Iowa Democrats Release Partial Caucus Results, but No Winner Yet

The release of the partial data, which accounted for 62% of caucus precincts, drew sharp criticism from several of the campaigns that wanted a complete result, either to have a definitive outcome or frame their Iowa performance in the best possible light. Troy Price, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, said the precinct data released Tuesday came from across all 99 counties in the state.

While the results of Monday night’s caucuses could change with more data, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts appeared to be in third place, with Biden trailing her by several points and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota behind him.

Yet there was little evidence in the data released Tuesday that any candidate was on the way to the kind of dominant victory that would have a good chance of transforming the Democratic race. No candidate appeared on track to receive much more than a quarter of the vote, and five held support in the double digits — a further indication that the Iowa caucuses were unlikely to play a decisive role in deciding the Democratic nominee.

Two other candidates, Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer, registered about 1% support or less.

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In Iowa, the candidates’ support is measured chiefly in the number of state-level delegates that each amasses, which in turn determines how many delegates they can collect for the Democratic nominating convention next summer. The state party is in the process of releasing popular vote totals as well, though their significance can be diluted in the arcane, multi-round caucus process.

It was not immediately clear whether the initial tranche of caucus returns were reflective of the overall dynamics in the state, nor did the state party indicate when the complete results would be available. Several campaigns, including Biden’s, expressed frustration to state officials earlier Tuesday with the idea of publicizing a partial data set, amid widespread confusion about the breakdown in reporting the results.

But under pressure to salvage the caucuses from a humiliating logistical debacle, Iowa Democratic leaders decided to go ahead with releasing numbers from a majority of precincts without waiting for the counting process to be completed.

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The halting and hectic process in Iowa was an unsightly spectacle for the Democratic Party at the start of its presidential nominating process, offering President Donald Trump an easy target for gloating and ridicule and raising serious questions about whether Iowa would be allowed to retain its first-in-the-nation status in future elections.

A downcast Price described the process as “unacceptable” in remarks to reporters Tuesday. “As chair of the party, I apologize deeply for this,” he said.

Price repeatedly stressed that the data was accurate and said the security of the returns was his “paramount concern.”

The returns posted on Tuesday largely mirrored the scenario that the leading presidential campaigns detected during the caucuses, gathering precinct-level information on their own and in some cases releasing it to the media to make up for the void of hard results.

Should the rest of the Iowa results mostly mirror the data published on Tuesday, it could represent a significant embarrassment for Biden, who entered the race as a front-runner last spring but has struggled mightily in recent months to compete with fresher-faced and more liberal rivals in both Iowa and New Hampshire. For a period in January, his campaign had grown hopeful that he had a chance of winning Iowa and establishing early dominance, but by caucus night that seemed a remote prospect.

Biden is aiming to retake control of the race later in February, when the competition moves to Nevada and South Carolina, two far more diverse states long seen as friendly to his candidacy. But first he may have to explain his Iowa slump to the political donors whose support he needs to compete in the larger primary states that vote at the beginning of March.

Biden’s campaign has said they expect to accrue delegates in Iowa and are bracing for an extended contest.

Yet if Biden’s dismal standing appeared clear enough, the actual identity of the Iowa winner remained a question mark.

Both Sanders, I-Vt., and Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, have attempted to claim an overall victory in the state, based on their internal campaign data, and they were too closely matched in the initial returns to declare a single winner.

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Buttigieg was the most aggressive on Monday night in asserting he would prevail in Iowa, saying, “By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.”

The strength displayed so far by Sanders and Buttigieg underscored just how fluid the Democratic race remains, with a 78-year-old democratic socialist who ran for president four years ago deadlocked in Iowa with a 38-year-old former municipal official who was largely unknown a year ago — and both of them substantially ahead of a former two-term vice president.

In a sign of how uncertain the final outcome remained, Sanders held a lead over Buttigieg in the popular vote but trailed him narrowly in the state delegate count, with three-fifths of the totals reported.

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The result also underscored the divisions on the moderate side of the Democratic Party, with three candidates closer to the political center — Buttigieg, Biden and Klobuchar — collecting a majority of delegate votes so far, but a candidate of the left, Sanders, still in a position to prevail because of the strength of his progressive base.

The chaos surrounding the caucus process may limit the effect of the Iowa outcome: It is already apparent that, in a departure from past presidential campaigns, no candidate intends to drop out as a result of a disappointing finish in Iowa. Several candidates, including Biden and Warren, stressed on the night of the caucuses that the nomination would be decided over a long process.

By late afternoon Tuesday, every major candidate – and a number of lower-profile competitors – had already moved on to New Hampshire, the next state in line, which holds a primary on Feb. 11.

Arriving there Tuesday, Sanders struck a balance between lamenting the procedural breakdowns in Iowa and defending the ultimate significance of the vote there. The caucuses, he acknowledged, were “not a good night for democracy.”

“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.”

Warren, also campaigning in New Hampshire, said Iowa had to “get it together” and criticized the decision to publish fragmentary results.

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

In Iowa, Price declined to lay out a timeline for completing the tabulation and releasing the results.

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On a midday conference call and in other private conversations with Iowa party leaders, representatives for Sanders, Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar 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.”

Caucuses are largely a relic of the past, and Democratic Party rules prodded all but a few states to switch over this year to holding straightforward primary elections. Democratic leaders in two states that still use the caucus system, Nevada and North Dakota, made statements Tuesday distancing themselves from the fiasco in Iowa and promising that their states would do better. Harry Reid, the former Senate Democratic leader from Nevada, said his state’s upcoming caucuses on Feb. 22 would be run more capably.

“In Nevada, we have built the best state party operation in the country,” he said. “I am 100% confident that what happened in Iowa will not happen in Nevada.”

In an uncharacteristic reversal of roles, it was Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders, who spoke up to defend the Iowa Democratic 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 said, pressing the party.

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

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .