Well it doesn’t look like a good start to the Democratic Caucuses/Primaries with the Iowa Democratic Caucus running into quite a mess up with reporting results appearing to be in relation to an app they are using, leading to quite the long delay. State democrats running the caucus are also keeping tight lipped, with the Iowa Democrat Party Chairmen saying in a 53-second call to reporters, that it wasn’t due to a hack or intrusion and that the results were expected later today, before hanging up without taking any questions.
Joe Biden has already expressed his annoyance at the delay while Pete Buttigieg appears to be interestingly optimistic. Bernie Sanders on the other hand is also optimistic of victory in the Iowa Caucus with their internal campaign polls showing he could win by about 5%, with Pete Buttigieg in 2nd place, which may explain his opptimism, Elizabeth Warren 3rd and Joe Biden seemingly underperforming by quite a bit compared with what public polls had been saying, with him in 4th place, with even Amy Klobuchar coming up close behind.
IF and this is a big if, IF these internal polls from Bernie Sanders’ campaign are correct, then this could spell a bad start to Joe Biden’s campaign for the nomination and will stoke the hopes of Pete Buttigieg as well. But also remember this is only the very first caucus/primary and there are many more to come, although this can help to boost candidate popularity and be positive for future polling, there is still a long way to go and much can still happen.
Pete Buttigieg’s campaign have also released their internal numbers on what they see the outcome being, which they are viewing as quite promising
. Their campaign have claimed a premature victory.
So as can be seen we still need to wait for the official Iowa Caucus results, so I would not latch on to what any of the candidates are claiming just about yet as it is clearly too close to call.
In other news Donald Trump stormed to victory in the Republican Iowa caucuses with 97% share of the vote against his two challengers, Walsh and Weld, both of whom are hardly popular with the voters. This is hardly a surprising result and is the reason we are not really focusing on the Republican caucuses and primaries as Trump is almost certainly going to win them, as is the usual story for presidential incumbents. Some states have even cancelled their Republican primaries.
When the official results are out I will update the post with those results below. Also make sure to check back for other updates!
UPDATE 1: 62% of the results have been released in a batch as the caucus continues to reel from the mess up of the reporting app used to manage it, the rest should hopefully trickle out over the next few hours. Anyways, the first batch of results have Pete Buttigieg leading by almost 2% over Bernie Sanders with Warren 3rd and Biden 4th, but many more finalized results yet need to be declared to see who places first. For now, I am going to sleep.
UPDATE 2: Just got on. The results are 71% reporting now but I don’t think there will be anymore updates from this for a while. As it stands Pete Buttigieg is slightly ahead of Bernie Sanders in State Delegate Equivalent numbers (this determines how many delegates each candidate gets and is based on how well each candidate does in each county) meanwhile Bernie Sanders is winning in the popular vote in the Iowa Caucus, ahead in both first and final vote tallies so far.
Both Sanders and Buttigieg have 10 of the 41 delegates each, while Elizabeth Warren is the only other candidate so far to get some delegates, with 4 as it stands. 17 more delegates are yet to be allocated.