How to decode the Iowa caucuses result

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

74% : If Trump ends up doing about that well, or even better, it will confirm the political world's belief that he's the overwhelming favorite.
67% : Most political indicators currently suggest Trump will win the GOP nomination easily, and that the first step toward this will be a big win in Iowa.
62% : The low expectations for Haley in Iowa even make it possible that, if she comes in a strong second place (ahead of DeSantis and closer than expected to Trump), she could be deemed the "real" winner by many in the political world.
59% : Polls of Iowa Republicans show Trump getting about 50 percent support, more than 30 points ahead of any other competitor.
58% : In Iowa, Haley trails Trump by 35 points in polls.
50% : But in New Hampshire, she's 14 points behind Trump, on average.
48% : But he's spent most of the past year a distant second to Trump in Iowa polls, and the most recent polls show him and Haley -- who, again, hasn't prioritized the state -- neck-and-neck.
43% : Perhaps a strong second, much closer than expected to Trump, would do the trick.
29% : And back during the 2016 nomination contest, Trump actually lost Iowa but went on to win anyway.
27% : The flipside is that if Trump underperforms polls -- getting around 40 percent or lower, or having another contender come surprisingly close to him -- he will be deemed a "loser" of Iowa even though he won because the results showed his support looking less rock-solid than expected.
17% : And a bad result in Iowa might not impact Nikki Haley's campaign much, but such a result for Ron DeSantis would all but doom his hopes of defeating Trump.
16% : For instance, if Donald Trump wins but his vote share or margin of victory is unexpectedly small, this will be covered as a shocking development that throws his seeming inevitability into question.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.