Something was off in Iowa, and it wasn’t just a coding bug. The caucuses, and the media circus surrounding them, felt like a lesser version of a once-hallowed event, like the time Jack Johnson headlined Coachella. Usually, the presidential primaries supplant whatever’s happening in Washington as the focal point of American politics. Not this year, not with Donald Trump as president. The Des Moines Marriott bar, described in rinse-and-repeat fashion every four years as a “Star Wars bar scene,” crawling with big-name journalists and minor political celebrities, was less crowded than ever. The big shot news anchors mostly avoided Iowa and stayed back on the East Coast covering the impeachment trial. In 2016, ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted 86 minutes of their evening broadcast airtime to the campaign coverage in the run up to the Iowa caucuses, according to the Tyndall Report. This year, the caucuses ginned up only 10 minutes of coverage on broadcast news, a record low. Impeachment, coronavirus, and Kobe Bryant were bigger stories than canvass kickoffs in Ankeny.

The Democratic candidates weren’t doing much to consolidate attention, either. Heading into caucus night, well over a third of Democratic caucusgoers were still deciding who to back in a crowded field. Even the saintly Des Moines Register poll fell into disrepair. Not only was the poll spiked for the first time in 76 years when Pete Buttigieg’s campaign raised questions about its call methods, after the poll results finally leaked, they were wrong, badly missing the final near-tie between Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders. Once-important newspaper endorsements for Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar did little to shape the outcome. Even before app failures and recriminations and whack-job conspiracy theories and the jousting between Bernie and Pete over who actually won, the signs were everywhere that Iowa just wasn’t going to be as important as it once was. There were too many candidates and too few delegates at stake for anyone to pack it in after a single contest, regardless of who was declared the winner.

Despite the air of mediocrity swirling around the whole enterprise, a piece of conventional wisdom was baked in from the start: that caucus turnout would be higher than ever. After all, this was the starting gun of the 2020 presidential race, the first real chance for Democratic voters to take a stand in the fight against Trump. “I think we’ll see our biggest turnout that we’ve ever seen,” Iowa Democratic Party chairman Troy Price predicted in January. The Des Moines Register wrote that turnout “will probably rival the 2008 record of nearly 240,000 people, which included unprecedented numbers of first-time caucusgoers, who showed up statewide to propel Barack Obama to victory. Party officials and volunteers are preparing for a massive turnout.” The New York Times reported on some magical thinking among activists working in nonwhite precincts, predicting that Latino turnout in Iowa could jump from less than 3,000 in 2016 to 20,000 this year. Former Lieutenant Governor Patty Judge predicted that “caucus night is going to be a Democrat night, and there will be huge numbers, even in rural Iowa.” All of these people were wrong. The turnout number—about 176,000—barely surpassed 2016 levels. It fell well short of the historic 2008 turnout mark of 240,000 that many Democrats had expected to break. It’s not just Iowa: In New Hampshire, which holds its primary on Tuesday, Secretary of State Bill Gardner revised down his recent estimate that 500,000 voters will cast ballots. Gardner said he still expects Democratic turnout to be roughly on par with 2008, but not as high as he once thought.

The modest Iowa showing, coming at a time of existential dread for the left, was far more distressing for some Democrats than the media freak-out over a busted vote-counting app. Former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, who since dropping out of the race has been working to register voters in Texas, posted a howler on Medium. “Perhaps the most alarming thing that came out of Iowa this week was not the incompetence of the party and the failed technology that leaves us still in the dark as to the final results of the caucus,” O’Rourke wrote. “What should most concern us is that turnout might have barely kept pace with 2016 levels, and fell well below the historic turnout of 2008. We’re in the middle of a national emergency, and people are staying home.” O’Rourke told me by phone a few days later that his mood had brightened somewhat, but he was still worried. “In my opinion, this is the most defining moment of our lifetime, and maybe since the Civil War, the most important moment for the country,” he said. “My response is, let’s go fucking knock on doors, let’s go win elections, and even if we don’t, let’s just be in the fight as hard and vigorous as we can be in the fight. I would just expect everyone to be all about it and as engaged and involved as possible, and at a minimum voting.”