This mix is a recipe for chaos

THE Iowa caucuses reveal not only a Democratic Party deliriously incompetent at handling a vote tally — this from the folks who have been screaming about voting fraud and irregularities for years — but at war with itself in a way that could lead to political disorder that will make the counting disaster look like a garden party.

What little we can glean from entrance polls reveals the way in which the schematics of the intra-Democratic conflict in 2020 are very stark.

It’s Joe Biden with big numbers with people 65 and older — and nobody else. It’s Bernie Sanders with huge numbers among people 18-29 — and mediocre numbers with everybody else.

That likely translated into Sanders running away with collegeeducated voters and Biden running away with those caucus-goers who have only a high-school education.

Slicing the Iowa pie even more thinly, Biden likely lost a significant number of younger moderate voters to 37 year-old Pete Buttigieg — another suggestion that Biden’s candidacy is, in a state like Iowa, almost exclusively a Geritol candidacy.

This happened in a state that is 92 percent white. New Hampshire, which follows, is 93 percent white. Polling suggests Sanders will win there in a walk, as he did in 2016 — and that his victory there could mean a downward slide for Biden.

But what happens when the nominating process begins reflecting another schematic reality — the entry of African-American voters in sizable numbers? Before any voting, Biden was running away with them. In January, a Washington Post-Ipsos poll had

Biden at 48 percent nationally and Sanders at 20.

But it’s only in the fourth state to vote, South Carolina, that African Americans will be the decisive players. Now, if Sanders runs the table in the first three (Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada), his numbers will surely improve. Still, if past history is any guide, 25 percent of the overall Democratic primary electorate will be black.

So if you combine Biden’s strength with the elderly and his strength among African Americans, Sanders’ base of young voters starts to look a little shaky. The problem is Biden has to remain viable through a month in which he might start appearing hapless and, well, excessively old.

And then, hovering in the background, is the Billionaire Mothership. If Biden melts down, Bernie isn’t exactly going to glide effortlessly to the nomination the way Donald Trump did as the populist insurgent darling.

He (and whoever else is still in the race) will then have to contend with the limitless resources of his worst nightmare — a freespending billionaire whose money he has yet been unable to expropriate.

What we know is that Mike Bloomberg has been dropping his infinite dollars in the places where people are going to be voting a month from now — just as voters in the largest states begin to hit the ballot boxes having heard almost no ads and seen relatively few Facebook posts from anyone but the former mayor.

All of this is a recipe for chaos — even more so because the Democratic Party’s apportionment of delegates is by voting percentage within each state rather than the Republican party’s winner-takeall system.

Hello, brokered convention!