Copy For the 935 days that he spent planning the Iowa caucus, Troy Price can think of three or four times when he believed things were as bad as they would ever get. In moments like these, Price could feel his stomach drop, and in its place, a fierce and unpredictable panic would rise to the surface, producing some combination of anger and tears and bouts of dry heaving, his head bent unceremoniously over a toilet bowl. The first time was in June 2019, months into the process of trying to twist the caucus system into something more accessible and transparent via the creation of a “virtual caucus,” when the Democratic National Committee first expressed concerns about the security of the tech they were developing. Price happened to be in Israel, watching a livestream of the DNC meeting, “just screaming in my hotel room, which was probably not great because it was Shabbat.” The next time was at a DNC meeting in August, when it became clear that the party wasn’t going to allow the virtual caucus to go forward. He was summoned to meet with Tom Perez, the national party chair, in his suite at the San Francisco Marriott. Price sat down and saw the words “virtual caucus cannot go forward” written on Perez’s notepad. “That’s when my resolve ended,” he says. The meeting ended cordially, but when he got home to Des Moines, he thinks he had a nervous breakdown. Back in his office, where he kept a ball of Scotch tape that he globbed together while working for Hillary Clinton in 2016, he at one point picked up the ball and hurled it at the wall, leaving a small hole.