Joe Biden Campaign: We Finished ‘Bunched Up in the Top Four’ in Iowa

The failure of the Democratic Party’s vote-reporting app during the Iowa caucuses on Monday likely provided a reprieve to former Vice President Joe Biden, who appears to have suffered losses all over the state.

As of Tuesday morning, there were still no official results. But throughout the caucus Monday evening, social media was replete with stories of poor Biden results in local voting precincts. In several caucuses, Biden failed to meet the 15% threshold on “first alignment” to qualify for the second round of voting.

Joe Biden failed to clear the first alignment threshold here in Precinct 41, Teddy Roosevelt High, Des Moines: Only 71 votes for @JoeBiden, 102 needed #IowaCaucuses #2020

— Joel B. Pollak (@joelpollak) February 4, 2020

The mood at Joe Biden’s campaign party in Des Moines was subdued, as volunteers and supporters gathered nervously around television screens — a contrast to the jubilant mood at other campaigns.

An unsubstantiated rumor began to spread among political observers as the delay in results dragged onward through the evening: people speculated that Biden had done so badly that the state Democratic Party either did not believe the vote tallies they were seeing or suppressed the news to save Biden to fight another day in New Hampshire.

-Iowa Democratic Party uses secretive app for caucus reporting
-App stops working a few hours before caucus begins
-Results trickle in but show dominating performance for Sanders, death knell for Biden camp
-Counting now shut down by DNC for "quality control"

I have that right?

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) February 4, 2020

As Tim Carney noted at the Washington Examiner, while other campaigns published data showing that they had done well, even in the absence of official totals, Biden’s campaign was conspicuously silent.

Carney observed:

The Sanders campaign released all the results it had, coming from about 40% of precincts, and it showed, by all three counts, Sanders winning with nearly 30%, Buttigieg in second, Elizabeth Warren in third, and Biden way back in fourth. The Warren campaign said its numbers showed Biden also in a distant fourth. The Biden campaign hasn’t reported any results.

On CNN Tuesday morning, Biden campaign spokeswoman Symone Sanders put a brave face on a difficult night, telling the hosts: “Our internal data shows that we did well in a number of places across the state — frankly, some places where we didn’t think we would do well.”

How well?

“Bunched up in the top four,” she said.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.