Livestream Tonight, 8:45 p.m. ET: Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi Watch Iowa Caucus Results
America This Week's campaign professionals watch the returns come in. Will they be interesting, or just surreal?
We’ll see how this works out, but Walter Kirn and I will be watching C-SPAN this evening as the Iowa Caucus results come in this evening. Click here to join us at roughly 8:45 p.m. Caucusing begins at roughly 7 CT/8 ET, and results supposedly will begin trickling in just before the top of the next hour, though we all know how that worked out in the last cycle. Viewers incidentally can click here for NPR’s result count.
I’m looking forward to live Walter Kirn, and also at least vaguely interested in the result, as experience in the last cycle has taught me to expect shenanigans. But perhaps not! In any case, see you tonight as the White House horse race begins.
Iowans are not surreal. Some candidates and many of the media are. I’ll be at my precinct caucus in three hours. There’s an outside chance that you won’t see me on CNN, but try to enjoy the show anyway.
The thing I hate the most about the Iowa caucuses is that the media pretends they have ANY IDEA about where the delegates will actually end up. In 2012, the first round of voting was basically a three-way tie between Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum, but after the county and state conventions, Paul ended up with 22 delegates to Romney's 6. (Everybody else was shut out.)
Tonight is the first step of the caucus process, not the end of it. (Though that doesn't make for much of a story!)