Time to find clear choice against Trump is running out

For months, the race to nominate a Democratic challenger for the 2020 presidential election has been beset by confusion over policy, an overcrowded field and the headline-grabbing impeachment process. So when Americans awoke on Tuesday to news that results from Iowa – the first state to vote for its favoured candidate – were incomplete and indefinitely delayed, they could have been forgiven for feeling that a second Trump term in the White House was closer than ever.

"Have they tried unplugging Iowa and plugging it back in again?" historian Kevin Kruse joked on Twitter. But at a time of widespread uncertainty about information and fears of technological interference by foreign powers such as Russia and China, the inability to co-ordinate paper ballots from one state's 1681 precincts and transmit them via an app, nearly two decades after Florida’s “hanging chads” debacle, is the kind of spectacle that feeds conspiracy theories as well as narratives of American decline, both fertile ground for US President Donald Trump's nationalist demagoguery.

With about 62 per cent of results reported on Wednesday (Australian time), the state had given just over half of votes counted to two men: Pete Buttigieg, who has no experience in federal politics but is widely touted as a centrist and a fresh face; and Bernie Sanders, the hero of the Democratic Party's insurgent left. The result is probably most troubling for former vice-president Joe Biden, the man whose name Republicans have relentlessly tied to the impeachment process and perhaps the best-known of all the contenders nationally. Biden was running fourth behind another favourite of the left, Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Mr Biden's supporters will probably console themselves by subtly suggesting Iowa is an anomaly, an overwhelmingly white and rural state that doesn't represent the diversity of the US electorate and which instead of conventional voting uses caucuses, a decentralised and time-consuming system that many campaigners say unfairly penalises those with work and family commitments or disabilities. Even in 2008, a year of record turnout, only 16.1 per cent of the state's eligible voters attended the Iowa caucuses, and early signs are that the figure this year is even poorer, which helps to explain the decision of another Democratic hopeful, New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg, to sit Iowa out and spend money on a Super Bowl ad instead.

In the age of Trump, however, looking like a winner matters. Mr Biden will hope that, just like a scandal-plagued Bill Clinton in 1992, he can make a strong showing in New Hampshire, the next state on the campaign trail, and proclaim himself "the comeback kid" – an unlikely label for a 77-year-old, but better than letting Mr Trump have naming rights.

For Americans more widely, the essentially negative aim of getting rid of Mr Trump needs to be replaced by a clear and compelling choice that people from across states and demographics can say "yes" to, which would render all arguments about voting systems, faulty technologies and who votes first moot. The time for those who care about the democracy of the United States and its standing in the world to find and make such a choice is running out fast.

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