The plan was to write Joe Biden’s political obituary in Iowa.

After visiting a number of campaign events around the Hawkeye State leading up to Iowa’s First in the Nation caucuses, it was apparent that the former vice-president was going to underperform expectations for a political figure of his status and support.

Though some polls had Biden in the lead, it became apparent that the ex-veep wasn’t going to run first.

And with every rally attended, I had a premonition of things getting worse, from falling to second to tumbling to third.

And there’s a chance Biden might crash even lower.

But that we don’t know exactly how far a day after the caucuses means Biden’s candidacy might have clung to a thread of a lifeline.

After 13 presidential elections, the Iowa caucuses may have run out of time.

It was subtly hinted at Biden’s campaign stop in Waterloo  (two hours northeast of Des Moines) that the future of Iowa’s leadoff delegate contest was in question, specifically over “diversity” issues.

Yet the matter of competency has manifested in that the Iowa Democratic Party has delayed releasing results for another day because of app failures.

Now Republicans have feasted on this international embarrassment at the expense of their rival party yet I should remind them that they had their own “reporting” issue in 2012 when it was not clear for weeks which candidate had won the poll taken at the Iowa caucuses.

Eventually Rick Santorum was declared the victor but the delay stifled the boost the former Pennsylvania US Senator should have received while Mitt Romney enjoyed an immediate benefit from being the erroneously projected winner.

As if on cue the Nevada GOP suffered their own embarrassment with their results not being announced until 10 hours after the caucus concluded. And they were partnered with the all powerful Google in that enterprise.

The Iowa Democrats tried to be too cute by expanding their caucuses to locations in other states to capture snow birds and using a newfangled internet app system without an efficient failsafe redundancy backup for reporting polling and delegate totals from the state’s 1,681 precincts (think 50 people in a room each taking 35 phone calls staggered over an hour).

It wouldn’t have been that hard to develop and execute a second reporting track.

I attended the Des Moines Precinct 62 caucus in the affluent Drake University neighborhood and despite having over 800 participants caucusing and then recaucusing in the “viable round,” walked out with final results by 8:45 PM.

While that exercise was prolonged owing to the size of the venue and number of people, the DM Precinct 62 caucus went smoothly without a hint of controversy.

With this mess the country has seen how sloppy Democrats are with election security and they can’t blame Russia, Trump, Koch Industries, Haliburton, or Chick-fil-A for this fiasco.

It’s all on them and the completely avoidable cost the Democrats credibility and just maybe their First in the Nation status they’ve enjoyed since 1972.

The Iowa Democratic Party has caused their own people to lose confidence in “small d” democracy as allegations went viral that the screw-up was engineered to hurt Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg.

This isn’t the made-up Kremlin-hack nonsense that paralyzed Washington for three years and meandered into a disgraceful impeachment sham.

The Democrats deserved this humiliation after what they subjected America to since Donald Trump won.

Even more so than President Trump, the big winner was the Electoral College on Monday night as the wisdom of our Founding Fathers became apparent of largely compartmentalizing questionable results within the confines of state borders and electoral votes.

While all of America was watching, it was Iowa’s problem.

It’s a teachable lesson all sides should take to heart.