There were 74 total delegates on the line last night. Iowa Democrats will ultimately allocate 44 pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and Iowa Republicans will send 30 bound delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Those are pretty small numbers. The Iowa share of Democratic delegates is just 1.1 percent. Iowa’s share of the 2472 total Republican delegates is 1.2 percent.

Iowa provides an even smaller share of the delegates needed to clinch the nomination. Ted Cruz’s projected 8 delegates is just 0.65 percent of what the Texas senator would need to win the Republican nomination.

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For Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the virtual tie likely means an even split of the 44 delegates, just under 1 percent of what either would require to become the party’s nominee.

Iowa, then, is not really about delegates. There are delegates at stake, but not enough to make or break a campaign. Just one delegate separated first and third place in the likely Iowa Republican allocation. Cruz will get his eight delegates while Trump and Rubio will each get seven. In terms of delegates, there really isn’t any daylight between the top candidates in either party.

Here’s another key point: Iowa delegates are relatively easy to count. The Republican Party of Iowa was forced by a change in Republican National Committee rules to bind the delegates based on the results of the precinct caucuses. This is a departure from the non-binding straw poll that had been typical for the party previously. Replacing that was a truly proportional allocation plan with no threshold of support required to qualify for delegates.

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And although the Democratic delegate rules in Iowa are more intricate, Clinton and Sanders both finished above the 15 percent viability threshold in the overwhelming majority of precincts, and this smoothed out what can often be noisy delegate estimates coming out of the precinct stage of the caucus/convention process.

Iowa, then, is easy and provided a virtually even distribution of delegates among the top contenders. The delegate rules in the contests ahead — particularly on the Republican side (though the Democrats still have superdelegates) — are more complex.

It is these contests that should create some distance between the candidates in delegate count.