Juan Williams defended the Democratic Party from criticism in the wake of the Iowa caucuses fiasco Monday, saying the "process is always messy."

"The reality is that the nominating process is always a messy process and it's always like a roller coaster," Williams said on "The Five" Monday. "And sometimes a roller coaster goes off the tracks. And sometimes you think Jeb Bush is going to be the nominee and then it's Donald Trump."

BIDEN FIGHTS FOR SURVIVAL IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, AS ELECTABILITY ARGUMENT PUT TO TEST

Ahead of Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, Williams predicted that the turbulence on the Democratic side will settle down once a nominee emerges.

"We don't know where this is going," Williams said. "But once there's a nominee, I think the dynamic shifts and you stop talking about that dysfunction, you start talking about Democrats coalescing behind a candidate."

Co-host Katie Pavlich disagreed with Williams, arguing that "momentum doesn't just apply to individual candidates. It applies to the party as a whole."

"When you have the Iowa caucus vote still being in disarray, they still can't figure out whether all the data and information was in the voting system," Pavlich said. "There is now this cloud over the entire primary process from the beginning about whether the person who may end up winning actually won it fairly."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Pavlich argued that the cloud is likely to linger if supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., believe he was unfairly deprived of the Democratic nomination for the second straight election cycle.

"That is certainly something that the Bernie camp will be thinking about when they go into this, if he doesn't get the nomination, and whether they are going to then support the nominee against President Trump," Pavlich said.