FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver added a dose of perspective to the disastrous rollout of the Iowa caucus results late Monday night, noting that — if the snail’s pace of the results’ release remains the same — voters will not know who won Iowa until after New Hampshire’s February 11 primary.
Comprehensive, meaningful results from the highly-anticipated Iowa caucuses have yet to come out of the Hawkeye State, with the Iowa Democrat Party attributing the delay to “quality control” — a phrase that sparked concerns across the board.
Shortly after 11:30 p.m. ET, Silver wrote:
At this point, it’s been 3.6 hours since the start of the caucuses and 1.9% of precincts have reported results, which extrapolates out to knowing the results in a mere 189 hours, which would be at 9:30 pm next Tuesday, after voting in the NH primary has already closed.
At this point, it's been 3.6 hours since the start of the caucuses and 1.9% of precincts have reported results, which extrapolates out to knowing the results in a mere 189 hours, which would be at 9:30 pm next Tuesday, after voting in the NH primary has already closed.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 4, 2020
The Iowa Democrat Party has since reported the discovery of “inconsistencies” in its multiple sets of caucus results but downplayed it as “simply a reporting issue.”
“The app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion,” IDP Communications Director Mandy McClure said in a statement. “The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”
“Getting past midnight Eastern (in 7 minutes) with 0 results officially reported kind of feels like the point of no return for the Iowa caucus,” Silver added:
Getting past midnight Eastern (in 7 minutes) with 0 results officially reported kind of feels like the point of no return for the Iowa caucus. (Of course this take will probably be wrong because nothing ever changes.)
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 4, 2020
While Silver said, based on early results, that results leaned in a positive direction for both Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Pete Buttigieg (D), he noted the difficulty in stating where they stand now, given the stunning lack of results over the past two hours:
I probably wouldn't have tweeted about 1.6% of precincts reporting if I'd known we'd only be at 1.9% three hours later. https://t.co/LNYdBOs2bh
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 4, 2020
As of midnight ET, zero percent of precincts had reported results.
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