Questions swirled among staffers and donors over whether a higher-level staffing overhaul was in order, pointing to both campaign manager Greg Schultz and Pete Kavanaugh, assistant campaign manager of states, as the ultimate authorities in Iowa.

Biden’s Iowa state director, Jake Braun, is moving to a contract position instead of continuing as a full-time campaign employee due to a preexisting commitment to teach a course at the University of Chicago, according to the campaign.

Even Biden, who began Tuesday morning in New Hampshire bragging that he probably did well in Iowa, admitted Wednesday afternoon that he suffered a “gut punch.”

“I expected to do better,” Biden said at a CNN town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, Wednesday evening. “And I expected that our organization would perform better.”

Just days prior to the caucuses, Schultz had given a private presentation to supporters about an expected outcome that was considerably rosier.

That presentation, according to two people with direct knowledge, predicted Biden would finish in the 20s in Iowa and have robust support in a cross-section of precincts across the state, including urban, rural and working class areas.

The implication was that Biden would pick up both Klobuchar and Buttigieg supporters when they failed to reach 15 percent minimum needed to be viable. Instead, it was rival Pete Buttigieg who appeared to do that across the state.

“Clearly the campaign underperformed its own expectations,” said one of the individuals familiar with the presentation.

Those who spoke to POLITICO, many on the condition of anonymity because they still worked for the campaign, complained that precinct captains were not well trained in Iowa, or in some cases, didn’t show up at all on caucus night.

Some of the precinct tallies from election night showed Biden losing support after the first alignment, a sign of weak support or poorly trained precinct captains or both.

Several campaign staffers said the field problems began mounting months ago when Biden’s fundraising tanked in the late summer and it pulled back on hiring and had to go dark on TV.

In the months before the caucuses, aides had butted heads over the need for more polling, with some saying they were “flying blind” about where Biden needed to beef up staffing, according to two aides.