By Rachel Kapochunas, CQ Staff

The results of the early presidential caucuses and primaries are parsed two ways. There is, obviously, the objective standard of how many votes each candidate received. But there is another standard that is at least as important, if not more so: How each candidate measured up to the expectations set for them by the political community and the media and the general public.

Thus, much of the commentary following Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses Tuesday night focused on how the front-running candidates made out in the political “spin” game. Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee exceeded expectations by running up comfortable victory margins, while Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Mitt Romney did not do nearly as well as expected.

But expectations can also set the bar high or low for the rest of the candidates, who are striving to qualify for the “top tier” or simply to keep their hopes alive. This was clearly evident in the close fight for third place in the Iowa Republican caucuses. Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson edged Arizona Sen. John McCain by a fraction of a percentage point to take third. Yet McCain is widely perceived by political insiders as having had a better night.

This is because Thompson had a bigger stake in doing well in Iowa. While Thompson was staging a long exploratory campaign prior to his late official entry into the GOP race in September, his supporters touted him as the answer to conservative voters’ qualms about whether they had a true champion in the Republican field. But their hopes that the lawyer-turned-actor-turned-senator-turned-actor would galvanize the conservative constituency as actor-politician Ronald Reagan once did were deflated by Thompson’s plodding early campaign efforts.

So Thompson was seen as needing to do very well in the Iowa caucuses, an activist-driven process made to order for a conservative candidate. Instead, it was upstart Huckabee who ran off with the conservative mantle, and Thompson was left was a pretty mediocre 13 percent of the GOP vote.

McCain also took 13 percent and had a couple of hundred votes less than Thompson. Yet his outcome looks like a good 13 percent. That’s because McCain did not campaign heavily in Iowa, where his past outspoken stand against federal subsidies for the state’s growing ethanol industry — a key factor in his abandoning an Iowa caucus campaign when he first ran for president in 2000 — is ill-remembered by many voters. The fact that McCain got 13 percent (as opposed to 5 percent in the 2000 caucuses) seems to reflect his recent surge in national polls, the esteem in which a number of Republicans hold him for his past heroism as a Vietnam POW, and his standout role as an outspoken supporter of President Bush’s “troop surge” strategy in Iraq.

McCain, therefore, performed much better in the expectations game than another candidate perceived to be a serious competitor in the Republican field: former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani . Like McCain, Giuliani made a strategic decision to play down the Iowa caucuses, in part because his past strong support for abortion rights and gay rights was expected not to play well among the conservative voters who tend to dominate the event. Yet Giuliani did poorly in Iowa by any standard, holding just 3 percent of the vote with most precincts reporting.

Giuliani spent Thursday campaigning in New Hampshire, which is holding the first-in-the-nation primary Tuesday, and Florida, which is holding a primary Jan. 29 in which he has invested much of his campaign’s energies. Although he has lost the lead he had long held in national polls of Republican voters, Giuliani still maintains a corps of supporters who admire the stalwart image he projected after his home city was attacked by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, and he has continued to poll in the top tier nationally.

Giuliani’s camp sought to minimize the importance of the Iowa results. “This race is wide open and we will continue to run a national primary campaign designed to win the number of delegates necessary to become the Republican nominee,” Guiliani campaign manager Michael DuHaime said in a statement last night.

Nonetheless, Giuliani finished sixth, running behind the longshot candidacy of Texas Rep. Ron Paul , who had 10 percent. The low double-digit outcome showed that Paul has developed a following for his strongly stated libertarian views about smaller government and his role as the only Republican hopeful who strongly opposed the Iraq war. But given his strong Internet fundraising totals, Paul’s fifth-place finish was not the expectations-busting breakthrough he needed to be accorded first-tier status.

Paul, in fact, remains stuck with the underdog label shared with the other Republican contender, California Rep. Duncan Hunter , who barely registered 1 percent of the Iowa vote. Neither has been invited to participate in a Republican candidate forum scheduled for Sunday and hosted by Fox News and the New Hampshire Republican Party. State GOP Chairman Fergus Cullen told CQ Politics Thursday that the decision was made by Fox News and that the party was appealing to the network to let the left-out candidates in.

Hunter, the former House Armed Services Committee chairman and its current ranking Republican, had not expected to do well in Iowa and focused his meager resources on Wyoming, where Republicans are holding their unheralded presidential county conventions Saturday, and in New Hampshire. He had just $133,000 in campaign cash on hand at the end of September.

The second-tier campaign in the Democratic caucuses Thursday was less complicated. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson , Sens. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, and Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio all needed breakthrough performances to emerge from Iowa unscathed. All fell well short of the mark.

The results produced mournful finality for the presidential hopes of Biden, who received just less than 1 percent of the Iowa county convention delegates alloted in the caucuses, and Dodd, who barely broke zero. Both announced their withdrawals from the race while speaking to supporters in Iowa immediately after the caucuses Thursday.

Dodd in particular had made an all-or-nothing gamble on the caucuses, moving his family to Des Moines and enrolling his two children in school there. “I always knew this endeavor would be an uphill battle against very tough odds,” Dodd said Thursday.

Richardson stated he is hanging in the race despite earning just a 2 percent share of the county delegates Thursday. But his poor showing sets him up for a make-or-break contest in the Jan. 19 Nevada caucuses, in which he hopes regional affinities will help him jump start his campaign.

Kucinich received no county delegates and thus was not even listed in the Iowa Democratic Party’s vote counts. But as he did in 2004, Kucinich is running a quixotic campaign to draw attention to his strongly liberal agenda, which includes staunch opposition to the Iraq war and a call for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney . And he may not be any more compelled to leave the scene early than he did in 2004, when he remained an official candidate through mid-July.

Kucinich, though, is increasingly being excluded from the stage at the presidential candidate debates, including the ones scheduled in New Hampshire for Saturday night and co-sponsored by ABC News, Manchester TV station WMUR and the Facebook Web site.

According to the Associated Press, ABC followed the Iowa caucuses by officially disinviting candidates in both parties who did not place in the top four in Iowa or did not receive 5 percent or higher in one of the four latest surveys conducted either statewide in New Hampshire or nationwide. Missing the cut on the Democratic side were Kucinich and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel — whose support in polls throughout the campaign has been infinitesimal ­­— and Hunter on the Republican side (though Paul was deemed eligible for this debate).

Marie Horrigan contributed to this story.