By contrast, for Buttigieg’s co-winner, Sanders, the botched count actually balances his apparent failure to win decisively, making him a winner in the voting and the fiasco both. Yes, it’s not as good an outcome for Sanders as a thumping 10-point win or a big delegate edge, but the solidity and national spread of his support means that he has the clearest path to the nomination in a permanently divided field, and if one of the main effects of the Iowa disaster will be to delay any winnowing, that’s almost certainly good news for him.

And the fact that it’s Buttigieg rather than Biden sharing the win is also probably good news for Sanders, given that Mayor Pete has negligible support in many national polls and little traction with minority voters. A race where Biden collapses and Buttigieg and Bloomberg scramble to fill that space is almost certainly better for Sanders than a quick consolidation into a Sanders-Biden battle of the septuagenarians — and the first scenario just became a lot more likely.

But less likely than it would have been without the fiasco, which is why Biden, the big loser of the actual voting, is probably the biggest winner of the tabulation debacle: It obscures just how much he slipped beneath his polling, lets Iowa be swallowed up by other stories (the State of the Union, impeachment, coronavirus and then … New Hampshire!), and makes it modestly more likely that he can limp through to South Carolina with a chance to make a stand.

That effect is only modest because voters aren’t momentum-obsessed pundits, and if Biden’s support is as fundamentally weak elsewhere as it proved in Iowa, that will manifest itself going forward regardless of the caucus headlines. But at the very least we can say that Biden is the only candidate competing in Iowa for whom the delayed announcement of the victor is unqualified good news.

For Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, the disaster’s impact is somewhat less significant. Warren’s apparent third-place performance keeps her in the running, but if she can’t beat either Buttigieg or Sanders in the early states, then her campaign’s only purpose will be to accumulate delegates for a hypothetical brokered convention. In which case maybe the meltdown helps her a little, by making such a marathon more likely — but it might also just obscure her weaknesses relative to the top finishers, giving her a reason to burn donor cash a little longer than she reasonably should.