The Iowa debacle screwed up Nate Silver's forecasting model

Predicting elections is hard enough to begin with, but the Democratic primaries just got a whole lot more complicated after the Democrats' Iowa debacle, says FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver.

Per Silver, Iowa normally matters a lot — not because it has a high delegate count (quite the contrary) but because of the media attention it garners thanks to its first-in-the-nation status. So his forecasting model pegged the Hawkeye State's caucus night as the second most important date on the Democratic primary calendar, trailing only Super Tuesday. In this model, Iowa was symbolically worth around 800 delegates, dwarfing its actual contribution of 41.

But after a disastrous string of events Monday evening that are still delaying the results of the caucuses, Iowa's role is up in the air. Silver thinks the lasting narrative from the caucuses won't be about the eventual winner, but rather how the night broke down into chaos. Therefore, it could give candidates who did poorly a "mulligan" while stripping successful candidates from their glory. It also means the field probably won't slim down like it usually does after Iowa.

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Some things you just can't predict. Read more at FiveThirtyEight.