DES MOINES, IOWA—In April of 1980, I covered a very famous footrace in which we did not know the name of the true winner for a week. That true winner was a Canadian woman named Jacqueline Gareau. The announced winner at the finish of the actual race was an American woman named Rosie Ruiz. Up until this very moment, that was the strangest competition of any kind that I had been around in a professional capacity. It should not take a week to decide who won something. That’s not competition. That’s professional wrestling.

So here we are, many hours after the high school gymnasiums and rec centers have been swept clean, and thousands of Iowans have gone back to their lives unencumbered by Scandinavian film crews. And we still don’t know who won the Iowa caucus. We need not belabor the facts of the case. The Iowa Democratic Party clearly could screw up a two-car funeral if you spotted it the hearse. The app didn’t work. The party bunkered itself as soon as the magnitude of the derp became clear. At the small precinct where I attended a caucus, the party didn’t even manage to get the proper paperwork to the people organizing the event, and that was long before the general meltdown.

And we still don’t know who won.

Bernie Sanders was highly competitive here, but you wouldn’t know it listening to Pete Buttigieg. KEREM YUCEL Getty Images

Which left us with a festival of the absurd on Monday night. I thought Amy Klobuchar was sharp in being first to the microphone, but she likely is going to finish fourth here in a neighboring state that ought to have been attuned to her pitch. Joe Biden appeared to have taken a thorough pounding, but we don’t know that for certain because we don’t know who won. Pete Buttigieg appears to have done well, and he gave a triumphal speech in which he gave no indication that anyone else had competed in Iowa, even though Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren appeared to have locked him up in a dead heat. Given that it was his campaign’s complaint that scuttled the last Des Moines Register poll, and now that he’s walked out of a murky process pretending to be JFK at the Brandenburg Gate, Buttigieg is threatening to become the Democratic Mitt Romney, the candidate whom all the other candidates detest. And all these speeches were essentially exercises in fiction, because we still don’t know who won.

But there is one number of which everybody is certain, and it is the number of maximum distress for those people who believe that the primary goal of this election is to eliminate the ongoing threat that is the presidency El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. Even the Iowa Democratic Party is sure that the promised maximum turnout did not materialize; the numbers are said to be roughly identical to those of 2016 and far off the record turnout of 2008, when Barack Obama set the place on fire. The party and most of the campaigns were united in their hope that turnout for this year’s caucuses would be closer to that number than to the results of the fight between Sanders and Hillary Rodham Clinton here four years ago. We can safely say that the campaign leaves Iowa with a quite palpable enthusiasm gap.

Yes, this likely is the death knell for Iowa in terms of its pride of place in the Democratic nominating process. This is the third presidential cycle in a row in which Iowa was unable to report its results in a timely manner, and this time, the process was so shoddy that it not only couldn’t produce legitimate results, but also it has turned into a hothouse for conspiracy theories and disinformation. Joe Biden, of all people, has sicced his lawyers on the Iowa party, and his campaign officials sounded on Monday morning like they’d all been fitted for tinfoil. The future of the Iowa caucuses is a minor concern. The future of the country is not.

And we still don’t know who won.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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