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

For what it’s worth, these numbers are pretty close to the partial results that the Buttigieg campaign released — off by at most 1 percentage point. But the partial results the Sanders campaign released overshot his percentages in these early returns. For example, he claimed he had 29 percent in both the first-alignment vote and the post-realignment vote. In the actual results, he has 24 percent in the first-alignment vote and 26 percent in the post-alignment vote. (Again, I want to emphasize these are not the final results — just 62 percent of precincts are reporting.)

The relative strength of the candidates across the three metrics matches expectations. We suspected Sanders and Warren would be more concentrated, Buttigieg and Biden more widespread. But Buttigieg’s realignment strength was not as clear from voters’ professed second choices.

Here is a table of the initial popular vote vs. the popular vote after non-viable candidates’ supporters realigned. As you can see, Sanders is leading in both counts, but Buttigieg gained the most from realignment. Biden — and really all of the candidates who got less than 15 percent in the initial popular vote — were hurt by the realignment.