The best (and the worst) of the Iowa caucuses

The 2020 Democratic presidential race kicked off officially on Monday night, with voters in more than 1,700 caucus sites across Iowa choosing among a slew of candidates all vying for the chance to face President Donald Trump in November. And it still isn’t over, with 100% of precincts reporting but no call in the race, and with Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez calling for a full recanvass of the vote.

The race has now moved on to the New Hampshire primary set for Tuesday, but the echoes of what happened in Iowa still reverberate.

Below, I went through some of the best and worst of the night(s).

THE BEST

* Pete Buttigieg: The closeness of the final result between the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in Iowa means that it was, effectively, a tie. But in this case the momentum from the tie goes to the candidate with less high expectations, which was clearly Buttigieg. Polling going into Iowa suggested Sanders would win and that plus his surprisingly strong showing in Iowa against Hillary Clinton four years ago led to the assumption that he was the class of the field. That Buttigieg, a 38-year-old former mayor of a 100,000-person town in the Midwest, was able to fight Sanders to a draw in the caucuses is a remarkable achievement made somewhat less remarkable by the fact that he didn’t get to celebrate his strong showing until more than 24 hours after the caucuses ended. Still, Buttigieg needed a big moment in Iowa. And he got one — albeit a little late.

* Bernie Sanders: Sanders declared victory in Iowa on Thursday afternoon, although it’s less than clear whether he or Buttigieg will ultimately walk away with the most state delegates. (The likeliest outcome is that the two are within a few delegates of another in the state.) And Sanders looks solid in New Hampshire too, according to new numbers released Thursday by Monmouth University. Plus, if there was any doubt about Sanders’ ability to stay in the race for the long haul, the fact that he raised $25 million in January alone should put those concerns to rest. If you had to bet — right now — on the candidate most likely to wind up as the nominee, Sanders would be the favorite.

* New Hampshire: It’s no secret that Iowa and New Hampshire have never really liked one another. New Hampshire views itself as allowing Iowa to go first because the Hawkeye State holds a caucus, not a primary. But they don’t like it. So you can imagine the private (and not-so-private) glee among New Hampshirites as it became clearer and clearer that Iowa Democrats had totally botched their moment in the national limelight.

* Donald Trump: Remember when Jeb(!) Bush said that Trump was a “chaos candidate” and that if he won he would be a “chaos president”? Well, Jeb(!) nailed it. Trump revels in chaos — believing that it keeps his opponents off balance and hands him an advantage. It’s like Bane tells Batman: “Ah you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it.” Trump is chaos. It’s his DNA.

What happened in Iowa this week was the definition of chaos. And Trump loved every minute of it, reveling in the incompetence of Democrats and insisting he was the only one who knew how to do all of this right.

* Michael Bloomberg: In order for the billionaire’s heavy spending on ads in states that vote on March 3 (and later) to work, he need the first four voting states this month to produce a muddle. Well, Iowa certainly did its part! And it’s not just the chaos in Iowa that works to Bloomberg’s strategic advantage. It’s also that former Vice President Joe Biden, the establishment pragmatist in the race, finished fourth. For Bloomberg to have a chance, he needs Biden to fade — allowing him to fill that center/centrist lane. It’s hard to imagine Bloomberg could have choreographed the first vote any better for his hopes.

THE WORST

* Iowa Democratic Party: It’s Friday. That’s four days after the caucuses. And we just — finally — found out how the state actually voted. And we knew nothing — not one number — until Tuesday afternoon. The truth is that we may never really know what the hell happened in Iowa. It’s virtually impossible to overstate how bad all of this is — not just for the Iowa Democratic Party or the national party but for peoples’ trust in democracy itself. I hesitate to predict the death of the Iowa caucuses almost four years before the next one occurs, but the state’s primacy in the nominating process is now more threatened than ever before.

* Joe Biden: In the days leading up to the caucuses, the former vice president’s team sought to downplay expectations in Iowa. But, fourth place? There’s simply no spinning that — not when you are a two-term vice president who has been the 2020 front-runner from the day you announced your candidacy. Biden can recover — sure. Polling conducted prior to the Iowa caucuses suggested he had a real chance to win in New Hampshire. But a strong showing in the Granite State went from a “nice-to-have” thing for Biden to nearly a “must-have” thing due to his poor performance in Iowa. If Biden can’t surprise in New Hampshire, his path to the nomination begins to narrow badly.

* Amy Klobuchar: The Minnesota senator based her campaign on a unique ability to overperform in Iowa because of her Midwestern roots. She finished fifth. That’s simply not good enough to provide the sort of major boost Klobuchar needed to be competitive in New Hampshire and beyond. Presidential politics are about timing and moments; Klobuchar just hasn’t found either to date.

* Diversity: According to the entrance poll in Iowa, more than 9 in 10 Iowa caucus-goers were white. This isn’t terribly surprising — Iowa is among the whitest states in the country — but it is striking when you consider the increasing diversity within the Democratic Party. That lack of diversity within the Iowa electorate coupled with the problems surrounding reporting the results in a prompt time frame mean that if you want the Hawkeye State to lose its coveted first-in-the-nation status, what happened on Monday was a big step in that direction. “We may be witnessing the last Iowa caucus,” former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said on Monday night.

*Twitter: Eight in 10 Iowa Democratic caucus-goers said they are not regular Twitter users, while just 19% said they are. If you ever need evidence that the conversation happening on Twitter isn’t indicative of the broader views of the Democratic Party, man is this it. Twitter isn’t useless, of course. It’s simply not any sort of representative sample of much of anything within the Democratic Party. Just for kicks — the two candidates with the highest number of supporters on Twitter? Sen. Elizabeth Warren (27% regular Twitter users) and Sanders (25%).