On Politics: Hanging-Chad Flashbacks – The New York Times

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• If you can’t get the situation resolved, you can at least get a recount. Or maybe a “recanvass” instead. Then again — maybe you can’t. It’s Iowa, it’s 2020 and nothing makes sense.

• Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic National Committee, said on Thursday that he was “calling on the Iowa Democratic Party to immediately begin a recanvass” of Monday’s caucuses. But less than 10 hours later, he walked that back, saying he wanted a “surgical” examination of the results in precincts with problems — not a statewide check.

• Either way, there appears to be little question that the Iowa Democratic Party needs to address the discrepancies and all-around system breakdown. Whether the party goes with a recanvass or a recount — or neither — will probably depend on negotiations between its officials and the various campaigns.

• So here’s what all that means: A recanvass would involve double-checking the arithmetic on 1,756 precinct work sheets, handled by caucus administrators. But a full recount would mean eyeballing each of the 180,000 preference cards, which were initially collected as a backup measure from caucusgoers across the state and at satellite caucuses around the world. This is the first year the cards were used, after Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign raised objections about a lack of transparency in the caucus process.

• No matter how the vote unfolds, one thing remains an open (and important) question: How many delegate equivalents will satellite caucuses count for? Among caucusgoers at the satellite events, Sanders did far better than Pete Buttigieg, his closest competitor in Iowa. That means the two campaigns will inevitably have different preferences when it comes to how these votes are counted.

• Sanders did something on Thursday that he’d been resisting the urge to do all week: He claimed a “decisive victory” in Iowa, even as final results remain elusive. He currently leads in the popular vote, though not in the count of “state delegate equivalents” that most news outlets use to declare a victor. He told reporters in New Hampshire on Thursday that the victory announcement “should have occurred three nights ago in Des Moines, but for the inability of the Iowa Democratic Party to count votes in a timely fashion.”

• Monmouth University released its latest poll on Thursday, showing Sanders at 25 percent in New Hampshire and Buttigieg at 20 percent. Joe Biden — whose fourth-place showing in Iowa has put his campaign on the rocks — was at 17 percent there, and Elizabeth Warren at 13 percent. Even more than telling us who was up and who was down, the poll showed how much remains in flux. Only about half of likely Democratic voters in New Hampshire said they were settled on their candidate of choice.

• Here’s one thing that may help late-breaking Granite State voters decide: the Democratic debate on Friday in Manchester. Andrew Yang, who did not qualify for the last debate, has made the cut for this one, bringing the number of candidates onstage to seven. Michael Bloomberg won’t be there — but this could be the last debate without him, because of a controversial rule-change that the D.N.C. enacted late last month. The committee decided to waive its requirement going forward that candidates must meet a fund-raising minimum to qualify. That opened the door for Bloomberg, who is self-funding his campaign, to participate in future debates, starting with the one on Feb. 19 in Las Vegas.

Children colored during Elizabeth Warren’s visit to a day care center in Exeter, N.H., on Thursday.

President Trump bragged of “total acquittal” in a speech at the White House on Thursday, after the Senate voted down both articles of impeachment against him.

The vitriolic talk was an indication that his combative tone from the State of the Union address is likely to continue.

“It was evil, it was corrupt, it was dirty cops,” Trump said of the impeachment trial. “It was leakers and liars, and this should never ever happen to another president, ever. I don’t know that other presidents would have been able to take it.”

He congratulated Mitch McConnell for keeping Senate Republicans almost entirely united in opposition to impeachment.

And he condemned Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi, the House Democrats who spearheaded the impeachment inquiry, calling them both “horrible people.” He even singled out Mitt Romney, the lone Republican senator who voted in favor of Trump’s removal, saying, “Say hello to the people of Utah and tell them, ‘I’m sorry about Mitt Romney.’”

Behind the scenes, Trump’s aides are considering whether to reassign or remove members of the administration who cooperated with the impeachment process, according to a report in The Washington Post.

The immediate aftermath of the scrambled Iowa caucuses has led to a quick shuffling of candidates’ plans on the airwaves.

Often, when a candidate cancels an ad buy, it’s either a sign of shifting priorities (a desire to go all in on a certain state) or a sign of flailing finances.

For Biden, signs point to a little of both.

After a disappointing finish in Iowa and fund-raising that lags behind his top rivals, Biden’s campaign appears to be shifting its focus to Nevada. It pulled nearly $150,000 in advertising from South Carolina and $60,000 from Nevada. But the campaign then quickly added $160,000 to Nevada, a move known as “shuffling” that occasionally drives a mistaken report on social media that a candidate is cutting ads when he or she is really just shifting money around.

Biden has been getting air cover from Unite the Country, a super PAC supporting his candidacy. It has currently reserved more than $720,000 on New Hampshire television in an effort to bring Mr. Biden’s sagging television advertising into parity with some of the top-tier candidates (those who are not self-funding billionaires, that is).

Buttigieg, who detoured to New York on Wednesday for a fund-raiser, has also been getting some help on the air from a super PAC — Vote Vets, which is poised to spend nearly $1.3 million for Buttigieg in New Hampshire, according to Advertising Analytics.

Warren, on the other hand, was forced to take down roughly $375,000 worth of ads in South Carolina and Nevada, and has no current plans to put that money back into television advertising.

“I just always want to be careful about how we spend our money,” Warren told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

Sanders, by contrast, announced on Thursday that after raising a whopping $25 million in January, he had placed TV and digital ad buys totaling $5.5 million in 10 different states through Super Tuesday.

Tom Steyer, the billionaire businessman who is largely funding his own campaign, just became the first Democratic candidate to air a negative ad against other Democrats with a new 60-second spot that calls Biden “another insider” and Buttigieg “an untested newcomer who doesn’t have the experience to beat Trump on the economy.”

Personal diplomacy with North Korea? Sanders, Warren and Yang say they’d continue it. Biden, Bloomberg and Amy Klobuchar say they wouldn’t.

Reversing Trump’s move of the American embassy to Jerusalem? Only Steyer says he’d do so.

These are just a few of the deep differences among the Democratic candidates on foreign policy and national security, based on a survey by our colleagues Maggie Astor and David Sanger. Read the candidates’ responses and our analysis of them.

“There are so many easy ways a Democratic president could reverse the damage of Trump decisions that foreign policy hasn’t been a way to discriminate among the candidates,” said Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute and a Republican who served in the Bush White House. “But the differences are really significant.”

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