Jeet Heer anticipates the spinning that will follow tonight’s results:

It’s inevitable that some candidate in the crowded Republican field will under-perform tomorrow. How will his or her supporters spin the dismal news? History offers a guide. In 2008, Rudy Giuliani came in sixth in Iowa with 3 percent of the vote. You would think that such a terrible showing would be impossible to gild into a shining achievement. Yet John Podhoretz of Commentary wrote, “The result in Iowa could not have been better for Giuliani tactically.” David Frum, another Giuliani supporter, enthused, “Yet as the smoke clears, it’s going to become apparent that Rudy was the night’s big winner.”

This spinning for Giuliani was driven by the pundits’ desire that their preferred candidate would prevail in the end. Failure in Iowa could be dismissed because Giuliani was always a horrible fit with Iowa Republicans, and because the result fit in with his risible “wait until Florida” strategy. Heer quotes Giuliani in an old 2008 post saying this:

This is a strategy we selected–it is the only strategy that can work for us and it’s a good one…and given the nature of the race which is wide open, we think it is going to turn out to be a smart strategy.

As we know (and knew at the time), it was a ridiculous strategy, and it was never going to work in Giuliani’s favor. Despite that, Giuliani and his fans stayed on message that a poor result in Iowa was consistent with their plan, and so they pretended that failure was a rare species of victory. Ultimately, it didn’t do him any good, but it allowed his fans to keep kidding themselves that he might become the nominee.

My guess is that the Rubio campaign will underperform tonight. His campaign organization is not that good, his support is relatively soft, and he neglected to campaign in Iowa as much as many of his competitors. Like Giuliani, he has a campaign strategy that makes no sense and can’t work. Nonetheless, we already know that he has a ready supply of boosters eager to turn a mediocre showing into proof that his “moment” has finally arrived. Jason Zengerle remarked on this last night:

The way conservative pundits (and even some straight political reporters) are trying to make Rubio happen is really something.

— Jason Zengerle (@zengerle) January 31, 2016

Virtually no one will celebrate or try to explain away poor results for the other “establishment” candidates. For one thing, they have already been written off, and for another it doesn’t help Rubio to minimize the bad results of his New Hampshire rivals. The story that a lot of pundits and journalists want to be able to tell after tonight is that Rubio has exceeded expectations. That is more than a little amusing since many of them have continually gone out of their way to raise those expectations beyond what the candidate could achieve, but this is the story that Rubio boosters have to tell to keep the illusion going that his campaign strategy won’t fail. It is the story many of them will try to tell regardless of how underwhelming the result may be. Bear that in mind when we hear that Rubio is the “real” winner tonight. There was probably never going to be a result that would make his boosters say otherwise. Rubio will be just as much the winner in Iowa tonight as he was the “real” front-runner months ago. That is to say, not at all.