Honestly a lot rides on how close the top 4 are to one another--with the prevailing speculation that Warren is in third, it makes sense for her campaign to state the gap between third and fourth is huge, but that could mean a lot.
These results mostly seem good only if you're Pete or Klobuchar, since you're outperforming expectations. Warren did better than I expected, but I've already resigned myself to not getting her and it's not good enough to make he a forerunner or reverse the spiral she's been in. Sanders kind of wanted a decisive victory here since it's the setup most favorable to him and it could have established his narrative pretty strongly, but if he's close to the others... It's not bad-bad for him, but it's not as good as what was expected.
Biden in fourth or fifth is bad, but his campaign has he opportunity to recover if they address it. That placement would have ended a lot of others, but the weird situation we're in lets him try to pull it out later, I think.
Maybe the spread will differ from my expectation but this seems like an insane and largely rough night.
Right, I'm mostly going off the 3 sources I have seen so far. The crowd sourced spreadsheet, Bernie's internal polling and that tweet. The first two have Biden trailing by a lot. Like 9-12% or more. The tweet only states that Biden is ways behind, but doesn't give us a clear picture.
The problem for Biden, in my opinion, is how striking his under-performance is. I went in expecting Biden to come in 2nd or 3rd. But I expected it to be mostly close. On CNN, MSNBC, CBS and so on, Biden was also being talked up as a frontrunner in Iowa. So now we come out of Iowa with Biden potentially being 4th (or 5th), where he should have been 2nd or 3rd, with a massive difference between 3rd and 4th, where it should have been close. Biden cannot ride on 'electability' the same way he has up until now, and he cannot make a case of the results being very close (and that any one thing could have altered the end result).
Biden is the clearest loser of the day (assuming the snapshot is accurate), because this result contradicts the primary selling point we've been told Biden has. Warren, Buttigieg and Klobuchar over-performed by contrast. Thing is, I don't see this really helping Klobuchar, specifically, whereas it definitely helps Buttigieg.
And should Sanders end up winning Iowa, he'll be the big winner with New Hampshire coming up, because he's probably running away with it there. In the end, Iowa helps Sanders the most (if he wins), especially so if Pete comes in 2nd or 3rd (it's hard to tell who's leading between Sanders, Warren and Pete). And it damages Biden's campaign considerably.
