Why is it thought to be an at all important matter how quickly the results are reported?
It is completely legitimate to worry over important procedural details, that the caucuses be conducted in a way that allows participants to cast their votes for their preferred candidates, and have those votes recorded and counted accurately. To add to that any concern at all over the accurate reporting to the media of unofficial results by midnight of the caucus is to show that you are concerned about the show and the drama of the horse race, not about actual politics, which is not show business.
But that’s just me, and what do I know? The professionals who run the party think they know better. They think it’s important that we demonstrate that our party can put on the kind of show the media wants, which means that results come out in a manner convenient to the media’s schedule. Wrap it up before the late-night talk shows start, or you lose audience share.
It would be bad enough if our side’s professionals were competent at showmanship and gloss at least, even at the expense of their worrying about the substance of politics. But you let go of concern for that substance as they have, and you can’t remain competent even at putting a good gloss on the actual workings of democracy.
Elections are messy, caucuses even messier. There will always be a question of exactly how many votes each side got in an election, but most of the time the numbers are beyond the range in which small differences in vote count matter, so nobody directs any attention at the small numbers of votes that might be contested, and people ignorant of actual politics can remain undisturbed in their illusion of clear and definite election results. Caucuses are procedurally messier, the messiness is much more out in the open, and they are never the final determination of the result, so every disputed vote always still matters right up until someone wins the nomination. Nothing about that messiness can be glossed over with reporting of results by the media’s schedule. Get the results out the night of, even if that goes smoothly, and you just highlight controversies that night while the drama-fixated media is paying the fullest attention it will ever pay to the caucus. Not that the reporting of results is at all likely to go smoothly, considering that hundreds to thousands of caucus sites have to get the novel reporting system right, and if that system is more novel to all those caucus leaders than POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) that they’ve all used forever, there will be snafus no matter how good the novel software is. Then you have the interplay between reporting snafus and snafus in the actual conduct of the caucus, with the natural tendency for the media to assume that reporting irregularities must mean caucus voting irregularities.
Some things having to do with politics should be left boring to all but people who are actually interested in politics. Whatever you think of caucuses, or elections for that matter, they’re not primarily media events. Trying to run them as media events just results in falling flat on your face, even in media event terms, the only terms these “professionals” seem to care about.