Iowa voters gave birth to a new star Monday night, as 38-year-old Pete Buttigieg capped a year-long flight from obscurity to finish atop the field. He was joined there by socialist Bernie Sanders, a man four decades his senior, in photo-finish results that promise an extended battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, with the two leaders offering sharply different visions: A return to centrist norms, or a leftist warrior who in his own fashion is as much a disruptive agent as Donald Trump.

Not grabbing you? That’s fine. One of the most popular items on our regular menu is Pox on the Whole Lot of Them:

Iowa voters essentially shrugged their shoulders at a crowded field of Democrats, as a tightly bunched field of finishers highlighted the party’s challenges in finding a nominee unburdened by serious vulnerabilities in the coming general election against Donald Trump. Even the apparent winners scored the lowest percentages in the celebrated history of the caucuses, which have often helped anoint front-runners since Jimmy Carter’s victory in here in 1976. Joe Biden’s embarrassingly weak fourth-place finish may spell the end of his 48-year career. But even the other contenders will move forward facing stark questions about whether they are too inexperienced, too ideologically extreme, or too far behind in organization, money, and momentum to catch up.

All that stuff in italics….Is it true? Well, true-ish—certainly valid by the historic standards of post-Iowa blah-blah.

But those standards for the moment must be regarded as discredited, defunct. Perhaps that seems too harsh. So someone screwed up the vote-counting procedures and we have to wait a while to find out what happened. Why should that nullify the result?

The answer is that the Iowa caucuses, to an even greater degree than next week’s New Hampshire primary, have always depended on a significant element of Make Believe. It worked because multiple actors, including or especially the news media, had a shared interest in playing along with the conceit that a small state without much demographic diversity is in better position to view the candidates up close and make judgments without outsized repercussions for the country as a whole.

One reason the gig lasted for decades was because of political reporting. There is an old (partially) tongue-in-cheek maxim about how to produce journalism: first simplify, then exaggerate. Generations of reporters applied those principles to writing about early-state results, investing them with significance that, once written or broadcast, was at least partly self-fulfilling.

Everything about Iowa this time around—the questions raised before voting about whether the caucuses had outlasted their utility; the problems after voting in tabulating results; above all, the narrowness of the results—suggests this is the year to stop investing the state with that significance. At a minimum it is appropriate to slow down, not necessarily to a full stop but definitely to half-speed, in projecting the Iowa results into supposed deeper trends.

Buttigieg is, as of 9 p.m. on Tuesday, ahead of Sanders by 1.8 percent in the delegate count and behind him by 1,184 votes in the popular vote total. Less than 15,000 votes (in a state of 3.1 million, in a country of 327 million) separate Sanders’s current good-for-you, tied-for-first vote total and Amy Klobuchar’s nice-try-but-you-came-in-fifth total. If she had gotten 790 more votes, Klobuchar would have been in fourth and Biden in fifth—a result that would have echoed with a boom even amid the all the confusion.

Who knows how these results will change—most likely only at the margins, and too late for most people to care—when the rest of the votes are counted and released?

It is not that all election analysis is illegitimate. It’s just that this analysis must be carefully circumscribed to what actually happened, not extrapolated to things that have not happened yet. Probably not a bad principle even when there is not a vote-counting debacle.

By that measure, Iowa did not transform the race so much as jostle it in interesting ways. It has not provided definitive answers but it has more sharply framed the questions for the next couple weeks.

--For Buttigieg, will his fine performance cause a larger group of people to view him in a new light? He probably doesn’t need to win New Hampshire to remain ascendant, but anything lower than third there and in Nevada and South Carolina would probably return to his candidacy to ephemeral status.

--For Biden, Iowa voters saw him up close and not many of them are impressed by his supposedly commanding status nationally. How much bleeding can he withstand, and can he continue to count on strong African-American support in South Carolina if he doesn’t produce a commanding performance before then?

--For Sanders, how does he address in the next three states the widespread perception—held probably by all his rivals and much of the professional political class -- that he is a high-risk candidate, the U.S. equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn, who recently took the progressive Labour Party down to a big defeat in the United Kingdom? Entrance polling by CNN showed that more than 6 in 10 Iowa voters, despite the strong liberal bent of caucus-goers, say it is more important to nominate a candidate who can beat Trump than one who aligns most with their personal views on issues.

--For Warren and Klobuchar, they both did well enough in Iowa to carry on credibly to New Hampshire. But absent very strong performances there—either outright victories or at a minimum much higher vote percentages—what is the rationale for soldiering on and asking their supporters to do the same?

Wait a minute, you might say, all those questions could have framed with only minor variation before Iowa voted. To which the most valid reply is: True enough. Also: One state at a time.