Sanders Ends Iowa Campaign Strong

Ryan Lizza: “If you were an alien visiting Iowa this weekend and were asked to guess the order of Monday’s results based on nothing but watching the top four Democrats speak, you would predict a Sanders victory, followed by Warren, Buttigieg, and Biden.”

“The dangers of extrapolating from crowd size and subjective observations like the enthusiasm of attendees or the performance of the candidate speaking are obvious. A campaign can build a big crowd when it needs to with aggressive phone banking, bussing in supporters or adding a celebrity to the program. A candidate can nail a speech one day and botch it the next.”

“Still, the alien would notice that Sanders’s events, at least the two big ones this week with musicians, are large and electric, that Biden’s are small and sleepy, and that Warren and Buttigieg’s fall somewhere in between.”

“The Iowa caucuses reward enthusiasm, especially at the end.”