My view (and this certainly shows up empirically) is that places below 1st don't matter as much as folks think. The storylines are quickly forgotten about once a winner is declared. Buttigieg/Klobuchar getting little if any bounce post-NH is instructive.
Nor has finishing a distant 4th in NH proven to be especially harmful to Warren. And although Biden's polls declined a bunch after Iowa, they don't seem to have declined much more as a result of his awful 5th place finish in NH.
I can certainly imagine exceptions to this and a strong 2nd place finish in NV for either Warren or Biden might well be one of them. But in general it's relatively binary.
