A surrogate for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) 2020 presidential campaign criticized former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg for declaring victory in Iowa despite a lack of official results.
”It was a big night for Pete in the sense of his last election was won with 8,000 votes in a liberal college town. And he’s just thrilled to have beaten 8,000 votes last night,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), told Hill.TV on Tuesday. “So, you know, I guess hats off for that, but it was kind of premature that he did that. I think what it showed was that he banked everything on Iowa.”
“Pete Buttigieg is basically a spoiler at this point,” he added.
Green went on to predict that the Iowa caucus results will ultimately come down to Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Monday’s Iowa caucus ended with no winner after a glitch in a mobile app was partially blamed for delaying the results.
Amid confusion surrounding the debacle, Democratic presidential candidates delivered their own version of what happened Monday night.
Buttigieg’s speech in particular has drawn ire, with some saying that it sounded like a victory speech.
Though he stopped short of declaring victory, Buttigieg highlighted the success of his campaign, adding that “by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.”
“So we don’t know all the results, but we know by the time it’s all said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation,” he told supporters.
Buttigieg later defended his decision to basically declare victory without clear caucus results, and pointed to his campaign’s own internal polling numbers.
“We are looking at the internal numbers that we had and beginning to realize that something extraordinary had happened last night,” the former South Bend, Ind. mayor told MSNBC on Tuesday.
The Iowa Democratic Party (IDP), meanwhile, has announced that it would release the final caucus results “as soon as possible” and maintained that the technical problems didn’t result from a “hack or an intrusion.”
“As part of our investigation, we determined with certainty that the underlying data collected via the app was sound,” the IDP said.
—Tess Bonn
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