At long last, the Iowa caucus results are in… kind of! The results are very interesting… if they can be understood!
With 62 percent of the precincts reporting, Pete Buttigieg has racked up the most delegates. Congratulations to the first openly gay candidate for president. However, by the two other new metrics introduced for the first time this year, Sanders appears to have won over the hearts of more individual supporters in Iowa.
Bernie won in the “first initial alignment” raw vote count (more people who walked into polling centers said they were there to support Bernie than anyone else), and Bernie also won in the “second final alignment” raw vote count (after the opportunity to switch teams during the caucus depending on who was and wasn’t viable, more people were for Bernie than for any other candidate). But! Given the way various precincts are assigned more “clout” than other precincts (this makes absolutely no sense to me), Buttigieg has emerged with the most delegates by a hair.
Here is the percentage of state delegates awarded to each candidate so far:
Buttigieg: 26.9 percent
Sanders: 25.1 percent
Warren: 18.3 percent
Biden: 15.6 percent
Klobucher: 12.6 percent
Yang: 1.1 percent
Again, only slightly more than half of the caucus totals have been counted, so some of these positions could switch, especially the top two. This could end up as a Bernie victory for delegates, which would make Pete Buttigieg’s speech last night look a little presumptuous. That said, it would only have been a little presumptuous: Buttigieg did far better than many people expected a gay guy who’s never won statewide office to do.
The biggest, clearest takeaway so far is how poorly Joe Biden did. Maybe it’s because of Hunter, maybe it’s because of the bad debate performances, maybe it’s because he’s basically re-running Hillary Clinton’s campaign of empty platitudes, or maybe it’s all of the above.
Granted, Iowa has never liked Biden much—he’s run for president multiple times, and he’s never won Iowa—but Biden is also supposed to be the guy who can win in the Midwest, the guy who can win among white rural voters. He says over and over that he is going to beat Trump “like a drum.” But he can’t even beat the gay guy, the socialist, or Elizabeth Warren!
Fourth place is a miserable showing for Biden. But it’s not as bad as fifth, where Klobuchar, who claims she can win over the same white rural voters as Biden, and who lives in a neighboring state, finds herself.
Interestingly, between the “first initial alignment” and the “second final alignment,” Warren went up a percentage point, whereas Biden and Klobuchar each lost ground.
As for Buttigieg, he said in his speech last night, “Iowa, you have shocked the nation.” It sounded a little weird at the time, but now it seems about right. It is shocking that he won first (or second). Here’s his speech from last night in which he claimed victory:
Sanders also gave a rousing speech last night. At the start, he said, “It looks like we are in a virtual tie. And while the results are still not complete, it looks like we’ll have half of the Iowa delegates.” Which also seems just about right.
Buttigieg and Sanders are tied for first, and Warren is right behind them.
All of that could change when the remaining 38 percent of the caucus totals are factored in. Since Warren also did well last night—three points ahead of Joe Biden in the delegate totals so far—let’s hear what she had to say last night, too:
With the top three divided between Buttigieg, Sanders, and Warren, it looks like the progressive wing of the Democratic party is the big winner of the night. The only moderate who did well was the gay guy. But obviously the final results of Iowa are still a question mark.
“This is a mess,” Brian Williams just said on MSNBC. “We still don’t really know what happened in Iowa last night.”
It’s also not clear when we will know. The Iowa Dems have not yet said when more results will be released and when the state party chair was asked for a firm timeline at a press conference, he walked away from the podium without answering.
