DES MOINES — The Iowa Democratic Party on Tuesday released partial results from its disastrous caucuses nearly a full day after all the participants left town, and gave Pete Buttigieg a narrow lead with 62% of precincts tallied.
But with attention shifting to New Hampshire before of its primary next Tuesday, humiliated Democratic officials in the Hawkeye State still couldn’t say when they’d be able to name the official winner of the nation’s first nominating contest of the 2020 race for the White House.
Preliminary results showed the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor leading with 26.9%, but trailed closely by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with 25.1%.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was in a distant third place, with 18.3%, while former Vice President Joe Biden scored 15.6%, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had 12.6%.
Buttigieg, who didn’t let the lack of official results stop him from declaring victory Monday night, repeated that claim in the Granite State.
He told supporters his tentative, first-place showing “validates the idea that we can expand a coalition not only unified around who it is we are against, but what it is we are for.”
While the results are subject to change, they offer an insight into how the battle between moderate Democrats and progressives such as Sanders and Warren will shake out.
For the first time ever, the initial vote was recorded along with the final result after caucus-goers supporting also-rans were allowed to realign to more viable candidates.
The results show Sanders originally winning 28,220 votes to Buttigieg’s 27,030, Warren’s 22,254 and Biden’s 14,176.
But in the second round, Buttigieg picked up an extra 3,364 votes from the campaigns of Warren, Biden and Klobuchar, while Sanders netted only 1,132.
The campaign of Biden will no doubt be reeling after his fourth-place finish, made even more embarrassing by the fact he and Buttigieg had been able to campaign while their chief competitors, all senators, were stuck in Washington, DC, for President Trump’s impeachment trial.
The future of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation vote is now in jeopardy in the wake of the failure of the reporting system and subsequent the delay in an announcement of a winner.
State party Chairman Troy Price apologized and promised there would be a full investigation.
“The reporting of the results and circumstances surrounding the 2020 Iowa Democratic Party Caucuses were unacceptable,” he said.
With Mark Moore in New York