What it really means that Pete Buttigieg is currently leading in the Iowa results

| 7:20 pm EST February 4, 2020
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When Pete Buttigieg declared victory in almost exact words last night in the Iowa caucus, it raised a lot of eyebrows. Was he saying that he knew he’d finished in first place, based on what his campaign observers saw at the precincts? Or was he merely asserting that he’d finished a lot higher than the polls had predicted?

The first batch of Iowa caucus results came in this evening, and maybe Pete was truly onto something. With 62% of the precincts reporting, Pete is slightly in the lead. Maybe he’ll win and maybe he won’t. Steve Kornacki’s statistical jujitsu on MSNBC is a reminder of just how complex it is to try to determine a winner by taking the partial current results and combining them with the overall demographic and recent historical trends in the precincts that haven’t reported.

But what if Pete Buttigieg does win Iowa? Or for that matter, what if he finishes a close second in the state, after he was expected to be closer to a rounding error? I’ve spent the past week pointing out that Iowa and New Hampshire don’t tell us much about who’s going to be the nominee. Bill Clinton lost Iowa by around seventy percentage points (not a typo), but went on to win the nomination. There are plenty of other similar examples. So no, Pete’s unexpectedly strong showing doesn’t tell us that he’s now the frontrunner, or that he necessarily has any better chance of being the nominee than he did when the week began.

There’s a key point here, though. Pete Buttigieg’s Iowa results were way higher than what the polls predicted. We don’t know if this is because the Iowa polls were simply wrong about Pete, or if this is simply a fluke of the asinine and semi-random caucus format. But if Pete did legitimately outperform his Iowa polls by this much, it raises questions about whether his polls might also be way off in other states. Pete is polling at 5% in South Carolina, where the Democratic primary is dominated by black voters. If he gets 15% there, for example, that could mean that he’s set to outperform on Super Tuesday.

I don’t put too much stock into the theory that because Pete Buttigieg will get positive media coverage from his strong Iowa showing this week, it’ll change things much in the upcoming states. Are we supposed to believe that some people in South Carolina are going to suddenly change their votes based on how some people in Iowa voted? If there’s any takeaway here, it’s that we have to allow for the possibility that Pete’s early state polling numbers have been wrong all along. But we won’t know that for awhile yet.