Former DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe: We want to run government but ‘can’t count 170,000 votes’
Iowa caucus results too close to call as Sanders, Buttigieg finish in virtual tie
The Iowa Democratic Party pushes back on calls from the DNC to recanvass the results; Mike Tobin reports from Des Moines.
Former Democratic National Committee Chairman and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe knocked his own party on Friday, suggesting that the Iowa caucuses debacle hurt its chances going into the 2020 presidential election.
«Here we’re trying to take on Donald Trump and we’re trying to say we can run the government, and yet we can’t count 170,000 votes,» McAuliffe told CNN, adding: «We’re playing on Trump’s turf which we should never cede.»
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McAuliffe echoed others in criticizing the caucus system and argued that the state wasn’t representative enough of minorities. By the time the 2024 election season rolls around, he said, Americans can expect to see a different state starting the primary season.
«The other thing I haven’t liked about the Iowa caucus is it’s a state that’s predominantly white, as is New Hampshire,» he said.
«And you have the Democratic Party, which gets support from the African-American community 95 percent of the time, 70 percent of Hispanics support our party, and yet they’re not represented in the first two contests,» he said.
The Iowa Democratic Party announced Friday that it had extended the deadline for campaigns to request a review of the results, following Monday night’s vote collecting debacle that led to a dayslong delay in reporting the results and inconsistencies in the numbers.
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After a breakdown in tallying the results Monday evening, it took until late Thursday for the state party, which operates the series of roughly 1,700 local meetings statewide, to issue what it said were complete results.
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Those figures showed former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg leading Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., by two state delegate equivalents out of 2,152 counted, a margin of 0.09 percentage points.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
