From New Hampshire.

With the limb, comes the saw, and those who prognosticate must own up to the reality of the results. With that in mind, I’m grading myself 0-2 on my calls for the Iowa caucuses. I didn’t know it was a limb and never saw the saw.

Technically, I could claim 1-1, since strictly speaking I did say Hillary would win and technically speaking, she won. To be fair though, I expected less of a contest than it turned out to be. By any measure, this was a tie. And a tie for Bernie is as good as a win, given that Hillary led in six of the last seven recent polls. 

As for Cruz, I did not think his well documented crack, ground game would be enough to overcome the distance Trump had opened in the polls over the last 10 days. And that was the difference. You may have heard commentators talking Monday night about how the polls were “wrong” on the Republican side. The polls were not wrong. This was about a great ground game versus a feeble one that needed to figure out how to get newly interested supporters to the polls and failed to do so. And great ground games depend on effective use of data, which Trump seemingly refused to believe.

So the two main drivers last night were superior organization (Cruz) and enthusiasm running on the fumes of a deeply resonating message (Sanders).

Now, what does it all mean in the larger scheme of things? At this point, I would say not much. Bernie is still poised for a win by a sizable margin in New Hampshire and Iowa has never provided the evangelical favorite there a bump in New Hampshire, or beyond for that matter. Trump is up by 20 there, Bernie by 19, according to the aggregated number on pollster.com.

If somebody gets within five points of either of them, it would spell trouble. Right now, the polls clearly suggest this is unlikely, but as always it’s an expectations game. Assuming Trump pulls off a solid victory, I think his path to the nomination is still clear. A big win by Bernie unfortunately (to my sentiments) doesn’t do enough for him. A big win is expected in his neighboring state and he really needs to win the Nevada caucuses to prove his game—or South Carolina, which would seem to be a longer shot.

More interesting and potentially determinative is the race for second and third on the R side in New Hampshire. Right now Cruz, Kasich, Rubio and Bush are all vying for that distant number 2 position and are within about 3.5 points of each other. The permutations are almost endless here. But if Rubio gets an Iowa bump and manages a solid second place, this pretty much becomes a three-person race between Trump, Cruz and the darling, well-spoken, jejune senator from Florida.