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

Projections by Lenny Bronner, a data scientist at The Washington Post (and my brother!), have Buttigieg’s 95 percent confidence interval in state delegate equivalents as slightly higher than Sanders’s — but there’s a lot of overlap between the two intervals. So while Buttigieg has a lead, some caution is warranted.

One question that didn’t get asked in the (very short) presser with Price was why the Iowa Democratic Party wanted to use an app at all, rather than sticking with the tried-and-true phone method. The only explanation I’ve been able to find is from a January story where Price said it was to “speed up the time it takes to get results to the public” which … uh … didn’t quite work out.

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.