Democratic Infighting Escalates as Candidates Await Iowa Results

Fault lines that emerged between the campaigns Monday night quickly deepened Tuesday, as several campaigns pressed the state party for a speedy and full release of the results and representatives of former Vice President Joe Biden continued to criticize the legitimacy of the process.

The state party said in a midday statement that it would begin to announce partial results late in the afternoon, frustrating campaigns that feared a partial release of data would offer a misleading picture of the outcome and throw the presidential race into further disarray. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont did not wait for Iowa officials; citing his campaign’s internal data, he all but declared victory as he waited to fly to New Hampshire.

Troy Price, the state party chairman at the center of the maelstrom, declined to lay out a timeline for completing the tabulation and releasing the results.

On a midday conference call and in other private conversations with Iowa party leaders, representatives for Sanders, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota urged local officials to provide the most complete set of results possible, and several campaign emissaries pushed for access to the paper trail that the party was using to verify returns from the caucuses.

Biden’s campaign took a more combative approach, repeatedly questioning — in public and private — the integrity of the caucuses and objecting to the party’s plans for releasing the results.

“If you put out 50% of results, people are going to take that as final,” Jesse Harris, a Biden adviser in Iowa, said on the conference call with the party. “That’s only half. That’s not the total picture of what happened yesterday.”

It was perhaps not a coincidence that Biden also appeared most at risk of embarrassment in the caucuses, once the results are reported. Senior strategists for all of the other major campaigns said information gathered from caucus sites by their campaign representatives indicated that the former vice president was headed for a dismal finish.

In an uncharacteristic reversal of roles, it was Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders, who spoke up to defend the party against criticism from the Biden camp on the conference call. Four years ago, it was the Sanders camp that raised alarm about the reliability of Iowa’s opaque results, in a clash that yielded a more complex set of data-reporting requirements that appear to have snarled the state party this time around.

Weaver praised the officials on the call, noting that “you do have a paper trail,” and warned rival campaigns against “discrediting the party.” He suggested that those raising the sharpest objections had motives beyond concern for the sanctity of election returns.

“I do want to urge people in the interest of not discrediting the party, that folks who are just trying to delay the return of this because of their relative positioning in the results, last night, I think that’s a bit disingenuous,” Weaver said. “Those results should be rolled out as we get them.”

But how long the process could take was not answered.

“Today, tomorrow, the next day, a week, a month?” Harris asked on the call.

“We’re continuing to work through our process and just as soon as we can,” Price replied.

If Biden’s camp was working most aggressively to reduce Iowa to an asterisk in the 2020 process, the former vice president was not alone Tuesday in expressing open frustration about the state of affairs in Iowa.

Warren, in her first appearance in New Hampshire, said Iowa had to “get it together” and set a high bar for the release of caucus results. She suggested that the plan Price outlined, to post a large but incomplete tranche of results, was an insufficient step.

“I just don’t understand what that means to release half of the data,” Warren said at an event in Keene. “So, I think they ought to get it together and release all of the data.”

Sanders, scheduled to arrive in New Hampshire later in the day, struck a balance between lamenting the procedural breakdowns in Iowa and defending the ultimate significance of the vote there. Of all the candidates, Sanders and Buttigieg were by far the most optimistic about emerging as victors in the end.

“I think we should all be disappointed in the inability of the party to come up with timely results,” Sanders said. “But we are not casting aspersions on the votes that are being counted.”

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“This is not a good thing,” he added. “This is not a good night for democracy.”

Sanders, 78, projected confidence Monday night that he would ultimately take the top spot in Iowa, where he nearly upended Hillary Clinton in his first insurgent campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2016.

A first-place finish could lend new momentum to his candidacy, just four months after he had a heart attack and four years after he lost the caucuses by only the smallest of margins. It would also most likely prompt his competitors to confront Sanders in New Hampshire with the sort of hard-edge attacks that were largely absent in Iowa. Even before the caucuses began, Buttigieg previewed the sort of warnings mainstream Democrats were likely to issue about the risk of nominating a candidate who would be the most liberal in the country’s recent history.

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Buttigieg was the most aggressive Monday night in asserting he would prevail in Iowa, saying, “By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.” An early triumph of a mayor who has not yet seen his 40th birthday, over a former vice president and the runner-up for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, would be an emphatic demonstration of just how uncertain the race remains.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .