5 takeaways from the early Iowa results

As the Democratic candidates jetted out of Iowa late Monday, they left behind a state that had the power to shape the rest of the battle for the party’s presidential nomination. That power ebbed with each passing hour as the state party struggled to report accurate results.

Nearly 48 hours after Iowans showed up to caucus in school cafeterias, church basements and — for the first time in state history — in a mosque, the full results still are not out, a devastating failure that could ultimately doom Iowa’s prized place on the political calendar.

But the nearly 75 percent of precincts for which results are available show some tantalizing trends, indicators of what happened in Iowa — and how the rest of the nominating contest is likely to shake out.

Here are the five things we learned from Iowa’s caucus results so far:

Organizing works

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) first came to Iowa in 2015, and he almost never left.

Sanders built up a huge campaign team in the state, and that team took some innovative approaches to organizing supporters. They had a specific focus on employees at Casey’s General Store, an Iowa chain, and at retail outlets like CVS. On caucus night, Sanders’s team had precinct captains — sometimes more than one — in every precinct in the state.

For Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., a strong performance in Iowa would be the foundation necessary to vault into the top tier. His team opened 34 field offices, more than any other campaign, and they dispatched some 1,000 volunteers for last-minute door-knocking on caucus day.

For months leading up to the caucuses, campaigns touted their impressive ground games. The caucus results themselves show why those organizations matter: Buttigieg qualified for delegates by meeting the 15 percent threshold in 88 percent of the precincts that have reported so far. Sanders hit the 15 percent threshold in 78 percent of precincts. No other candidate came even close, an indication that investments in grassroots politics are fundamental to a strong caucus performance.

Sanders has built a racially diverse coalition

The knock on Iowa as the nation’s first test of presidential candidates is that the state does not represent the country as a whole — and especially the coalition that forms the foundation of the Democratic Party. But Iowa has its pockets of racial diversity, especially in and around Des Moines, its largest city.

And in most of those pockets, on the east and north sides of the city that have large Hispanic and African American cohorts, Sanders did well. In fact, he did very well, at least doubling up his main rivals in many of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city. Among the 9 percent of Iowa caucusgoers who were nonwhite, Sanders took 43 percent of the vote — more than double any other candidate in the field.

That offers a small hint that former Vice President Joe Biden’s claim to a wide base of support among African American and Hispanic voters in South Carolina and Nevada isn’t as deep as he might hope and that Sanders is resonating among communities of color.

But Sanders fans are angry

After the 2016 caucuses, when Sanders came within an inch of beating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his supporters insisted on a series of reforms to the Iowa caucuses. The state party implemented those reforms, including for the first time agreeing to release the initial and final alignment votes that are distinct from the ultimate delegate totals.

The nightmare scenario for Iowa Democrats was that the final alignment would not match up with the number of delegates awarded. The winner of a large urban area might receive fewer delegates than, say, a candidate who cleaned up in a bunch of smaller rural areas.

That’s exactly what happened. With 75 percent of precincts reporting, Sanders leads Buttigieg by about 1,000 final allocation votes, but Buttigieg leads the race for delegates by about 1.7 percentage points. Sanders fans cried foul, even though their team knew the rules going in. If the current results hold and Sanders’s supporters stay angry, it may portend a repeat of the 2016 campaign, when some Sanders backers refused to support Clinton in the general election.

Biden’s electability argument isn’t holding water

Entrance polls conducted as Iowans streamed into their caucus sites on Monday showed those voters cared about one thing more than anything else: beating President Trump. At the beginning of the race, that would have benefitted Biden the most; the campaign’s entire pitch to Iowa voters centered on his strength in the polls and his ability to beat Trump, as he liked to say, “like a drum.”

But by the time the caucus doors opened, Biden had not made the sale. Of the 61 percent of Democratic caucusgoers who said they preferred a candidate who could beat Trump over a candidate with whom they agreed on major issues, 24 percent caucused for Buttigieg, and 23 percent caucused for Biden.

Biden retains a well of support among Democratic voters. Of the 50 or so voters who spoke to The Hill over the last several days, almost every one of them expressed admiration for his time as President Obama’s No. 2. Perhaps tellingly, most of those interviewed at Biden’s own events said his greatest appeal was his status as the most electable candidate — a status seriously called into question this week.

Showing up counts

Iowans like to be courted. They really like it. And no one spent more time crisscrossing the state in the final month as did Buttigieg. The South Bend Democrat campaigned at 46 events in the month leading up to the caucuses, making a point to stop in so-called pivot counties, those that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and flipped to Trump in 2016.

Of the 31 pivot counties in Iowa, almost all of which are rural regions and most of which are on the eastern side of the state, Buttigieg won all but nine — seven of which voted for Sanders and two for Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).

Success in a Democratic caucus does not necessarily portend success in a general election, when moderates and Republicans get to weigh in. But Democratic voters who live in those counties liked what they saw in Buttigieg — and that they saw him so much.