Iowa's got problems whether it's R or D.
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This isn’t the first time in the past decade that the process has failed to produce a timely result, which in turn arguably affected what happened next (which, after all, is what makes Iowa important).

In 2012, it was the Republican caucus that was a mess. Back then, Mitt Romney was named the winner of the caucuses by eight votes — a narrow victory, yes, but still a victory for the favorite to be the Republican nominee.

Romney went on to win the New Hampshire primary comfortably, apparently winning the often-elusive double in the first two contests — he would have been the first Republican to ever win both Iowa and New Hampshire — and setting him on course to face incumbent President Barack Obama.

Except eight days after that New Hampshire win, we found out Romney actually finished second in Iowa. The Iowa GOP announced, 16 days after the caucuses, that Rick Santorum had actually finished first — by 34 votes. But even that result was tinged by uncertainty:

Santorum’s strange, belated victory also served to embarrass the Iowa GOP — which had to admit that it had misallocated some votes, and simply lost some others, in a razor’s-edge election where every vote mattered.
It also cast an unflattering light on the old-fashioned and convoluted system that the party uses to collect and count caucus votes.
“It should be like a fine Swiss watch,” said Iowa State political science professor Steffen Schmidt. “It’s really more like a sundial.” He said the system used by Iowa Democrats was not significantly better.

Given the irregularities and problems, in fact, the party even after the recount declined to declare either Romney or Santorum the actual winner:

… Iowa Republican leaders seemed to cast doubt on their own results, saying Thursday that it was hard to declare a “winner” without knowing what happened in those eight precincts. Matthew N. Strawn, the state party chairman, simply “congratulated” Santorum and Romney “on a hard-fought effort during the closest contest in caucus history.”

Eventually, amid pressure, the party decided to just declare Santorum the winner in a statement released just before midnight on a Friday night — prime news-dump time.

“To clarify conflicting reports and to affirm the results released Jan. 18 by the Republican Party of Iowa, Chairman Matthew Strawn and the State Central Committee declared senator Rick Santorum the winner of the 2012 Iowa Caucus,” the party wrote.