Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) nearly tied in Iowa, with most of the caucus results reported on Wednesday night.
With 97 percent of Iowa’s precincts reporting, Buttigieg remained the leader of the race, with 26.2 percent of state delegates. He’s closely trailed by Sanders, with 26.1 percent.
They are followed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 18.2 percent, former Vice President Joe Biden at 15.8 percent and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar at 12.2 percent.
Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price told state party officials on a call Wednesday night that the full results are expected by Thursday morning.
The Democratic presidential race has shifted to New Hampshire, with the full field of 2020 contenders blanketing the state ahead of its Tuesday primary. On Wednesday and Thursday, eight candidates are participating in CNN town halls. And on Friday, the leading contenders will meet for a debate.
The Iowa Democratic Party was slated to release results on Monday night after the caucuses but said an application developed by a company called Shadow Inc. failed to work properly.
Shadow Inc. CEO Gerard Niemira said that employees at the company feel bad about what happened.
“I’m really disappointed that some of our technology created an issue that made the caucus difficult,” Niemira told Bloomberg News. “We feel really terrible about that.”
Niemira said people had been using the app for weeks and that the issues that prevented some precinct chairs from logging in on Monday, the day of the caucuses, arose for the first time that day.
“All the data that was produced by calculations performed by the app was correct. It did the job it was supposed to do, which is help precinct chairs in the field do the math correctly. The problem was caused by a bug in the code that transmits results data into the state party’s data warehouse,” he said.
The issue could have been foreseen but the app still failed, Niemira said. “And we own that,” he said.
The CNN Wire and Epoch Times reporter Zachary Stieber contributed to this report
