Monday's Iowa caucuses won't enshrine any presidential nominees quite yet -- just ask former victors Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and Tom Harkin.
But the results will affect how the candidates are perceived by the rest of the nation, which is increasingly starting to tune into the race.
On the Democratic side, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that a Bernie Sanders win would be considered a major milestone for him, but not a significant failure for Hillary Clinton. Sanders, who currently trails Clinton by about 3 points in HuffPost's polling average, would likely need record turnout to win.
A 52 percent majority of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say that Sanders winning in Iowa would be a sign that he's a serious challenger to win the Democratic nomination, while just 37 percent say it would be a temporary victory for his campaign.
"There’s no better evidence that you can win than having won," Democratic pollster Mark Mellman told Vox.
Just 30 percent say that Clinton losing would be a sign that her campaign is in serious trouble, while 57 percent say it would be only a temporary setback. That, however, reflects a considerably higher perception of vulnerability than in 2007, when just 14 percent of Democrats told Gallup that Clinton losing in Iowa would be a sign of serious trouble.
On the Republican side, 66 percent of GOP and GOP-leaning voters say that a Trump win in Iowa would be a sign that he's a serious challenger, while only about a quarter would call it a temporary victory.
Regardless of the results, a majority of voters in both parties -- 52 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners, and 51 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners -- think that early states like Iowa and New Hampshire have too much influence on who wins the party nominations for president.
Republican voters, though, say by a 12-point margin that in terms of representing the country, Iowa is a good place to begin selecting the next president, while Democratic voters say by a 14-point margin that it's a bad place to do so.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Jan. 25-27 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be foundhere. More details on the polls' methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov's reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.