Iowa: the first-in-the-nation caucus state, where a good showing can breathe new life into a presidential campaign, or smother it entirely. At the moment, Joe Biden is holding on to a strong lead in the state. But as his progressive rivals begin to nip at his heels, his campaign is cautiously tamping down expectations. “Do I think we have to win Iowa? No,” a senior Biden adviser told Politico on Tuesday, adding that while the state is still “critical,” it’s not essential. “We think we’re going to win. We think it’s going to be a dogfight...But we think there are several candidates in this field, there’s probably three or four, that are going to go awhile.” (To wit: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg.) Instead, Team Biden urged reporters to look to Super Tuesday as the true test of Biden’s mettle. “We feel we are going to be in a very dominant spot” after Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, said an adviser.

Strategically and historically speaking, a loss in Iowa doesn’t necessarily mean a candidate won’t win the primary season. (In the past three Republican cycles, none of the candidates who won Iowa ended up with the nomination: Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz.) But the stakes are different for Biden, whose selling point is that he’s the best anti-Trump candidate and could return America to normalcy, and whose strongest challengers are fire-breathing progressives. Biden didn’t come close to winning Iowa in a previous presidential run, and Iowa’s recent caucus history doesn’t favor Biden either. In 2016, Hillary Clinton barely eked out a 0.3% win against Bernie Sanders, shocking the Democratic establishment and presaging the socialist-progressive movement roiling the party today. Anything less than a sound to crushing win would elicit questions as to whether voters want what Biden’s selling, which could pose an existential challenge to his campaign, depending on how well he does in New Hampshire the following week. (Unfortunately, New Hampshire voters have preferred New England candidates, like, say, senators from Vermont, in the past.)

At the moment, Biden is leading Warren and Sanders by roughly 10 points in Iowa, according to RealClearPolitics, suggesting the progressive vote could be split if both are still in the race come February. Biden might also win a few converts from other candidates who drop out of the race, particularly those pitching themselves as the party’s solid elder statesmen. And of course, this year’s jacked up Super Tuesday schedule will be the true test of Biden’s candidacy, with 16 states and 1,358 delegate votes up for grabs.

Still, narrative is narrative, and Team Biden needs to manage theirs, particularly as the 76-year-old struggles with verbal pitfalls. The gaffes are legion at this point, the latest being an error-filled stump story. In a New York Times story published Monday, Biden seemed unable to definitively say where his desire to be president stems from. (“Um, I’m not sure, to be quite honest with you...I hadn’t planned on running again,” he said when asked if he would have entered the race were a more traditional Republican in office.) To win the nomination, Biden needs to recast Iowa as the first leg of a marathon that he can eventually win—not a sprint that he’s too old to even compete in.

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