Bernie Sanders acolytes can complain all they want about their current popular vote lead in the botched Iowa caucuses. But just as with winning a general election, becoming a party’s presidential nominee requires playing a delegate game, and as the results from the first primary contest continue to trickle in more than a day after the caucus doors closed, Pete Buttigieg seems to have exacted the most successful strategy.
With a little more than 71% of precincts reporting, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor has secured 31,458 popular votes and 26.8% of the delegate share. Although Bernie bested Buttigieg in the popular vote by a little more than 1,000, he’s only brought in 25.2% of the delegate share. Iowa only provides 1% of the total delegates awarded to presidential primary contenders. But what matters for Buttigieg is not just that he’s on pace to win Iowa, but where he earned such a victory.
Buttigieg spent the better part of January courting cities in the Hawkeye State that flipped from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, betting on his ability to sell himself as an electable moderate. Mayor Pete may be a policy moderate in name only, but based on the available precinct data, he proved himself electable. For all that the woefully woke Left has berated Buttigieg for praising the heartland, it looks like it paid off. In an election where Obama’s former vice president has spent a year as the dominant front-runner, Buttigieg is the candidate who evidently earned the most Obama-to-Trump areas. That somewhat harms Biden’s electability case and substantially helps Buttigieg’s.
Buttigieg is still far from a front-runner, but he showed that his strategy has an endpoint, and one his detractors would be wise not to ignore.
