Grumble grumble Trump. Grumble grumble impeachment. Grumble grumble senate. Grumble grumble State of the Union. Grumble grumble Brexit.

In this, the winter of our discontent, the Iowa Democratic Party and the state’s quirky method of awarding primary election delegates, steps into the breach and mutters, wild eyed, “Hold my beer.”

For my entire life, Iowa has been the “first in the nation” to express their choice in the primary cycle. It’s a valuable piece of electoral real estate and has always given Iowa an out sized importance during election years.

If the Iowa Democratic Party didn’t single handedly end both the state’s first in the nation role and ye olde caucus method of casting votes, I’ll be amazed. The first story from the heart of primary season is of a party and an entire slate of candidates in disarray. The campaigns and the DNC can’t be happy that the biggest story of the election isn’t an impeached president, but rather a relatively small Midwestern state’s inability to count the 147 people or so who live there and report back who they caucused for in something like a timely and efficient manner.

It’s the kind of thing that basically writes it’s own Republican ad. It’s not hard to imagine the tens of thousands of mailers coming out of print shops even now asking “If the Democrats can’t be trusted to hold their own caucus in Iowa, how can you trust them to run the federal government.”

Accurate or not, fair or not, reporting on the debacle in Iowa will be red meat for the opposition. The fact that it appears that figuring out how and where Iowa Democrats came flying off the rails is going to take well over 24 hours is just embarrassing… especially when receiving precinct reports and tabulating totals feels like something that could be achieved over the phone using a pretty basic Excel spreadsheet without all that much fuss. It really, really shouldn’t have been a heavy lift.