I keep seeing shades of "Oh, when it's Clinton the liberals all care about the popular vote but when it's Bernie in Iowa suddenly people are defending the caucus" and literally who at this point is defending the caucus? Make it a primary election via popular vote.
Honestly, replace the delegate system with nationwide popular vote using a ranked choice system and I will be ecstatic, but any move that gets us closer to a popular vote is good and eliminating a caucus is GREAT.
Get rid of the caucus and also get rid of the thing where we care about Iowa in particular apart from the number of delegates it represents, which is not a lot of them. Just the normal amount for a state its size.
Also, whether Bernie wins or gets a strong second, the fact that Pete is his major competition and is surging in New Hampshire is not my favorite thing but it's a great counter to the "This is a two man race." argument - very few people saw this coming.
We don't know what we don't know, and we don't know the future. People were saying back in the fall that it had to be Biden or Bernie so if you voted for anyone but Bernie you were voting for Biden, and they had arguments for why that looked true, back then.
In retrospect it's maybe not so surprising that the white businessman/mayor of a moderately sized midwestern city overperformed in Iowa. In retrospect it makes sense. But that's not the same thing as being inevitable or predictable.
Him doing well in Iowa and possibly better than expected in New Hampshire doesn't mean he's going to win or even that he'll stay a viable candidate as the race goes nationwide, but it demonstrates that the landscape changes.
