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Here is a special post-caucus edition of the IowaPolitics.com Political Stock Report.

POLITICAL STOCK REPORT
Post-caucus edition

RISING

Barack Obama: The first-time national candidate touting a message of unity and hope showed his stuff Thursday night, pulling off an impressive win in part by drawing the kinds of caucus turnout numbers -- newcomers, young people and women -- that most doubted were possible. Anecdotal reports of scores of party-switching Republicans -- perhaps independents, at heart -- show Obama more than lived up to his campaign's expectations. Now pundits wonder whether the frontrunner can stand up to the scrutiny.

Dave Loebsack: The freshman U.S. rep backed Obama, making him the only member of Iowa's congressional delegation on either side of the aisle to back a winning candidate.

Mike Huckabee: National political reporters said Huckabee's not-quite-negative press conference Monday spelled doom for his campaign, but Iowa's Republicans didn't listen. Huckabee followed up on weeks of upward-trending polling with a decisive victory that news networks called quickly -- about the same time Mitt Romney was exhorting a West Des Moines caucus to help him to victory. But Huckabee still needs money to be competitive in the long run, as was evident from the 12:45 a.m. fundraising missive he sent to backers just hours after the caucuses closed. And he's on his way to New Hampshire, where he's behind and without the strong bloc of evangelical Christians that helped him to victory in Iowa. Still, Huckabee proved to be an inspirational and engaging candidate -- assets that could work with independent-minded New Hampshire voters.

Dwayne Alons, Carmine Boal, David Hartsuch: These state politicians who backed Mike Huckabee watched as Mitt Romney, John McCain and Fred Thompson all attracted the backing of greater numbers of legislators. But they bucked the tide and ended up in the camp of the caucus-night winner.

Evangelical Christians: They showed themselves again to be a force in Iowa politics as they comprised 60 percent of the total GOP caucus-goers, according to surveys. Then 46 percent of them picked Huckabee, ushering him to his comfortable victory, the sampling indicated.

Fred Thompson: His low-energy campaign raised eyebrows, but it also lowered expectations enough that his third-place finish was enough to keep him in the race. Instead of dropping out, as some had speculated, his campaign moved on to New Hampshire.

Ann Selzer: The Des Moines pollster who does the Register poll got a lot of heat for the final pre-caucus poll. But Thursday's results were a vindication for her methodology and the state's most watched poll.

MIXED

John McCain: The candidate who was given up for dead in the summer recovered enough to pull off a near-tie for third. He was helped by several newspaper endorsements in the closing days of the campaign and an unsettled Pakistan that focused attention on his experience. Where Hillary Clinton's narrow loss to John Edwards was portrayed as a decisive rejection, pundits were eager to label McCain's razor-thin loss to Fred Thompson as essentially a third-place tie. He could be rising after New Hampshire.

John Edwards: The second-place finisher in 2004 needed a first-place finish to really give himself a strong chance at the nomination, insiders said. But he had to settle for another second. He barely defeated Clinton, but seems to have been able to spin that into enough of a victory to carry him into New Hampshire with momentum.

Mitt Romney: After heavily investing in Iowa with commercials, advisers and paid staff, he was only able to gain a second-place finish. But pundits labeled his self-proclaimed "silver'' damaged goods on his way to New Hampshire, where he's battling McCain and Huckabee.

Ron Paul: The Texas congressman ended up right about where the polls said he would -- reaching double-digit support and finishing ahead of Rudy Giuliani and Duncan Hunter but behind the other top contenders. He was even able to pull off a win in southeastern Iowa's Jefferson County, making him the only candidate other than Huckabee or Romney to win a county. His strident online support and his fourth-quarter fundraising numbers are enough to keep his campaign viable through more early contests.

FALLING

Hillary Clinton: An Obama backer said Clinton's campaign went from inevitability to "survivability" as the campaign drew to a close here. It appears her campaign may have expected this result in the final days, as surrogates tried to temper expectations. She didn't have the advantage some had expected her to have among women voters -- entrance polls showed that women made up 57 percent of the total Dem vote and 35 percent of them favored Obama, compared to 30 percent for Clinton. But she has the money and the organization to keep moving forward, and insiders were cautioning that it's dangerous to count out the wily Clinton machine.

Bill Richardson: The fourth-place finisher didn't make much of an impact in the face of the top three candidates' juggernauts. But he vowed to soldier on, even as the fifth- and sixth-place finishers dropped out. To many observers, his effort now looks like a campaign for a Cabinet or veep spot.

Rudy Giuliani: He didn't really try too hard in Iowa and it showed, as the former New York mayor finished behind Ron Paul for the second time in Iowa (he also lost out to Paul at the Ames Straw poll he skipped in August). Speaking from Florida on caucus night, Giuliani defended his strategy. Observers remark that past candidates who have skipped Iowa have had trouble recovering; Giuliani's looking to prove them wrong with solid performances in the next month of primaries.

Foreign policy: After former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, observers thought the candidates who had emphasized foreign policy would benefit. But that wasn't the case as Dems watched Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson underperform, and the GOP saw John McCain finish fourth.

Iowa detractors: The criticism of this year's early, front-loaded primary schedule may be just a small preview of what will come four years from now. But Iowans made a strong case to keep their spot at the front of the line. Critics had said caucuses were problematic because of low turnout; the 350,000 Iowans who waited in line to set turnout records for both parties did their best to shoot down that argument.

Chris Dodd and Joe Biden: The two veteran East Coast senators ended their campaigns on caucus night after finishing out of the top four. It was Biden's second trip through the Iowa wringer. Dodd, who had hoped that the fire fighters' endorsement would make him into a John Kerry-esque comeback story, found that even moving to Iowa for the final months of the campaign wasn't enough to net him significant support.

Special interest groups: Top unions backed Clinton and Edwards, but AFSCME and SEIU, respectively, were on the losing side. The pro-Clinton EMILY's List, likewise, failed to get Hillary the female voters she needed. On the Republican side, the Club for Growth attacked Huckabee for being a taxer, but the former Arkansas governor talked and charmed his way around those charges with his own tax reform plan.