Amid delayed Iowa caucuses results, Democratic candidates move on to New Hampshire
While waiting for delayed results of the Hawkeye State’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest, Democratic candidates made hasty claims of winning the caucuses as they pack up for New Hampshire.
In this diptych, ormer Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., former Vice President Joe Biden, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., address supporters at their watch parties in Des Moines after the caucuses on Tuesday.
February 4, 2020
DES MOINES — Delayed results of which presidential hopefuls Iowans supported kept the nation holding its breath on Monday night, but candidates themselves attempted to fill the vacuum before they left for New Hampshire.
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor, Pete Buttigieg, tweeted “Iowa, you have shocked the nation. By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.”
Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, said, “I have a strong feeling that at some point the results will be announced. And when those results are announced I have a good feeling that we are going to be doing very very well here in Iowa.”
At Joe Biden’s party on the Drake University campus, the former vice president acknowledged the lack of results, but said he was looking “onto New Hampshire.”
U.S. Senator from Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren took the stage at her watch party in Des Moines at 10:30 p.m. saying that while the results were at that point “too close to call,” she said she had confidence moving forward to New Hampshire.
As of Tuesday morning, no precinct results of the nation’s first nominating contest on the Democratic side had been released. Iowa Democrats cited needing extra time to verify results with a new reporting process this year.
According to a Politico article, 85 percent of precincts were reporting by 8:30 p.m. in 2016.
Part of the new changes, the Iowa Democratic Party planned to release two added metrics this cycle — the raw total of supporters for each candidate and the amount of supporters after some camps don’t meet the viability threshold.
An Iowa Democratic Party spokesperson cited needing more time to ensure accuracy of the three reported results as the reason for the delay, as well as tech systems being used to tabulate the results.
“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” said Iowa Democratic Party Communications Director in a prepared statement. “In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report. This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”
General counsel for the Joe Biden campaign, Dana Remus, emailed the Democratic Party officials decrying Iowa Democratic Party’s reporting system and asking for “full explanations and relevant information regarding the methods of quality control you are employing.”
In previous years, the party just released state delegate equivalents, which are calculated based on a formula of the Iowa Democratic Party. Each of Iowa’s 1,678 Democratic precincts reports a certain number of state delegate equivalents.
Iowa pledges 41 delegates to the Democratic National Convention to pick an eventual nominee. The Hawkeye State’s delegates are relatively small compared to California and Texas. They each send 415 and 228 delegates, respectively.
The next state to make its presidential pick is New Hampshire, on Feb. 11. Candidates left Iowa Monday night to get to New Hampshire for a heavy week of campaigning ahead.
The chair of the Iowa Republican Party defended the Iowa Democrats, telling WHOTV that the party was right to ensure the accuracy of the results.
“The accuracy of results of the Iowa Caucuses does not have a deadline,” Kaufmann said.
Gov. Kim Reynolds and Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, all Republicans of Iowa, also released a statement of support Tuesday morning.
“Iowa’s bipartisan first-in-the-nation status helped lead to the nomination of President Obama and has the full backing of President Trump. The process is not suffering because of a short delay in knowing the final results,” the joint statement read.
President Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale admonished the slow results from the Iowa Democratic Party in a prepared statement.
“Democrats are stewing in a caucus mess of their own creation with the sloppiest train wreck in history,” he said. “It would be natural for people to doubt the fairness of the process. And these are the people who want to run our entire health-care system?”
