Nearly every reporter who reported results last night showed Biden underperforming. (In the two precincts I covered Biden wasn't viable and actually had fewer supporters than Andrew Yang.)
The details are murky. There will be three different sets of numbers, and so there could be two different "winners." You can't place too much stake in partial numbers from an interested party. Maybe Buttigieg will win by one or two measures. Probably Sanders will. Maybe Warren will be close, and maybe she's in a distant third.
But definitely, Joe Biden bombed. He was first or second in all the polls, he is the former vice president, he has near universal name ID — and yet he finished fourth.
Biden's campaign can claim the whole process is tainted by the reporting problem, but the press shouldn't let him obscure what we know: He failed in Iowa, again.
On his first time out campaigning without Barack Obama, Biden failed miserably. That much we know.
