Buttigieg holds slim lead in Iowa tally

Pete Buttigieg held a narrow lead over Bernie Sanders on Tuesday in the first wave of results from Iowa's Democratic presidential caucuses, which were delayed a day by technical issues.

With 62 percent of the state's 1,765 precincts counted as of 9 pm ET Tuesday, Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, led the top five candidates with 26.9 percent of the vote. He was followed by Sanders, US senator from Vermont, with 25.1 percent.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts won 18.3 percent; former vice-president Joe Biden, who had led in most national polls, had 15.6 percent; and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota held 12.6 percent.

Andrew Yang got 1 percent, the highest number among the seven other candidates.

By the time partial results were released Tuesday, many of the candidates already had moved on to New Hampshire, which will hold its primary election Feb 11.

"I'm so humbled by the support that we got … every different part of the state, different communities. It's just an extraordinary validation," Buttigieg told CNN on Tuesday evening.

"Anyway you cut it … we've been able to do something extraordinary," said the 38-year-old. "This is a moment that we have been building toward since we first opened an exploratory committee.

"It's the end of the beginning … shows the power of having a message and connecting with voters and caucus-goers," he said. "It means something to a lot of people wondering if they fit in.

"New Hampshire is a state that famously thinks for itself," said Buttigieg, noting that the New England state has a "very strong independent streak".

"I think we should all be disappointed in the inability of the party to come up with timely results, but we are not casting aspersions on the votes that are being counted," Sanders told reporters Tuesday on his campaign plane. "There is no excuse for not having results last night, but that doesn't mean to say the votes, that the totals that come in, will be inaccurate. I think that is an unfair thing to try to do."

Warren, campaigning in Keene, New Hampshire, on Tuesday, said it was "a tight, three-way race at the top. We know the three of us will be dividing up most of the delegates coming out of Iowa."

Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign, said Tuesday that "the Iowa Democratic Party needs to be very judicious in checking, checking again and rechecking their data," the Des Moines Register reported. "The reality is that there were considerable and serious failures in the process yesterday evening all throughout the evening at every single level."

While Buttigieg had a slight lead over Sanders in the percentage of the vote, both so far have the same number of delegates — 10 — according to The New York Times.

Iowa will send 41 delegates to the Democratic nominating convention July 13-16 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A candidate needs a majority of the 3,979 pledged delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot.

The Iowa Democratic Party blamed the delay on inconsistencies in reporting from caucuses statewide.

Just before the state Democratic Party released the partial results, Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price couldn't say when complete results would be released or how the party would ensure the integrity of the partial or final count.

"We will continue to work through the process," he said. "We want to get some results out there."

Party officials said Tuesday that a new app, meant to speed up the reporting of caucus results, had a "coding issue" that instead led to a significant delay in counting and reporting caucus results. The error, which caused results to be only partially reported, forced the party to rely on paper records and manual backups.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the faulty app is called Shadow and is an affiliate of ACRONYM, a Democratic nonprofit launched in 2017. Shadow began as Groundbase, a tech developer co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for Hillary Clinton's technology team during her successful run for the 2016 Democratic nomination.

Nevada's Democratic Party said Tuesday it will not use the app for its caucus on Feb 22.

"This is simply a reporting issue," Mandy McClure, Iowa Democratic Party communications director, said in a written statement released Monday night. "The app did not go down, and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound, and (it) will simply take time to further report the results."

The Iowa Democratic Party sent staff Tuesday to collect boxes of presidential preference cards — which record the votes of caucusgoers — in counties across the state to shore up the trail as confusion persists about the results.

David Yepsen, a longtime observer of Iowa politics who hosts a Sunday public affairs program, said Monday's debacle will increase calls to shake up the nominating calendar and may cost Iowa its status as the first contest in the nation.

"It's hard to see how Iowa keeps this after last night," he told The Hill newspaper.

While all the focus was on the Democratic results, the Iowa Republicans also held caucuses. President Donald Trump won 97 percent of the vote over challengers Bill Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, and former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh.

Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, who sees himself as a viable challenger to Trump, authorized his advisers Tuesday to double television spending for his own presidential campaign, an indication that he has become more bullish on his chances.

Since entering the race in November, Bloomberg has spent more than $300 million on television and digital advertising, according to Ad Analytics, an ad-tracking firm.

Bloomberg's presidential strategy is dependent on a chaotic, or at least split, result in the first four Democratic nominating states, where he is not competing, a result Bloomberg advisers believe occurred Monday in Iowa.

Bloomberg told a noontime crowd in Detroit on Tuesday that he was sleeping on a plane last night when he awoke and asked an aide about the results in Iowa.

"The guy said, ‘Nothing.' I still can't figure out what happened," he said to laughter, before adding: "More than any other candidate, we have the momentum."

By comparison, Sanders spent $11 million on television and radio ads in Iowa during the entire caucus campaign, while Buttigieg spent $10.3 million.

William Hennelly in New York contributed to this story.