The main cachet of the Iowa caucuses is to give its winner “big mo” — momentum, as 1980 GOP state winner George H.W. Bush called it — and provide the rest of America a first peek at what heartland voters want in their next president.

On Tuesday the only message coming from Iowa was chaos — the kind that will taint every Democrat in the field and reshuffle the race in a way that gives the March 3 California primary more clout.

Iowa Democratic Party officials finally released partial caucus results late Tuesday after technological breakdowns prevented them from doing so Monday night. With 62% of the vote counted, Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor, led with 26.9% of the delegates allotted, followed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with 25.1%, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren with 18.3% and former Vice President Joe Biden with 15.6%. In the raw vote total, Sanders had a lead of nearly 1,200 votes over Buttigieg.

However, that was after multiple campaigns signaled they had won and others, notably Biden’s aides, said the eventual numbers weren’t to be trusted. The end result was that no one was likely to get a bounce — or a death notice — going forward.

“This is completely unsettling for the Democratic Party,” Amanda Renteria, a Menlo Park resident who was political director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, said before the returns were released. “And confusion is not good for party unity.”

One result of the chaos is that New Hampshire’s primary next Tuesday “is the starting point, and that elevates all the Super Tuesday states like California even more,” said Michael Ceraso, who ran Sanders’ 2016 campaign in California and Buttigieg’s New Hampshire operation last year. Thirteen other states also cast ballots March 3.

“California could be more of a deciding factor,” Ceraso said. “Some candidates would have been DOA’d after Iowa. Now they get to move on.”

Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg reacted to the muddled result in Iowa — and Biden’s mediocre showing — by promising to double both his advertising budget in the Super Tuesday states and his staff to 2,000 people. He also released the names of new California endorsers, including Democratic state Sens. Richard Pan of Sacramento and Robert Hertzberg of Van Nuys (Los Angeles County).

Bloomberg isn’t competing in the early states, including Iowa, opting to focus on large states like California. He entered in November out of fear that a more liberal candidate like Sanders or Warren could win the nomination.

“It’s good for Bloomberg,” said Terri Bimes, an expert on the presidency who teaches at UC Berkeley. “The longer that there’s not a clear front-runner is good for Bloomberg.”

There were plenty of disturbing signs in Iowa for Democrats even apart from the vote-counting mess. Party officials predicted that Monday’s turnout would be around the same as in 2016, when 171,000 Iowans participated. Some Democrats had said earlier that turnout could be close to 2008’s record of 239,000.

“That is challenging for the party,” Ceraso said of the disappointing turnout. “Every candidate says, ‘I can bring in X type of voters.’ But if they’re not, that’s not inspiring.”

The absence of a tally until Tuesday emboldened candidates buried in the eventual returns, like former San Francisco hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, to spin the non-results into a positive that could help them live on until California.

“Last night was a mess-up,” Steyer told MSNBC. “I would also say it means this race is wide open.” He then said, before any official results had been released, “that the one thing that I think everybody now knows is that Joe Biden had a really bad night last night.”

But Biden was among those calling into question the caucus results’ credibility.

“We have real concerns about the integrity of the process,” the former vice president’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, told CNN. “And I think there were some significant failures in the process last night that should give voters concern.”

Biden may actually benefit from the chaos surrounding Iowa’s official results.

“Biden might have avoided the biggest disaster,” Ceraso said before the returns came out. “We’ll already be focusing on other states.”

No state will be more important than California. State party chair Rusty Hicks said he wasn’t worried about turnout, Iowa debacle or no Iowa debacle.

“California ain’t Iowa,” Hicks said. “California has been the very heart of the pushback on the White House.”

Renteria, however, said Iowa could be a harbinger for the rest of the year in at least one sense.

“Welcome to 2020,” she said. “There is going to be a lot of chaos of all kinds this year, not just in the primaries.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli