The Republicans have spent vast sums on a digital. Democrats, meanwhile, have been outspent and outmanoeuvred

Donald Trump was gloating again.

“Now I understand the votes are fried in Iowa,” he told reporters at the White House on Friday. “Think of it, all the money that Democrats spent and the votes are fried. They have no idea who won.”

The president’s schadenfreude flowed from the debacle of the Democratic Iowa caucuses, the much-hyped first step to finding a nominee to challenge him in November. After seven debates, nearly a billion dollars in national campaign spending and a year of criss-crossing the midwestern state in search of every last voter, Monday ended with no winner and no official results.

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The main problem was an app the Iowa Democratic party used to tabulate the results. It had been rushed out shortly before caucusing began, did not undergo rigorous testing and hit a coding glitch. Back-up phone lines were jammed, compounding a meltdown that raised questions not only over the viability of the first-in-the-nation caucuses but Democrats’ grasp of technology.

Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “When you consider that Barack Obama revolutionised the Democratic party’s use of technology, large-N data and interactions with voters via mobile phones through texting, and that was 12 years ago, it is stunning how far from technological grace the Democrats have fallen and that was on full display in Iowa.

“We saw some of this problem in the Clinton campaign in 2016 when they were using technology to recruit campaign volunteers and supporters rather than using it to court voters as Trump did. A perfect example is that Trump bought ads on SnapChat before the debates with Hillary Clinton.”

The Iowa app is just the tip of the iceberg. The last Democratic administration’s healthcare website suffered a botched launch and went over budget. The Trump campaign outspent and outmanoeuvred Clinton on Facebook and other platforms in 2016, also receiving a boost from Russian interference. Since then, under manager Brad Parscale, the campaign has built a huge digital operation that will be difficult for the Democratic nominee to match.

It is a very different landscape from when Obama revolutionised online organising on his way to beating John McCain and Mitt Romney. Romney’s Orca Project, a big data voter-tracking app designed to rival Obama’s ground game in 2012, crashed and burned at the crucial moment.

We’re in a strong position, as a party, whereas in the Obama years we were playing catch-up. Now I think the Democrats are Henry Barbour

The Republican National Committee (RNC) learned the lessons of those defeats, argues lobbyist Henry Barbour, a partner at Capitol Resources, with chair Reince Priebus and his successor Ronna McDaniel recruiting dedicated tech staff. In contrast, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) rested on its laurels.

Barbour said: “We’re in a strong position as a party, whereas in the Obama years we were playing catch-up. Now I think the Democrats are. The DNC is a shell of its former self, a shambles. There is weak leadership left over from President Obama, who invested in his own organisation more than the DNC.

“President Trump is doing the opposite, investing in the RNC and the nuts and bolts. As a result, Republicans have built an advantage on the data side.”

Even as Obama won two elections, Democrats suffered punishing defeats in the Senate, House and key governorships while losing nearly 1,000 state legislative seats. In the wake of the Iowa chaos, Tom Perez, the DNC chair who had begun to turn things around, is facing calls to resign.

Barbour, chairman of the Republican firm Data Trust and the RNC national committee member for Mississippi, added: “The Democratic data is controlled on the state level, whereas the Republicans have a national approach to it. I think it’s a big advantage in 2020 when you’re trying to figure out who to target, how to target them and when to do it. Better data yields better results.”

Republicans do not entirely have the upper hand. The Democrats have ActBlue, an easy-to-use online platform that enables grassroots activists and big-dollar donors to chip in small amounts to candidates or big sums to party committees. In 2019, it funneled more than $1bn to Democratic candidates and causes.

While ActBlue was born in 2004, and played a role in Democrats’ 2018 midterms success, Republicans scrambled to catch up last year by launching WinRed. Barbour said WinRed raised $70m in the final quarter of last year and could hit between $800m and $1bn in 2020, but he predicted ActBlue may reach $2bn for this year.

Whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee will be up against the Trump campaign’s almost unlimited war chest and determination to “flood the zone” of social media with opportunistic merchandising and targeted advertising, including generous helpings of dishonest and inflammatory clickbait. The right has learned how to turn social media’s divisive echo chambers to its advantage.

Kara Swisher, editor at large for the technology news website Recode, wrote in the New York Times this week “of a persistent myth: that the Democrats are the party of the internet generation, intuitively embracing the whole app-tastic, AI-centered, who’s-got-the-VR-headset future better than the Republicans.

“That fallacy was fueled, in part, by the use of digital tools by Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 and the image of him as tech-forward, a guy who hung out with Silicon Valley leaders like the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.”

But Obama was “only sort of techie”, Swisher argued, and his administration did not challenge the industry in any significant way.

“In fact, from the start of the internet age in the 1990s, the right has been more clever than its rivals in exploiting ever-morphing tech to influence vast numbers of people with targeted messages.”

Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucuses in 2008 launched him towards the presidency and his victory speech that night inspired many to support him. Michael Slaby, the Obama campaign’s chief technology officer in 2008, was dismayed by the chaos in 2020 on a night that was supposed to provide the party with clarity.

“At the end of the day, I bet there’s plenty of blame for everybody,” he said. “This speaks to an ineffective approach to innovation and technology at the national level.

“It speaks to an unpreparedness at the state level. It speaks to probably some naivety at the technical level. You’re really only talking about 5,000 numbers – three numbers from 1,700 places. Why not use a Google spreadsheet? I’m not saying that’s the right answer, but I just think it reflects failures at multiple levels.”

If you’re not actively investing in getting better at technology, then you’re getting worse Michael Slaby

Slaby, now chief strategist of the not-for-profit Harmony Labs, added: “I do think that the party as a whole was this place where we were, especially pre-2016, sort of taking technology and our strengths in digital for granted. We have moved beyond that in some ways. There’s new investment in new projects.

“Technology’s not in a bubble and it’s not easy to do well. I don’t think either party has a corner on tech. It’s something that is always moving and therefore must always be invested in and if you’re not actively investing in getting better at technology, then you’re getting worse.

“And if you look at the national level, I think we have under-invested in technological and digital infrastructure, especially when it comes to digital media, as a party.”

Others hope Iowa will be a wake-up call to threats both domestic and external. Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to vice-president Joe Biden and now board director of TransparentBusiness, was in Iowa on caucus night.

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“I came back in a state of shock,” he said. “I can’t imagine after the Russians hacked our election, and the issues with cybersecurity being at the front of everyone’s minds, that the Iowa Democratic party wouldn’t take every possible precaution to this debacle happening.

“It’s a sad day for the Democratic party from a technology perspective and it’s disappointing to me, as an entrepreneur who deals with a lot of tech companies, that we couldn’t find one to build an app that worked properly.”

But Vela, an LGBTQ and Latino activist, was reluctant to make sweeping comparisons.

“Donald Trump and Brad Parscale’s advantage was cheating,” he said. “Ours was merely a glitch. I’ll take a glitch rather than being in bed with the Russian bots.”