A new poll released by Monmouth University today shows Hillary Clinton positively dominating the race for the Democratic nomination in Iowa, leading Bernie Sanders by 41 points. Per their results, 65 percent of Iowa Democrats support Clinton for the nomination to Sanders’s 24 percent. Martin O’Malley is at five percent, and Lawrence Lessig is at one percent.

The poll represents the first survey of the Hawkeye State since a string of good news for Clinton — a stretch in which she registered a strong performance in the Democratic debate, saw Joe Biden announce that he would not challenge her for the Democratic nomination and ate the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s lunch in an eleven-hour hearing concerning the 2011 embassy attack.

But while it’s certainly fair to say that Clinton’s had a good run, and that she stood the most to gain from Joe Biden taking his name out of consideration, it may be a bit hasty to say that Clinton is ahead by such a wide margin. A closer look into Monmouth’s methodology shows that the decisions they made with respect to who to count and who to ignore in their likely voter model could very easily have undercounted Sanders’s supporters.

Here is Monmouth’s likely voter screen, as they describe it:

The Monmouth University Poll was sponsored and conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute from October 22 to 25, 2015 with a statewide random sample of 400 Iowa voters drawn from a list of registered Democratic voters who voted in at least one of the last two state primary elections and indicate they are likely to attend the Democratic presidential caucuses in February 2016. This includes 300 contacted by a live interviewer on a landline telephone and 100 contacted by a live interviewer on a cell phone, in English. Monmouth is responsible for all aspects of the survey design, data weighting and analysis. Final sample is weighted for age and gender based on state registration list information on the pool of voters who participate in primary elections.

I’ll grant Monmouth that modeling who is likely to show up for the Democratic caucuses in Iowa on February 1st is tough, and requires a series of assumptions that are bound to be open to some scrutiny. But still, that’s a pretty strict likely voter screen — one that isn’t likely to represent the eventual Iowa electorate. Iowa does not require caucus participants to be registered with the party for whom they’re caucusing, and there’s every reason to believe that this particular round of the Iowa caucuses will include a large number of first-time participants.

There’s also good reason to believe that those first-time participants will not be distributed amongst the candidates in the same way that past participants will. Younger voters — especially younger voters who are hesitant to self-identify as Democrats — make up a disproportionate chunk of Sanders’s base. Millennials are the only age demographic in which Sanders leads Clinton. They’re more than twice as likely to prefer Sanders than the rest of the electorate is, and they are also the group most likely to be excluded from Monmouth’s sample.

In the 2008 Iowa caucuses, 22 percent of participants were between the ages of 17 and 29; only 7 percent of Monmouth’s sample was under the age of 35 — after it was weighted to fit their likely voter model. For 43 percent of participants, it was their first caucus; Monmouth’s likely voter screen only counts voters who have participated in one of the last two state primary elections. This doesn’t make sense. While the 2016 Iowa caucus electorate won’t look exactly like the 2008 electorate, it’s probably going to look more like that than, say, its 2014 primary for Senate:

You can see it in the age breakdown: 39% are 65+, 7% 18-34. That's a Senate primary electorate, not an Iowa D caucus — Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) October 27, 2015

So, again, now that Joe Biden is no longer included in Democratic primary polls, and given Hillary Clinton’s string of news cycle victories, it would be a monumental stretch to say that Bernie Sanders is still leading in Iowa; Clinton’s almost certainly ahead. But to to say that she’s ahead by 41 points, nearly tripling Sanders’s level of support, amounts to a stretch of equal proportions. As more polls are released in Iowa using different methodologies, I suspect we’ll still see Clinton ahead — just not by that much.

(h/t The New Civil Rights Movement)