Democratic voters across Iowa caucused on Monday night in the eagerly awaited first contest of the 2020 election. Results, however, have been hard to come by. Thanks to numerous screwups by the state Democratic Party, we still don’t know the winner. (The Iowa Democratic Party had released results from three-fourths of all precincts as of Wednesday afternoon.)

Adding to the confusion is that both the Party and the media have been reporting people’s first and final voting preferences, as well as state delegate equivalents (S.D.E.s). What does seem clear is that Bernie Sanders is likely to win on the first metric, and Pete Buttigieg on the third. And, regardless of which metric is used, Elizabeth Warren is certain to finish in third place, Joe Biden in fourth, and Amy Klobuchar in fifth.

To discuss the results and what they mean for the race, I spoke by phone, on Wednesday, with Nate Cohn, a domestic correspondent for the Upshot at the New York Times. (Cohn and I worked together at The New Republic and remain friends.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we covered the shape of Sanders’s coalition, Warren’s struggles, Buttigieg’s narrow path to a possible victory, and the reason the Iowa Democratic Party messed up so badly.

Did the data from the entrance poll and the results released so far suggest anything about one candidate expanding his or her base, or having surprising appeal?

No, I thought that the results and the entrance-poll results were largely consistent with the pre-election polls. I could make a case that the Sanders team could be a little disappointed in the results that came in a little lower than pre-election polling. The turnout wasn’t as large as they would have hoped, and he was fairly weak among older voters. He might have had only around four per cent of voters over age sixty-five, and Iowa is really the only place you can get away with something like that. The electorate will be older everywhere.

Why is that? It isn’t intuitively obvious.

It is because it is a caucus, and old people do not go to caucuses, while old people vote all the time.

Coming into the night, my assumption had been that Warren and Buttigieg were most in need of strong performances because Iowa is such a white state, and Biden and Sanders have shown more strength with nonwhite voters. Was that a fair assumption, in your mind?

I suppose. I think that it would be very hard, and maybe impossible, for either of them to win the nomination without doing very well in Iowa, or outright winning. And I suppose that is not true of Biden or Sanders. So in that sense I think it’s a reasonable thing to argue. But I think the stakes for all these candidates were quite high. In part because I am not really convinced that a win for Buttigieg or Warren would be enough to win the nomination, I am reluctant to place the possibility that they could keep their hopes alive as the most important stakes in the Iowa contest.

Why do you think both of them, especially Warren now, I assume, have a very long road to the nomination?

I don’t really see the path for Warren unless she is going to have a huge upset in New Hampshire next Tuesday, and I don’t really see that happening. She has no area of distinctive strength. In all of her strengths, someone else is stronger. She is strong among liberals, but Sanders is stronger. She is strong among well-educated voters, but Buttigieg is better in well-educated suburbs. If you look at the county map in Iowa, she didn’t win a single county for this reason. The number of actual precincts she won is quite low as well. So that makes it really hard for me to see how she is going to take a leap from here. Where is she going to win, particularly if she doesn’t have momentum on her side?

Buttigieg has a well-documented issue among nonwhite voters, and there is a lot of competition among affluent, moderate white voters. I find it hard to believe he can leap from here to the kind of huge, commanding advantage among affluent whites he would need to make up for his likely disadvantage among black voters. But I would be reluctant to rule it out, given how wide open the race is now. It’s not like anyone is that strong.

Do you think there is anything Buttigieg could do to expand his coalition?

No, probably not. I don’t think there is something he could say, or some policy he could support that would be credible and would have a real chance of materially influencing the trajectory of his support among nonwhite voters.

Sanders did well despite getting only around half the percentage he did in his race against Hillary Clinton, in 2016. How is his new coalition different from what it was in 2016?

He has shed a lot of his support among older and rural voters. He has been reduced to a coalition of ideologically consistent progressive voters, while in 2016 he also had a substantial amount of support among white working-class men who maybe didn’t like Hillary Clinton, to take one example.

I should say that this is not the story in the national polls. In the national polls, he seems to be doing better among groups that were not at the core of his coalition. You may have seen that he seems like he is doing better with Latino and black voters, compared with white voters, than in 2016. I don’t know that the story I told you will hold up, but it is certainly true in Iowa. If you look at the map, he is basically only winning the college towns now, while there are all sorts of older rural areas that went for Buttigieg or even Klobuchar that he carried in 2016.

You alluded to Clinton’s weaknesses, and there are two ways to look at this. One is that Sanders could have some strength down the road with some of these groups that went to Buttigieg or Klobuchar in Iowa, and the other is that he lucked out to run against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and his appeal with white working-class men, for example, is limited this time. Do you have a theory?

I strongly agree with what you just suggested. I think Sanders benefitted in a lot of ways from being in a matchup against Hillary Clinton. A lot of people didn’t like Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders may not have been the perfect candidate for them, but they were going to support him as a protest vote. I think that was even true in general-election polls in 2016, where there were a lot of people willing to say they liked Sanders and had a fond feeling about him simply because he ran against Hillary Clinton. Look at the polls now, and it is a pretty different story. In our Iowa poll, we had Bernie Sanders losing in the general election by six points. That was the worst of any of the major Democratic candidates. And that supposes a one-hundred-per-cent turnout, which presumably includes all the irregular young voters that they hope to lure to the polls.