RUTHFULLY YOURS

Politico, the Washington Post and Fox News all report that the results in the Democratic race in Iowa between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is too close to call.

Both Democratic candidates received approximately 50 percent of the vote, with only 0.1% to 0.4% separating them. In most of the data, Sanders is trailing Clinton, but the gap is so small that not one serious pundit is willing to call it for anyone, which — of course — doesn’t prevent the Clinton camp from claiming victory nonetheless.

But there’s nobody who’s running with that.

This is a situation in which a draw is actually a defeat for Clinton. And a big one too. Early last year, Hillary was leading Sanders by 50 percent. She’s lost that lead completely and is trailing Sanders in New Hampshire; chances are that the Vermont senator will pull off a clean win there.

With record-high turnout in the Iowa caucus, the top three Republicans were separated from each other by just a few points.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) came in first with 28 percent, followed by Donald Trump at 24 percent. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) surged past his polling expectations to take 23 percent with 99 percent of precincts reporting.

“So this is the moment they told us this would never happen,” Rubio told supporters in Des Moines. “…They told me I had no chance because my hair wasn’t gray enough and my boots were too high.”

“I’m just really honored,” Trump said at his Iowa headquarters, congratulating the others in the race. “We’re leaving tonight and tomorrow afternoon we’ll be in New Hampshire… I think we’re going to be proclaiming victory, I hope.”

Cruz was the last GOP candidate to take the stage as his victory really, accompanied by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and his father, Rafael Cruz.

“Iowa has sent notice that the Republican nominee and the next president of the United States will not be chosen by the media,” Cruz said.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton was locked in a tight race with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at 49.8-49.6 percent with 95 percent reporting.

The American political revolution appears to be exaggerated. Iowa Republicans played to their social conservative form Monday by vaulting Ted Cruz to victory over Donald Trump in their first-in-the-nation caucuses, while as we went to press Democrats were narrowly turning back Bernie Sanders’s populist challenge in favor of Hillary Clinton’s interest-group machine.

The night’s biggest loser, to borrow a word, was Mr. Trump, who in the end couldn’t turn his large crowds and polling leads into enough caucus voters. There’s no doubt the New York businessman helped to generate higher turnout, which broke recent caucus records for Republicans. But perhaps he should have attended that debate last week after all, or maybe there are limits to his unconventional media-dominated, celebrity politics.

Mr. Trump still leads in the New Hampshire polls, but one question is how he will respond to the uncomfortable reality of second place. His speech on Monday night was, to borrow another phrase, low-energy.

Instead Mr. Cruz prevailed like Mike Huckabee (2008) and Rick Santorum (2012) by mobilizing the state’s cultural conservatives into a 28% plurality. The first-term Texas Senator had the support of Iowa’s conservative pastors network, he spent months organizing across the state, and his campaign invested heavily in voter analytics. The Texan also passed the first test of his theory that he can win the GOP nomination, and then the Presidency, with a hard-edged conservative message.

Ted Cruz did what he had to do. Donald Trump fell well short of the shock-and-awe moment he hoped would set up a blitz through the rest of the country. Marco Rubio bought himself a seat at the big table. And Hillary Clinton flirted all night with disaster.

Those were the big story lines that emerged from Iowa’s caucuses Monday night. It’s early—ridiculously early, actually—to draw too many conclusions. But the results suggested that a fight still lies ahead on the Democratic side, and a potentially much bigger and longer battle is ahead on the Republican one.

Perhaps most important, the Iowa results suggest that those fights will take place in two parties deeply divided between insiders and outsiders, between young and old, and between the most and least wealthy. The situation is volatile, and, as a consequence, unpredictable.

By late last night, it was clear that Mr. Cruz rode his strong support among evangelical conservatives to a victory. He had to do that to be a viable long-term candidate; if he couldn’t charge ahead in a state where evangelical voters traditionally have an outsize influence, his candidacy would have been seriously compromised.

Mr. Trump calculated that he could make a late surge in Iowa, put away Mr. Cruz and pave the way for a big win in New Hampshire to start putting away the competition. That didn’t happen. His brand has been that he is a winner; it remains to be seen what the Iowa outcome does to that brand.