How'd it happen?

TNR's Ryan Lizza followed the Kerry Camp but decided to watch a Caucus, this one was in Urbandale, IA and sounds like a good sample of what happened on Monday night. "After the attendees broke into their presidential preference groups, the numbers looked like this: 40 people for Kerry, 44 for Edwards, 26 for Dean, and 9 for Gephardt. When the caucus chair announced that the forlorn Gephardt supporters standing against a wall were no longer viable, the Kerry and Edwards precinct captains descended upon them like wild dogs on road-kill carcasses. A Kerry candidacy, said Corey Goerdt, the 18-year-old Edwards captain who signed up with Edwards four days before, "is not going to work in the South." And in case he needed to make the case against Dean, he was also prepared. A thick caucus field manual issued by the Edwards campaign contained detailed persuasion scripts. On the outside was the Edwards campaign logo and the words "privileged and confidential." Goerdt let me flip through it. The way to contrast Edwards with Dean, it said, is to compare Dean's biography with Edwards' son-of-a-mill-worker upbringing. "Howard Dean is a Park Avenue elitist," it advised Edwards supporters to say. But Goerdt didn't need to use the line. By the time the Dean captain figured out he was supposed to be strengthening his numbers by picking off the undecideds and the Gephardt people, the Edwards and Kerry teams had already divvied them up between themselves. Final score: Kerry 53, Edwards 51, Dean 26."

Joe Trippi, Dean campaign manager before Monday night to reporters: "Undecideds don't break here. Every year. Does anybody go back and look at results before they cover the state? They never break! Never! There's like no year in which they ever broke. They walk in, they vote undecided." Wrong!