Campaigns fume about being left in the dark after Iowa results delayed

A delay in the results of the Iowa caucuses has left the Democratic presidential campaigns in the dark about the state of the race in the Hawkeye State. 

Aides to some of the leading candidates said late Tuesday that they know little if anything about the cause of the delays, even after a briefing from Iowa Democratic Party officials. 

“They basically told us nothing,” one senior adviser to a leading candidate said of the call between Iowa Democratic Party leaders and the campaigns. 

Asked what they were hearing about issues related to the caucus results, another Democratic campaign source replied, “Literally nothing.”

And an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who had taken the lead in recent polls leading up to the caucuses, said that the campaign still wasn’t sure what was happening with the delay.

The Iowa Democratic Party said on Tuesday that inconsistencies in the reporting process were responsible for the delay. A spokesperson for the party insisted that the issues were not related to any potential hack of the reporting system or technical issue with the app used to record results.

“This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion,” she said. “The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”

Still, the issues stirred unease among campaign officials, who expressed deepening concerns of a potentially larger issue with the caucus results.

“I think that every single second that passes where we don’t get a final result, it’s concerning,” Roger Lau, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) campaign manager, said, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Jamerson. 

Warren campaign manager @RogerLau: “I think that every single second that passes where we don’t get a final result, it’s concerning.”

— Josh Jamerson (@joshjame) February 4, 2020

The Iowa Democratic Party said the issue was due in part to the fact that, unlike in past years, it is reporting three separate results from the caucuses: the tallies of the first round of caucusing, the final tallies and the total number of “state delegate equivalents” won by each candidate. 

Still, the issues threatened to delay the results of the first-in-the-nation caucuses into Tuesday morning or potentially later. 

A lawyer for former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign sent a letter Monday night to the top officials at the Iowa Democratic Party urging them to withhold the official tally of the caucuses until the campaigns received “full explanations and relevant information regarding the methods of quality control” used by the party in the caucus reporting process.

“In the meantime, we are on to New Hampshire, on the road to the most important election of our lifetimes,” the lawyer, Dana Remus, wrote.

Reid Wilson and Al Weaver contributed.