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

As promised, there are at least some precincts reporting from all 99 counties (although none from the satellite caucuses). To me, that says that there isn’t a big cache of, say, Warren votes waiting to be counted. What we have yet to get should look pretty similar to what we have. That isn’t to say that the numbers won’t change slightly — maybe enough to put Buttigieg ahead of Sanders in the popular vote, for instance. But I think it’s safe to say that, for example, Biden, at 15 percent of the initial alignment vote, won’t catch Sanders/Buttigieg/Warren to finish first.

As Amelia mentioned earlier, the impeachment angle of this is interesting. Buttigieg may have benefited, but Biden had the same opportunity — he wasn’t trapped in D.C. and had a similar number of field offices, 28 compared to Buttigieg’s 33. If candidate travel and organization made the difference at the end for Buttigieg, it makes Biden’s apparent underperformance look worse.

The second-choice data suggests that Buttigieg and Warren gained the most in the realignment phase of the caucuses, which fits with how they have run — both have tried to appeal to all people in the party and offer themselves as consensus choices.