Did Hillary Clinton actually win more votes than Bernie Sanders in Iowa? It’s an interesting question, because in the last 40 years only one candidate has won the Democratic nomination for president without carrying either Iowa or New Hampshire. The rule-proving exception was Bill Clinton in 1992, when he and other Democrats didn’t compete with Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin in the latter’s home-state caucuses. And in New Hampshire, Clinton claimed a sort of victory by proclaiming himself “the comeback kid” for finishing second to Paul Tsongas, the diffident senator from Lowell, Mass., just a few miles south of the New Hampshire line, who didn’t make much of a victory speech.

This year may be another exception. As this is written, everyone expects Sanders to win in New Hampshire (Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com) and everyone believes that Clinton won the Iowa caucuses. But we don’t know if she actually got more votes there than Sanders. Iowa Democrats score their caucuses by state convention delegate equivalents and on that basis, Clinton won with 49.83 percent to Sanders’s 49.63 percent.