What happened in New Hampshire
Reading the tea leaves—and the writing on the wall
Good early, early morning y’all!
New Hampshirites has cast their votes for the 2020 Democratic nomination and the results are in! Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg performed as expected, scoring first and second place, and Amy Klobuchar has defied expectations and come in a close third. Elizabeth Warren a Joe Biden both finished a disappointing fourth and fifth, respectively.
I am a tired, sleepy, hungry mess but want to share with you a few things I’m taking away from tonight. This post is half words, half tweets, and half hot chocolate that I’m having way too close to bedtime. Wait, that adds up to 1.5/1! Oh well! Ready set go!
1. Bernie isn’t expanding his base
I wrote last week about Bernie’s base problem, expanding on some other work I’ve done this primary season that shows a low ceiling in support for the Vermont senator. Tonight, we saw that he performed pretty much as expected, based on the relationship between demographics and the share of the vote he won in Iowa last week.
2. Biden and Warren are faltering in a big way
National polls have made this conclusion pretty clear over the past week, but it’s good to get some actual evidence to back up those surveys. The results in Hew Hampshire show that the two underperformed expectations by a good 5-10 percentage points each. In other words, their support in New Hampshire fell by that much in the last week.
3. What’s the path for candidates with whiter bases?
As Warren has declined, Mayor Pete has stagnated. Like Sanders, he pretty much performed just as we should have expected based on last week’s results. But his trouble—as well as Werren’s and Klobcuhar’s—is that they are pulling in relatively low numbers among Democratic voters of color. Klobuchar, in particular, is doing pretty dismal with them. So where do they go as the primary takes a turn into states where non-whites make up larger shares of the electorate? I submit to you, dear reader, that they basically have nowhere to go and are doomed.
4. The Bloomberg factor
Bloomberg complicates ou handicapping, for two reasons. First, he is absolutely soaring in the polls we currently expect him to emerge from Super Tuesday with a sizable number of delegates. Likely not enough to win, but still enough to deprive some other candidates of crucial delegates they’ll need to win the nomination.
And second, it looks like he’s cutting in Joe Biden’s support among African Americans. This is the double-edged-sword that progressives were ready to thrust into Joe Biden’s crumbling candidacy, without high numbers among non-whites, primaries in places like South Carolina cannot save him from what New Hampshire is proving to be a sustained and significant decline.
Okay, and that’s my 10-minute wrap on New Hampshire. Also, see this thread for an update to the stuff I’ve been working on in regards to pollster accuracy in 2020:
Editor’s note:
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—Elliott
Thank you for all your hard work. My feelings about the lack of non white support for Pete and Amy are the same as yours. They are screwed. I think Bernie is more of a solid frontrunner than people can admit right now. He may start expanding his base as we get to Super Tuesday. I think we can be confident of him doing well in NV and SC.
The only question mark is whether the candidate with the least favorability can beat Bernie. He has had the advantage if exclusive airtime in many states and he will be losing that advantage later this month, I assume.