Pete Buttigieg is leading the Iowa caucuses with Bernie Sanders close behind, based on 62 percent of precincts reporting. Buttigieg has 27 percent of the total delegate count while Sanders has 25 percent. However, Sanders currently boasts the majority of total votes counted thus far.
The results have been on hold for nearly 24 hours due to a series of technical issues stemming from an app that was used by precinct officials to record the caucus data. The app, Shadow, was intended to add more transparency to the notoriously chaotic caucusing process. But as soon as reports of errors rolled in, Shadow’s glitches, security blind spots, and general lack of user-friendliness turned the night into an unmitigated disaster, leaving the Democratic candidates departing Iowa unsure as to how they fared in the first big vote of the 2020 election season.
The Iowa Democratic Party chair, Troy Price, apologized for the delay, citing a “coding error.” He did not indicate when the final results would be released to the public.
Former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, already gave a pseudo-victory speech Monday night, prompting the Sanders campaign to release their own impressive internal numbers that—conveniently—showed Sanders narrowly besting Buttigieg.
Regardless of whether Buttigieg or Sanders wins Iowa, the 2020 Iowa caucus will be old news as soon as President Trump delivers the State of the Union Tuesday night. But the anti-climactic, half-assed affair did have one definitive result: Joe Biden tanked, in spectacular fashion, coming in at a distant fourth with 16 percent of the vote.
We will continue to update this post as more results come in.