Thread by @AlexandraErin

...and overnight they've got a trending hashtag calling for Tom Perez (the head of the DNC) to resign.

See, this is why I made a thread about understanding the process and DNC vs. state party organizations. Tom Perez had nothing to do with last night.

Every state party organization runs itself. The DNC is a coordinating committee. It's not a top-down thing.

Do I need to re-up my thread about how there isn't actually such an organization as The Democratic Party or The Republican Party?

Yes. He has absolutely no authority, and frankly if the DNC tried to get more involved in state delegate selection/primaries, the people howling about "DNC rigging" would have actual cause to howl about it.

https://twitter.com/GhoulofUpstate/status/1224642881916268544

I don't like the DNC, I don't trust the Democrats to be anything more than a useful bulwark against the Republicans until we can destroy the Republican Party, but whatever happened to Know Thy Enemy?

I know some people thought my first thread of the wee hours today was unfair or mean or whatever but seriously, the DNC is not The Democrats and the DNC is not all-powerful in Democratic affairs and the DNC does not run state-level business.

The DNC doesn't run your primary. Local volunteers do. Why? For the same reason former Clinton campaign people are making election apps: because in politics the work gets done by the people who show up to do it.

Everywhere you look in politics you're going to find former campaign officials working on other campaigns and on election infrastructure and on polling and data analysis, and none of this is suspicious because who else exactly is going to do this stuff?

It's a world of small overlapping circles and sure that can be cliquey and inside baseball but the people who show up to do the work are the people whose fingerprints are on the work when it's done. There's no avoiding that.

Am I so naive to say that none of these people bring agendas and biases with them? Of course not. But if you agreed with their agendas and biases you wouldn't think it was a biased agenda, you'd be glad that someone is doing What's Right For The Country.

The whole Shadow app thing could be sketchy as it sounds. Or it could be a bunch of bright-eyed people who were dead sure that Technology Will Make Things Better and didn't actually have the right background or think to ask the right questions or test it the way it would be used.

(E.g., I saw a report that the app clears its forms every time the screen goes off/times out. How do you miss that in testing? By only have people who know the app testing it, with dummy data sets that don't require squinting, tabulation, or verification.)

It's very easy to make an app that works perfectly in every situation the developer thinks to try but which is utterly unsuited for use by the general public. Very easy to make an app that seems intuitive to anyone in the development loop but actually requires inside knowledge.

And to be clear this isn't a defense. "Anybody could have made these mistakes" is why Anybody shouldn't have thought they can magically modernize the caucus system by throwing together an app.

And I have questions I want to see answered, about who paid for what and why. But if there was malice and manipulation, there was also incompetence, because there's no way whatever actually happened was the plan.

Anyway.

Tom Perez didn't decide that Iowa should have a caucus. Tom Perez didn't run the caucus. If Tom Perez had said two words about how Iowa should have run the caucus, I am confident the Sanders campaign would have quite rightly called foul about DNC interference.

The DNC can't impose a primary. Iowa needs to fix Iowa.