DEAN'S SYSTEM CRASH IN IOWA

Having recently read this Salon piece on the failure of Dean's internet revolution to translate into electoral victory in Iowa, I was curious. The article only focused on the attitude-based drawbacks of Dean's netroots, and not of any of the practical problems that may have occurred in Iowa.

Luckily, I was fortunate enough, yesterday evening, to have dinner with a real-life volunteer from Dean's Iowa campaign, who was there, and was very involved in Dean's internet strategy, my friend Ping.

I wasn't taking notes at the time, and I only remember bits and pieces, but here's the essence of what he told me: The two biggest factors that caused Dean's loss in Iowa were...

1) His volunteers, while highly motivated, were inexperienced. This isn't really news, I suppose, as it was sort of touched on in the Salon piece, on DailyKos and elsewhere (the "navel-gazing" of Dean captains at precinct meetings, etc)

But more importantly, perhaps, was

2) The Dean campaign had an online (naturally) database information (phone numbers, and so on) of all prospective Democratic caucus voters in Iowa. It was run on a specific type of software, the name of which escapes me at the moment. That system, unfortunately enough, crashed on the day of the caucuses. As a result, it left a situation where frustrated Dean staffers were copying phone numbers by hand. In many cases, they ended up calling some people twice in the same day, a turnoff if there ever was one. As a result, they couldn't get some of the voters they needed to the precincts, and the rest is history, with John Kerry winning big, and Edwards close behind.

Does this provide a complete summary of what happened in Iowa last monday? Certainly not, as there were other issues at play (Ping cites the negative-attack-war between Dean and Gep as a big factor, as do I). But the electronic anomaly that occurred in Iowa is not likely to occur again in New Hampshire and the 2/3 states, so the commentary on how Dean's netroots don't necessarily translate into actual votes should be taken with a fragment of halite.