Pete Buttigieg by DonkeyHotey, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

Although results from the Iowa Democratic caucuses had not yet been released (and still have not been released as of 6:30 am EST), former Mayor of South Bend, IN, Pete Buttigieg, declared victory in the Iowa Democratic caucuses shortly after midnight on Tuesday.

“What a night!” Buttigieg told a group of his supporters in Des Moines, IA. “Because tonight an improbable hope became an undeniable reality.” Really?

He continued, “So, we don’t know all the results. But, we know, by the time it is all said and done, Iowa you have shocked the nation. Because, by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.”

The crowd chants, “IA all the way,” as Mayor Pete appears to bask in the glow of his victory.

By your effort, we brought together an extraordinary coalition of Americans. Progressives, moderates and that good number that we like to call future former Republicans. And that’s how we’re going to win in November. Because it’s about adding people to our cause, adding to our majority. That is how we will guarantee that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, we’ll be able to move America into the era that must come next…And tonight, Iowa chose a new path.

Mandy McClure, the communications director for the Iowa Democratic Party, attributed the delay to “inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results. In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report. This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”

Iowa Democratic Party officials held a conference call with the presidential campaigns, and attributed the “delay to the new rules requiring caucus leaders to report three sets of numbers to party headquarters, rather than just the delegate totals.”

Previously, caucus leaders reported only the delegate count from each of the state’s precincts.

“Two people who listened to the call,” told The New York Times that, after campaign officials became angry and demanded to know when results would become available, party officials hung up the phone.

Was it a bit premature for Buttigieg to make such a statement? Or did he know something the rest of us did not?

CNBC reports that Bernie’s campaign released data last night from their internal polling. Based on numbers from 40% of precincts, Sanders was in the lead with a 29% share of state delegate equivalents, Buttigieg running close behind with 26%, Warren with 18% and Biden with 15%.

Later, a Buttigieg campaign aide told CNBC “that data provided by 77% of the campaign’s precinct captains showed Buttigieg in the lead. The campaign aide said that internal projections prior to the caucus suggested that the race would be a tie, but that the internal numbers so far showed Buttigieg performing 8 percentage points better than expected, enough to win first place.”

Roger Lau, Warren’s campaign manager, reported that their internal data showed a tight race between Warren, Buttigieg, and Sanders.

Iowa Democratic Chair Troy Price issued a statement early this morning which said, “the results will be released later on Tuesday and the party is manually verifying its data.”

Stay tuned!