DES MOINES, Iowa — Sen. Amy Klobuchar grabbed the national spotlight Monday night in Iowa by being the first presidential candidate to take the stage and get the full attention of cable networks with cameras pointed in her direction.
Minnesota's senior senator chose to go ahead and thank her supporters, rather than waiting for the results of the first-in-the-nation test. And, to be sure, that would've been a long wait.
Those results were hung up indefinitely after the Iowa Democratic Party discovered irregularities in tabulations, possibly related to an mobile phone app that wasn't designed correctly.
"We know there's been some delays, but we know one thing, we are punching above our weight!" Sen. Klobuchar told the crowd in a ballroom at the Downtown Des Moines Marriott Hotel.
That was Klobuchar's way to say she had outperformed expectations, simply by just staying in the race this long as a perennial underdog in the eyes of the pundits.
"They said I wouldn't last through the summer, and then debate after debate after debate! And all I can say is we are here, and we are strong!"
And while the official results were still in limbo as Monday turned to Tuesday, the unofficial results from the Klobuchar campaign volunteers throughout the state suggested she had made a dint in the top four of Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.
"I’m hearing really good things from the precinct captains around the state of Iowa, so I'm super hopeful," Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who traveled to the Hawkeye State to lend her support, told KARE.
"Of course, everybody’s frustrated with the technology. But this is what happens sometimes."
Klobuchar had a strong ground game in Iowa, but President Trump's impeachment trial in the US Senate had curtailed her personal appearances here the past two weeks. Another factor that hampered her efforts here was the sudden last-minute cancellation of the final Des Moines Register/CNN poll.
That poll, normally released on the Sunday before the caucuses, may have given Iowans more reason to see Klobuchar a viable candidate. She thanked supporters to doing their best to overcome those obstacles.
"You know that despite some limited resources compared to some of those big bank accounts, we are way on the board," she remarked.
"So let’s stay up, stay happy and let’s head to New Hampshire! I love you, Iowa!"
Turnout was strong at the 1,600-plus precincts across Iowa, which delayed the start of some of those neighborhood meetings. They began by counting how many eligible caucus goers, and then moved to the phase of coalescing into groups by candidate, known as alignments.
Candidates who failed to garner a minimum of 15% support in the first round were considered non-viable. Those non-viable groups tried to wrangle people from other candidates' groups so they could get over that threshold.
2020 marked the first time that the precinct leaders would be reporting several sets of data, including the first round of candidate alignments and final round. So, there's a chance the computations required for that raised level of reporting exposed math errors or other problems that would normally go undiscovered.
Mike Alowitz, a Klobuchar supporter from Clive, IA said he felt really good about how her campaign did in his home precinct. But ending the night without real numbers was troublesome.
"A lot of frustration. A lot of confusion," Alowitz told KARE. "I don't know why the results aren't in yet, but it doesn't bode well of Iowa and our ability to keep leading the nation in presidential races."
At latest report, a full hand-recount of the caucus presidential preference cards would be scheduled.
