Setting aside the bad look for the Democratic Party in Iowa — admittedly a not insignificant thing to set aside — what we’re primarily missing is insight into The Narrative. We’re missing the ability of campaigns and pundits to declare a victor and assess repercussions, something that, had the caucuses run smoothly, we would now be some 16 hours into. Instead, everyone will stick around until New Hampshire and voters there will figure out the ways in which the Democratic field will be buffeted by the whims of the electorate.

Well, that’s not really true, unless the Iowa results never come out. That’s not going to happen; the entire point of holding off on releasing data Monday night was for the Iowa Democratic Party to ensure that its ducks were in a row before unveiling the results of the four different metrics by which the contest could be evaluated. We’re simply waiting for that tally to be complete, so we can parse how the caucus-goers viewed the field, know who got the most initial support, and know who got the most support once the realignments had occurred and those supporting relatively unpopular candidates were asked to pick someone else. We’ll know how that will translate into delegates, a two-part calculation of some complexity but one that will give us some sense of an actual victor.

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The party added this multi-tier results process specifically to address concerns that the data it used to release (an estimation of delegate support) was insufficient for assessing how Iowans actually felt about the candidates. By changing its system, the party sought to “provide a more transparent view of the movement in the room.” As results came in, we would get a fuller and fuller picture of how Iowa viewed the Democratic field. Multiple metrics might mean multiple winners and multiple Narratives, but the party figured it was better than wrangling over which metric was the proper one.

“The IDP does not declare a winner,” the state party’s “Press 101″ Web page reads, “the party’s role is to present results.” Fair enough.

Then, in the face of withering criticism, the party announced that it would do the one thing that could possibly make the fallout of the caucuses worse: It would release partial results.

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It’s a problem on every election night that results come in only in batches. People seize on the flow of a race with only half of the precincts reporting, slipping into assessments of contests as depicting some candidate coming from behind simply because votes from areas that supported that candidate more heavily came in later. That can have real repercussions, as it did in Florida in 2018. That year, Republican candidates for Senate and governor jumped out to early leads that held until all of the voting on Election Day was counted. As absentee votes came in, though, the Democratic positions improved. President Trump and then-Gov. Rick Scott, the GOP Senate candidate, cast this as nefarious instead of simply being a function of demographics and geography. Because of how the vote was counted, the Democrats had a bigger rhetorical hill to climb and Scott had fodder for legal challenges.

Remember: One of the only reasons that the Iowa results are important is because of the power they have to shape how people understand the Democratic primary race. By releasing half of the results of the caucuses, the party risks cementing a particular Narrative that may end up being inaccurate.

Let’s say, for example, that the data the party releases is heavily from areas where Joe Biden had an advantage. What the party publishes would then suggest a stronger performance from Biden than he had statewide, allowing his campaign to present an outcome in the state that holds only as long as the count is incomplete. Again, a misleading result that stems from an incomplete reporting of results happens in nearly every contested race — but it’s generally resolved by the time all of the votes are counted. Releasing partial results from Iowa under pressure is something else, especially given the lack of certainty about when all of the results will be available.

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Think that this isn't something campaigns will use to their advantage? Oh, you sweet naive thing.

The campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for example, has already released its own tallies of the outcome in Iowa, showing Sanders with a lead in the first count and after voters from less popular candidates realigned. It’s likely, based on polling, that Sanders does hold such a lead, but that data is from only 60 percent of precincts and excludes the delegate-equivalent metric that news outlets such as the Associated Press use to declare a winner.

Jeremy Bird, who ran Barack Obama’s field program, criticized the Iowa party for its deployment of a tool intended to make counting the results of the caucuses easier. But he did offer one compliment to how the party was managing the disaster.

The Iowa Democratic Party “smartly did not release inaccurate or partial data,” he wrote on Twitter. “We are going to get accurate results. Patience is a virtue we can cultivate here.”

So much for that.