But those standards for the moment must be regarded as discredited, defunct. Perhaps that seems too harsh. So someone screwed up the vote-counting procedures and we have to wait a while to find out what happened. Why should that nullify the result?

The answer is that the Iowa caucuses, to an even greater degree than next week’s New Hampshire primary, have always depended on a significant element of Make Believe. It worked because multiple actors, including or especially the news media, had a shared interest in playing along with the conceit that a small state without much demographic diversity is in better position to view the candidates up close and make judgments without outsized repercussions for the country as a whole.

One reason the gig lasted for decades was because of political reporting. There is an old (partially) tongue-in-cheek maxim about how to produce journalism: first simplify, then exaggerate. Generations of reporters applied those principles to writing about early-state results, investing them with significance that, once written or broadcast, was at least partly self-fulfilling.

Everything about Iowa this time around—the questions raised before voting about whether the caucuses had outlasted their utility; the problems after voting in tabulating results; above all, the narrowness of the results—suggests this is the year to stop investing the state with that significance. At a minimum it is appropriate to slow down, not necessarily to a full stop but definitely to half-speed, in projecting the Iowa results into supposed deeper trends.

Buttigieg is, as of 9 p.m. on Tuesday, ahead of Sanders by 1.8 percent in the delegate count and behind him by 1,184 votes in the popular vote total. Less than 15,000 votes (in a state of 3.1 million, in a country of 327 million) separate Sanders’s current good-for-you, tied-for-first vote total and Amy Klobuchar’s nice-try-but-you-came-in-fifth total. If she had gotten 790 more votes, Klobuchar would have been in fourth and Biden in fifth—a result that would have echoed with a boom even amid the all the confusion.

Who knows how these results will change—most likely only at the margins, and too late for most people to care—when the rest of the votes are counted and released?

It is not that all election analysis is illegitimate. It’s just that this analysis must be carefully circumscribed to what actually happened, not extrapolated to things that have not happened yet. Probably not a bad principle even when there is not a vote-counting debacle.

By that measure, Iowa did not transform the race so much as jostle it in interesting ways. It has not provided definitive answers but it has more sharply framed the questions for the next couple weeks.