By Jonathan Bernstein, The Washington Post

As Elaine Kamarck recounts in The Washington Post, winning isn’t all that matters in the early contests on the presidential nomination calendar. Candidates seek to beat expectations, and the press and the parties judge the results against what they thought would happen.

In fact, beating expectations can matter even more than the raw results because it affects the amount and tone of the coverage candidates get. Those, in turn, can affect voters in the next state on the calendar.

A classic example: In 1984, Gary Hart was perceived to have “won”...