What Did — And Didn’t — Go Down In The Iowa Caucuses

We are so deep in bizarro world that the campaigns themselves have started reporting “results” as collected by their precinct captains. Again, these should be taken with huge grains of salt, as they are coming from biased sources and are incomplete. (Indeed, precincts where a campaign didn’t have a precinct captain stationed are likely to be among a campaign’s worst precincts.) For instance, take the Sanders campaign’s “results,” which show Sanders leading but represent fewer than 40 percent of precincts. And the Buttigieg campaign claims to have collected data from more precincts (77 percent), but they were vague about the results — other than claiming that “we are on our way to winning the SDE count.”

I think we can say this: The Sanders, Buttigieg and, to a lesser extent, Warren campaigns are acting confidently; the Biden campaign is not. That might suggest what they think the results are, but it may not mean anything real. Accept no substitutes for the actual results!

Jeff Zeleny is saying on CNN right now that the Iowa Democratic Party is saying they will not report results any time tonight — instead they will release results “sometime Tuesday.” However, the Sanders campaign says they will release the results it collected internally — although again, these would not be official numbers and should be taken with a grain of salt (like an internal poll, they might be overly favorable to the campaign releasing them).