The above analysis ignores the fact that the 2008 victory by President Obama was more meaningful than a victory by Sanders would be due to the demographics. Iowa is 90+% white and Sanders is only polling well in states that are mainly white states. Your prior thread identified four such states http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251894731 President Obama was expected to do well with African American voters and the experts were surprised at how well he did with a mainly white electorate. A Sanders non-defeat in Iowa is not that meaningful given the demographics of Iowa. Nate Silver looked at this a while back and came to the conclusion that Sanders victories in Iowa and New Hampshire would be largely meaningless unless and until Sanders started attracting African American voters. In the We Got Berned article, 538 makes clear that nothing has really changed, http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/bernie-sanders-new-hampshire/
So why do I still think Sanders is a factional candidate? He hasn’t made any inroads with non-white voters — in particular black voters, a crucial wing of the Democratic coalition and whose support was a big part of President Obama’s toppling of Clinton in the 2008 primary. Not only are African-Americans the majority of Democratic voters in the South Carolina primary (a crucial early contest), they make up somewhere between 19 percent and 24 percent of Democrats nationwide. In the past two YouGov polls, Sanders has averaged just 5 percent with black voters. Ipsos’s weekly tracking poll has him at an average of only 7 percent over the past two weeks. Fox News (the only live-interview pollster to publish results among non-white voters in July and August) had Clinton leading Sanders 62-10 among non-white Democrats in mid-July and 65-14 in mid-August. Clinton’s edge with non-whites held even as Sanders cut her overall lead from 40 percentage points to 19.....
But even if you put aside those metrics, Sanders is running into the problem that other insurgent Democrats have in past election cycles. You can win Iowa relying mostly on white liberals. You can win New Hampshire. But as Gary Hart and Bill Bradley learned, you can’t win a Democratic nomination without substantial support from African-Americans.
This article is a little dated but the Demographics have not changed. Iowa and NH are 90+% white states and are not representative of the base of the Democratic party. To date, no polling has shown that Sanders has made any meaningful inroads on the non-white base of the Democratic party.
Sanders victories in Iowa and New Hampshire are not going to change the dynamics of the race unless Sanders can broaden the base of voters who find him attractive. As you know Texas has almost three times the number of delegates at stake as Iowa and New Hampshire combined and I have yet to see any polling or data showing that Sanders is going to do well in Texas.
Finally due to proportional representation rules, a "victory" by Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire will net him only a few more delegates than Hillary Clinton while there are many State Senate Districts in Texas where Sanders will likely not break the 15% threshold to get any of the delegates being allocated in such districts.
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