By the time you read this, Bernie Sanders may well be leading in every category of the Iowa caucus results. It all depends on the results that are still rolling in from the “satellite caucuses” made up of Iowans in Florida, France, and, for all I know, on Mars. Here's a good tick-tock by BuzzFeed News’s Ruby Cramer:

On Wednesday night, Sanders’s state director, Misty Rebik, emailed a memo to Iowa staff and supporters, saying campaign officials still believed they had “a viable path forward to achieve a clean sweep and retake the lead in state delegate equivalents and national pledged delegates.” The memo pointed mainly to results yet to come from Iowa’s satellite caucuses, which she said she believes Sanders won “overwhelmingly.” Satellite caucuses were held earlier in the day for Iowans out of state, but were also designed in part to allow workers and students, two chief components of the Sanders electorate, a chance to caucus earlier in the day.

In a number of the satellite caucuses, Pete Buttigieg failed to achieve viability, which again calls into question his charmingly hubristic election-night speech.

Sanders and Buttigieg top the Iowa results amid some irregular circumstances. Scott Olson Getty Images

Of course, the very chewy cluster of fck in Iowa still contains so many surprises that we may not know the true result until long after Iowa has ceased to be relevant to much of anything. For example, the state Democratic party had to pull back some of the results it actually did see fit to release because of a glitch in Black Hawk County that gave some of Bernie Sanders’s delegates to...Deval Patrick, whom nobody ever has mistaken for Bernie Sanders. From the Des Moines Register:

With 75% of precincts reporting, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick had not received any state delegate equivalents. When the number of reported precincts reached 85%, he'd earned 21 state delegate equivalents. That immediately surprised Iowa politicos, because Patrick had spent very little time campaigning in Iowa and was not actively competing for support here. The party's website said 1,677 people supported him on the first alignment and 1,768 people did so in the final alignment. After the Iowa Democratic Party released its corrected results, Patrick again was down to receiving zero delegate equivalents.

Between Patrick and Romney, it was a helluva Wednesday for former governors of the Commonwealth, god save it.

One of the other curious aspects of the Iowa results is the virtual disappearance of Elizabeth Warren from the post-caucus news coverage. That began on Monday night, when some networks cut away from her speech in order to carry Joe Biden’s, and when MSNBC played hers on tape delay. This, despite the fact that she over-performed relative to what many people predicted. Since then, accounts of what is going on in Iowa consistently talk about Buttigieg and Sanders, and then skip down to discuss Biden’s embarrassing flop. (There is also a tendency among the punditariat to move heaven and earth to make Amy Klobuchar happen.) In any other year, this would be considered a three-way race for the foreseeable future. But Iowa has knocked everything into a cocked hat, and nobody is handling it very well.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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