In late January, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., took his rural Rust Belt revival message to places like Orange City, Iowa, a place where books about homosexuality had been burned. He drew a crowd of more than 200 in that deep-red town of 6,000 in a county that voted 6 to 1 for Donald Trump. They had seldom so much as seen a Democrat before.

Mayor Pete stumped Storm Lake, my town of about 10,500, four times. He twice called me for interviews, in which he candidly discussed his views on race and owned the actions of South Bend’s police department. He talked about how immigrants had revitalized both his Indiana town and Storm Lake. About how agriculture could lead the way out of our climate crisis by capturing carbon. About how we can treat each other with decency.

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That’s how you win Iowa. You show up. You understand the issues and you press the flesh in 99 counties. You meet real people and hear about real concerns (not that much about impeachment). And then you organize.

Opinion Build your own New Hampshire primary Play the Post Opinions Simulator to see what might happen in the Democratic primary.

But late into this week we didn’t know for certain who did best because a cellphone app to report precinct results to the state party didn’t work. The app was imposed on Iowa and Nevada, another caucus state, by the Democratic National Committee as part of a transparency push. We used to count heads and phone it in to Des Moines. That worked well enough, but cable news producers grew impatient.

The app, which wasn’t publicly tested for fear of hacking, failed. Iowans looked incompetent. Everyone who has complained about Iowa going back to 1980 found a new reason to complain. As a result, now, the caucuses are toast. History. It was fun while it lasted.

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They were born in response to the smoky backrooms of the disastrous Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago. The caucuses were supposed to take power out of the hands of the bosses and put it in the hands of the people to hash out, in a neighborly way, the party platform and elect delegates to the county convention. Iowa’s role to pick a winner was assigned by the media. Our job is to narrow the field, as we did this year, taking the card down from 25 candidates to about five. We select the losers, not the winner.

By and large, it worked. The caucuses themselves ran without a hitch. We enjoyed each other’s company over cookies. The app failed, not the process.

America will lose that reliable filter if Iowa is jettisoned because a cellphone app failed to work. That will be a shame.

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But it will be good for Iowa. The flood of nasty TV ads, the invective on social media, even the attempted bribing of politicians in what was a squeaky-clean state have corroded our politics and civic discourse. “Iowa Nice” is not so nice anymore. Our heels are dug in. We are more poised to punch someone than to buy them a beer and laugh about Bernie and Joe and The Donald.

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Let all that bile flow someplace else.

In the future a fellow like Pete Buttigieg will have a much harder time getting a hearing. And he won’t be mucking around on an organic farm to learn how agriculture could suck 15 percent of the carbon out of the air and plant it in the soil. Or how the elderly cope with prescription drug costs.

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Go have your super-regional primaries. Score one for the swamp.