CQ Politics senior reporter Greg Giroux found Barack Obama's strategy of appealing strongly to college students appears to be playing a role in his projected victory in tonight's Iowa caucuses.

CNN, Fox News have projected Illinois Sen. Barack Obama the winner of a close three-way Democratic caucus contest, with 2004 vp candidate John Edwards and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton neck and neck for second.

Obama's charisma and message that he can be a greater catalyst for political change than his opponents have enabled him to emerge as a very strong contender in his bid to become the nation's first African-American president. And his win definitively punctured any thought that Clinton, the former first lady, is the inevitable Democratic nominee -- even though she has maintained a sizable lead in national polls even as the heavily concentrated campaign efforts by Obama and Edwards in Iowa thrust her into a tight race there.

Edwards again ran strongly enough to compete in Iowa, as he did in 2004, when he was the runner-up to winner (and eventual nominee) John Kerry. But the Iowa outcome raised the stakes for Edwards in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, as Obama's win has at least temporarily positioned him at the leading alternative to Clinton.

CQ Politics' Greg Giroux provides another caveat in following the Democratic vote count: Because of the arcane way in which the Democrats reported the results, the percentages given for each candidate are not necessarily a one-to-one ratio with the support they received from individual caucus participants.

"The Democrats' 15 percent viability threshold to elect delegates to the county conventions can work to inflate the totals of front-running candidates and understate the support for second-tier candidates. That is because caucus-goers who are initially aligned with non-viable candidates will realign with viable groups. In the 76 Democratic precincts that reported their results by 8:30 eastern time, John Edwards has 37 percent of the estimated state delegate strength, compared to 30 percent for Hillary Rodham Clinton and 28 percent for Barack Obama. Joseph R. Biden Jr. has 2 percent and Bill Richardson and Christopher J. Dodd have about 1 percent apiece. There are 1,781 precincts statewide, so we have a long way to go."

It's also worth noting that the lack at the moment of any recorded percentages for Dennis J. Kucinich and Mike Gravel doesn't mean that absolutely nobody went to caucus for them -- just that they haven't had enough support to earn any county convention delegates.

CQ Politics senior reporter Greg Giroux reminds that the two parties report the Iowa caucus results quite differently.

Let's get the easy stuff out of the way first. The Republican process is straightforward; caucus-goers will cast secret ballots in a straw poll, so the vote percentages that are reported reflect each candidate's total vote as a share of the countywide vote. They then will proceed with the nitty-gritty business of selecting delegates to the GOP county conventions that will be the next (and widely ignored) step in Iowa's multi-tiered process.

Leave it to the Democrats to come up with a much more complex system. Their caucus results will be released in terms of State Delegate Equivalents (SDEs), which project each candidate's delegate strength at the June 2008 state convention. The Democratic caucus-goers will not directly cast ballots for presidential candidates; rather, they will divide up into candidate preference groups that generally require 15 percent of caucus attendees of to elect delegates to county conventions in March. The SDEs are based on the number of county convention delegates the candidates earn in tonight's precinct caucuses.

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