What are the lessons of Iowa? It depends who you ask. But let’s talk about Marco Rubio, the third place finisher who many are considering the biggest winner out of last night’s caucuses. In fact, one prediction market had Rubio’s chances of winning the nomination sky-rocket 18% after the results were released last night.

But here’s the problem: He came in third. And third place is only a victory if you were expecting much worse. And if you were expecting much worse then it’s hard to see how suddenly you are the favorite.

If anything highlights the illusionary Rubio-victory story, it’s his speech last night:

“So, this is the moment they said would never happen. For months, for months they told us we had no chance. For months they told us because offered too much optimism in a time of anger we had no chance. For months, they told us because we didn’t have the right endorsements or the right political connections, we had no chance. They told me we had no chance because my hair wasn’t gray enough and my boots were too high. They told me I needed to wait my turn.”

It sounds good, but the issue is that none of it is true. Rubio was the favorite. He did have the political connections. He did have the establishment support. This was his turn.

The only reason his third place finish resonated is because all of those advantages crumbled. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz were winning every poll, standing center stage at every debate, and proving to everyone that the Republican electorate was unhappy with an establishment candidate like Rubio or Jeb Bush.

So does Iowa change that? It’s hard to see how it does. Trump may have performed below expectations, but his anti-establishment, equally apocalyptic sidekick, Ted Cruz, performed above expectations. It’s all a matter of where you set your frame of reference, but the only way you can slice this as a victory for Rubio is if you believed he never really had a chance in the first place.

Indeed, the forces that “decide” the winners — the media, the establishment, the talking heads — are all the same people who were proven wrong by Trump and Cruz in the first place. In their view, Rubio won because he was supposed to win, and his rise in the polls is evidence that we overrated the anti-establishment choices, and that conventional wisdom was right.

The New York Times columnist David Brooks, for example, wrote this morning that “in Iowa on Monday night we saw the limit of Trump’s appeal. Like any other piece of showbiz theatrics, Trump was more spectacle than substance.” But how does a second place finish add up to a lack of substance, especially in a context where the third place finisher, Rubio, earned “his moment”?

Expectations matter, but beating expectations doesn’t change reality, and the reality is that Rubio is still a major underdog. As David Frum notes in The Atlantic, Rubio may now be better positioned to win the nomination, but a lot of unlikely events––including a very strong showing in New Hampshire and the quiet, timely exit of many candidates––need to happen in order to get there.

That is not to say it cannot happen; Indeed, making predictions in this election is consistently proven to be a dumb idea. But if Iowa did anything for Rubio, it just kept his head above water. And for an establishment candidate who was supposed to be the frontrunner––with money, endorsements, and the prediction markets behind him––that is far from a victory.