1. Wow! Kerry 38, Edwards 32, Dean 18, Gephardt 11.
2. So much for the unions. The two union-backed candidates, including the one with the money and the one from next door, finished third and fourth.
3. Kerry did well, but he spent the money to do it. Edwards’s performance was astonishing. All of us who were wondering why a guy with so much talent didn’t seem to be getting anywhere now get to wonder what’s next.
4. Matt Yglesias is right that a Dean victory, forcing some of the non-Dean candidates out of the race, might not have been good for Dean. But finishing a bad third really isn’t good for Dean. How badly wounded is he? And what the hell happened?
5. Gephardt is obviously out. Where do his people go? Not to Dean, I’d guess. Edwards shares his anti-free-trade line, though somewhat less vehemently, and his working-class roots.
6. The Tradesports market thinks the result is very good for Kerry and Edwards and only slightly bad for Clark. The big loser is Dean. It has Dean at 34-40, down 14, Kerry at 30-40, up 17, Field (which is Clark) at 17-23, down 2, and Edwards at 15-20, up 13.
7. The Iowa market is roughly consistent: the bids are Dean 33, Kerry 24, Clark 19, ROF (Edwards) 14.
8. The Tradesports market disagrees with those of us who think that Dean is the weakest candidate. The Bush contract is down only a point and change, to 70.
9. The people who thought I was misreading the Iowa vote-share results also get some support from new data. Dean’s vote-share predictions vs. Bush are now in the same range as those of the other candidates.
What it all means
MORE: Not that you'll have any trouble finding it, but there's more interesting analysis from Mark Kleiman, and several posts by , and several posts by