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

Well, ummmmmm …. we still don’t officially have any votes counted in Iowa. But a variety of evidence — partial results released by the AP, crowdsourced data, vote tallies released by the campaigns and entrance polls — suggests that some outcomes are more likely than others. In particular, there’s more reason to feel optimistic about the showings of Sanders and Buttigieg — and Warren, to a slightly lesser extent — and less reason for optimism about Biden or Klobuchar. One other thing we can probably say is that whoever wins Iowa — and remember that Iowa has three different ways to count its vote — it’s liable to be a fairly narrow victory, perhaps with split winners across the various metrics. Even the Sanders and Buttigieg campaigns themselves aren’t claiming to have won by overwhelming margins. So out of the 89 scenarios we outlined yesterday — none of which was the royal disaster that Iowa has turned into! — let’s focus on those that are most relevant. Specifically, let’s look at those that involve:

• Either Sanders or Buttigieg winning narrowly
• And either Sanders, Buttigieg or Warren in second place.

Obviously, there’s a fair range of difference between these outcomes: Sanders finishing first (even a narrow first) would be much better for him than, say, tied for second with Warren behind Buttigieg. Still — if you ignore for the moment that Iowa might not produce the typical bounces because of the botched vote count — averaging out these different outcomes might give us some idea of what we’re dealing with. So here you go:

Generally speaking, these are a complicated set of scenarios, with multiple winners possible. For instance, a narrow Buttigieg win over Sanders would create a scenario in which no candidate has more than a 28 percent chance at winning a delegate majority, and the odds of no majority also substantially increases. On average between these four scenarios, though, the model would have Sanders winning a majority 36 percent of the time, Joe Biden 25 percent of the time, Buttigieg 9 percent of the time, and Warren 6 percent of the time … and no majority 25 percent of the time. That’s quite the mess.

Biden put out endorsements this morning from Democratic elites from Alabama, Arkansas and California. The most notable person was Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state. Those are all Super Tuesday states. I would assume those endorsements were pre-planned and did not depend on the Iowa result. That said, it is does feel prominent Democrats are more pro-Biden than voters are, at least right now. He has about 46 percent of our “endorsement points,” while he is getting approximately 26 percent of the vote among Democrats nationally, according to polls.

Illinois politicians are coming for Iowa. Last night, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker suggested his state go first in the primary process. This morning, Sen. Dick Durbin called the Iowa caucuses a “quirky, quaint tradition that should come to an end.”