schrodinger’s Primary. The election is both over and not over in the same moment, and depending on if it’s being observed. Sanders was the clear electoral winner with a statistical tie with Pete Buttigieg for the state delegate equivalent, a local parallel of the electoral college. What emerged from the static and straight-up confusion of the night showed us a new vision of Democratic Party elections: Shadow, Inc Politics. No one wins, everyone is confused all the time, and there are no real voters. Empty candidates now run on apps, become the app, and the results are imaginary until an invisible person just says so.
The software behind the colossal fuckup known as the Iowa caucuses was developed by a for-profit company called Shadow, Inc. I know, it’s a bit on the nose, they might as well have called themselves Ratfuckers, LLC. If you wrote this name in a movie, people think you were writing a not-terribly interesting parody. “Too obvious,” they’d say. We have the privilege of living inside of a self-parody, where an unnecessary, shoddy app creates mass chaos in the very first primary of this never-ending election cycle.
Here’s the story behind this company in a nutshell: Shadow, Inc was launched by a parent investor called ACRONYM (a dark money slush fund) after the Iowa Democratic Party hired Shadow to develop a new tracking system for their infamously complicated primary system. Various members of Shadow were former staff of Hillary Clinton, Obama, and other establishment Democratic staff. The app was thrust upon untrained caucus staff the day before the primary, weren’t really taught how to use it, and left to their own the night of.
Right after the debacle, a strange series of connections began to emerge. The Great Ratfuck had begun. Shadow, Inc and the Buttigieg campaign are troublingly intertwined with deep links to serious anti-Sanders forces. In July 2019, the Buttigieg campaign paid Shadow $42,500 for “software rights and subscriptions”. (Iowa hired the company in November of that same year.)
A week later, Ben Halle, the brother of the husband of Acronym’s CEO was hired as the Buttigieg Iowa Communications Director. His brother Michael Halle, the husband in question, was recently responsible for shitting the bed running Richard Cordray’s disastrous 2018 Ohio gubernatorial campaign in a year where Ohio Democrats lost nearly every statewide race. Michael Hale is husband of Tara McGowarn, ACRONYM’s CEO. The CEO of Shadow Inc, Girard Niemira, was Director of Product for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, as well as a former CTO and COO of ACRONYM. They’re all just a group of friends giving each other jobs to colossally fuck up, it seems.
Caucus workers didn’t know how to use the app, data wasn’t being transferred correctly, results were compiling too slow. The app had serious security concerns. The Buttigieg campaign pushed to cancel the release of the critical final Des Moines Register polls due to a “coding error”. There were rounding errors and straight-up miscalculations. The stupid NY Times Election Needle showed a 98% Buttigieg victory, then it had to be taken to the asylum, only to reappear lobotomized later as a shell of its former self.
And to top it off, Buttigieg himself falsely claimed victory before the final vote tallies, and even after 99% of the results, Sanders had correctly claimed a straight up vote victory. His organization in Iowa had kept meticulous, transparent records that ended up confirming the actual result. By then the damage was done. Operations like the Buttigieg campaign decide if they can’t really win, they can certainly muddy the water enough that no one will notice they lost.
There’s so much weird, stupid shit about this goddamn app:
- the HQ of Shadow was a former WeWork office
- the Twitter avi of the CEO of Shadow’s parent company is shown reading the book Dark Money
- PIN codes for app logins were posted by the Iowa Comms Director
- Co-founder of Acronym was also founder of Dollar Shave Club
- Engineers who built it were basically on their first job
To put this in perspective, if what happened in the Iowa Caucus had happened in Venezuela, we’d be fueling bombers right now.
“Let’s just slap an app on it!” was the thinking. This is the future of the establishment Democratic Party: all processes must be governed by a type of technology, and not a type of technology that can or will work very well. Liberal politics are about the appearance of governing and leadership, not the act of it. That’s at the desolate core of liberalism: it’s all for show, a plastic bag whipping across a weed-covered parking lot. The same mold just gets a fresh coat of paint. A broken lamp post flickers over a Gucci pop-up store.
The vapid candidacy of Pete Buttigieg exemplifies this as a buttoned-down, hollow stump speech delivered by a trained but pampered boy. Buttigieg is an especially manufactured candidate, like he was assembled in a factory. He has the intense emptiness of a liberal Patrick Bateman, or a killer robot who has located their target. His persona, platform, and affect screams Debate Nerd, but one that has been plugged into a malfunctioning evil supercomputer.
An app like this is the future for the Democratic Party establishment because on the surface, it appears to need no additional people to run it. Neoliberal politicians have a sneering disgust for the unwashed masses for what they consider to be a Third World state like Iowa. Their own voters in these states are seen as dirty, ignorant, lower class rubes honking for more fried dough. “If only we could have the clean, cold perfection of a GUI and tap our policies on and off,” they whisper erotically.
It’s a disturbing love affair with technology because a web app is safe and distant – no emotional risk involved. Nothing can hurt you or disappoint you the way a biting personal comment or a booing crowd can. No dirty people, no screaming, no smells, no poverty. You’re given a complete type of control over the way you can display your world. GUIs are smooth, antiseptic.
The tech asks nothing of them, save a login and password, and exists within a bloodless hierarchy of managerial metrics. Emotions and mass movements are messy, they’ll include too many gross people with problems. And the last thing they’ll stomach is an election with actual voters.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.