Bernie Sanders held a press conference on Thursday afternoon in New Hampshire that he said “should have occurred three nights ago in Des Moines, Iowa.” Sanders declared victory, noting that he has won the popular vote and will likely end up with the same number of delegates to the Democratic National Convention, even as it remained unclear whether Pete Buttigieg or Sanders would win more “state-delegate equivalents.”
“The person who gets the most votes wins. We got the most votes,” Sanders told reporters.
“A victory margin of some 6,000 votes is pretty decisive,” he said, referring to the first round of voting in Iowa. With 97 percent of precincts reporting, Sanders leads the first round of voting 24.7 percent to 21.3 percent over Buttigieg and leads the final round of voting 26.5 percent to 25 percent over Buttigieg.
According to the New York Times Upshot, the question of whether Buttigieg or Sanders gets the most “state-delegate equivalents” is a coin-flip. “We are still likely to receive the same number of national delegates,” Sanders said. “Those national delegates, not the state delegates, are the ones that really matter.”