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

Buttigieg’s success in the realignment (so far, anyway) is interesting — and I wonder if Warren/Sanders/Klobuchar were hurt by the fact that they were stuck in D.C. during the impeachment trial, which lasted the last few weeks of the campaign. As Laura pointed out yesterday, 36 percent of caucusgoers made up their mind in the past few days, and lots of people told me that personal interactions with the candidates were helpful for determining their first and second choice. The senators obviously had surrogates out on the campaign trail, but I don’t think that’s the same thing to people (well, okay, Iowans who are used to candidates basically moving to their state in the lead-up to the caucuses). Maybe it made a difference for some caucusgoers.

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.