Donald Trump blasts Iowa delay as ‘unmitigated disaster’
US President Donald Trump has blasted the Democratic party’s Iowa caucuses as an “unmitigated disaster” after technical issues delayed the results.
Writing on Twitter, the president said added: “Nothing works, just like they ran the country. Remember the $5bn Obamacare website, that should have cost 2 per cent of that.
“The only person that can claim a very big victory in Iowa last night is “Trump”.”
The victor of the contest in Iowa, which is traditionally the first state to indicate the candidate it will be backing in November’s presidential election, will be announced sometime on Tuesday, many hours after polling stations closed.
The delay is down to the fact that the Democrats have had to make “quality checks after finding inconsistencies in the reporting of data from the 1,600 caucus sites.
Both Bernie Sanders, the firebrand left-wing senator from Vermont, and South Bend Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg have already claimed victory in the contest.
“By all indications, we are going to New Hampshire victorious,” Buttigieg said.
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However, a staffer for Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign said that the delay would undermine the process.
Other senior Republicans followed the president’s lead. Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson said: “The Democrat Iowa caucus debacle is a perfect metaphor for Democrat policy proposals for America – they would be a total disaster.”
This year was the first in which Iowa Democrats are required to report three counts to the party’s central headquarters.
Mandy McClure, the party’s spokesman for the state, sought to reassure voters that the party was simply faced with a “reporting issue”:
“The app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion”, she added.
However, party officials at a county level disagreed, saying that the app created for poll organisers to report votes had broken.
Iowa’s privileged position as the first state to declare its candidate also came under fire, with many calling for a change to the system on the back of the debacle.
The next primary will be held in New Hampshire on 11 February, before “Super Tuesday” on 3 March sees 15 states declare.