It's obvious why Hillary Clinton and her campaign would like to spin Iowa as a "win" for Hillary.
And the mainstream media likes to covers the race like it's ball game with a clear winner and loser in each caucus or primary.
But proclaiming a Hillary "win" is misleading when it comes to the Iowa caucuses. In any meaningful sense, it was a "virtual tie."
If this were a ball game, or an election for Governor of Iowa, then an advantage of less than a hundred votes out of over 170,000 would be a win.
But the Iowa Caucuses are more like the first trial heat in a 1,000 meter track competition in which 1/10 of a second separated the first and second place finisher and both will be moving on to the next heat.
Moreover, Hillary's claims of victory are even more hollow when, only a few months earlier, the challenger was expected to finish 40 points back and he ended up fighting the vaunted Clinton political machine to a virtual tie.
Let's walk over to numbers Board, as CNN likes to do. For some bizarre reason, unlike the Republicans, the Iowa Democratic Party does not report raw vote totals from the Caucuses but only State Delegate Equivalents using a secret formula known only to Party officials
According to Politico 171,109 Democratic voters turned out to caucus and Party officials awarded 699.57 State Delegate Equivalents to Clinton and 695.49 to Sanders. That's a difference of 0.3%. A 0.3% differential out of 171,109 voters translates into a 513 voter edge to Hillary, about enough people to fit into one school gym. And that's not counting the 6 State Delegate Equivalents that went to Hillary by a coin toss, which if they went the other way would have given Bernie a 2 vote advantage in the State Delegate Equivalents which would translate into a tiny majority in the raw vote.
If you can claim victory in an entire state based on a 513 vote statistical edge based on a coin toss, then I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you.