Thanks for your ... votes? Or whatever it is caucuses produce.
"Thanks for your ... votes? Or whatever it is caucuses produce." Crush Rush / Shutterstock.com

Imagine if we lived in a country where everyone got together and looked at our options for leadership and then all got to vote, and whoever got the most votes won! You could call it, I dunno, "democracy" or something. That would be like the greatest country on Earth if that ever happened.

Instead, we have this bizarro system where all of the candidates spend months running around a corn state, and then anyone with six to ten hours to kill goes to a high school gymnasium and argues with their neighbors, and then someone flips a coin and they elect some delegates to a delegation that picks delegates for another delegation and we wind up led by whoever has the most money.

I dunno, maybe monarchy was pretty good. Is it too late to take us back, England?

I'm referring, of course, the process by which a winner is chosen for RuPaul's Drag Race. Did you see, the fabulous Robbie Turner is going to be on Season 8? If she doesn't win this thing there is going to be RIOTING. (I interviewed Robbie for this week's Sewers of Paris, airing this Thursday, so stay tuned for some riveting and insightful stories there.)

Oh and also there was a thing in Iowa. Ted Cruz in the lead for Republicans, Hillary Clinton in the lead for Democrats. Congratulations to all. Of course, in our stupid system Americans don't actually get to vote for presidential candidates — we vote for someone else to vote for them — but for now it's looking like delegates will be pretty evenly split between Hillary and Bernie, so the whole thing is a near-tie as far as Democrats are concerned.

Now we can go back to ignoring Iowa for another four years except for when we marvel at their excellent writing program. (Christie specifically celebrated putting Iowa in his "rear view mirror.")

From here, it's on to New Hampshire, where Bernie is absolutely definitely going to win on February 9 unless something insane happens. Clinton's in a free-fall in NH polls, but you might want to temper your enthusiasm, Bernie supporters. After New Hampshire, there are no primaries or caucuses where your candidate is even within striking distance of Hillary. And if you want to compare him to Obama, well, his popularity with non-white voters is not quite where Obama's was.

Unsettlingly, Trump has been soaring higher and higher and higher in New Hampshire polls, so he might bounce back from his second-place finish in Iowa. He was a bit somber last night — a state in which we haven't seen him before — but by this afternoon he was back to his old self, pointing out how awesome he is for financing his own campaign. (He is not, in fact, doing so.)

There was also some wonderful news to come out of the caucuses last night: Huckabee has suspended his "campaign," which was never really a serious bid for president as much as it was a form of renewing his qualifications to appear on Fox News. So long, asshole!

Rick Santorum, speaking of assholes, is still in the race somehow. There's a fun video of one of the Santorum volunteers — a man whose job was to round up his fellow supporters and get them to cast votes — admitting that not only did he secure zero Santorum supporters for the caucus, but he himself failed to vote as well.


Don't worry, Santorum supporter. It's okay that you didn't vote. Remember, none of these votes actually counts as a vote for the candidate! And because Santorum was never going to win any precincts, the number of votes he gets really doesn't matter. So your failure to tick a box will have exactly the same impact that your vote would have had: none whatsoever. Except that now nobody will ever ask you to volunteer for them ever again. So, a win for you?