The best stories of yesterday’s NH numbers are yet to be written (more Thursday, but as of now, there’s only 89% of the vote in and the R side is tight).
On the D side, it means a lot that Bernie did as well as he did. And if you’re like me, you savor reading about your team the next day if you won, and shudder to do so if you lost. My personal favorite is to read the Boston papers when the Yankees beat the Red Sox, or when the Patriots lose to anyone. When the Yankees lose (and that’s often enough), I skip the sports section altogether for a day. I’m guessing Bernie supporters will be reading more Hillary diaries to see what people are saying than the other way around.
In any case, two things can be true at the same time: team Bernie shellacked team Hillary last night in every phase of the game, splitting Ds and handily winning Independents. Also true is that NV and even more so SC will be tests for team Bernie. But nothing should seem impossible now. We have a race.
On the R side, Christie completed his murder-suicide mission, taking Rubio down but finishing 6th (with no path to the nomination, he should get out now and hope for a VP slot from one of the other non-Trumps). Rubio acknowledges his debate sucked and cost him. But maybe the problem is him. Who the hell knows what 4th place (by a hair) Bush will do? He’s beating Marco now and should get out before he embarrasses himself elsewhere (11% and 4th is dreadful given his advantages, and he might even fall to 5th) but who knows what he’ll be told to do by the family?
And so it looks like Trump and Ted (“3rd wins”) Cruz. Watch the establishment struggle with what to do with John Kasich, who looks a bit like the 2016 version of Jon Huntsman. Without consolidating, Trump and Cruz get an easier path. And I can’t imagine a worse result for the Republican establishment and donors. They wanted it to be Rubio. He blew it.
Philip Bump:
Other than that, the state of New Hampshire was Bernie Country. The deep splits we saw in Iowa were still there, but the split wasn't between voting for Sanders and voting for Clinton, it was between voting for Sanders by a little and voting for Sanders by Kim Jong Un-style margins.
Sanders won 2 out of every 3 men, and notably slightly more women than Clinton, according to the most recent exit polls. Sanders won young voters -- those under 30 -- by about 70 percentage points. He won those aged 45 to 64 with a slight majority. He won two-thirds of non-college graduates and a little over half of those with degrees. Sanders won 6 in 10 voters with household incomes of less than $100,000, and a bare majority of those earning $100,000 or more.
In other words: If Clinton won the demographic by a lot in Iowa, odds are good that Sanders won it by a little in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire allows independent voters -- a substantial part of the voting population -- to vote in the party primary of their choosing. Interestingly, Sanders and Clinton essentially tied among Democrats -- but Sanders won independents nearly 3-to-1. Twice as many independents voted in the Democratic primary (percentage-wise) in New Hampshire than caucused with the Democrats in Iowa.
More:
Most Democratic voters would be satisfied with either Sanders (acceptable to eight in 10) or Clinton (acceptable to two-thirds) as the nominee.
GOP voters (given their more crowded field) are more divided on this question. Just about half would be satisfied with Trump as the nominee; only about four in 10 would be satisfied with either Cruz or Rubio
But a caution: until black/brown people start voting don’t make assumptions about all of America. That’s the problem with IA and NH going first. The media will run with it, though. It’s great theatre. And it’s also a great opportunity for Bernie, who wins on authenticity (see top graphic) and has a chance to reintroduce himself. And that will including the incoming that goes along with winning.
I have said this before, but if there is one thing that drives the American electorate (both sides), it’s that banksters didn’t go to to jail. The rest follows, from lack of trust in institutions to suspicion of Hillary’s Wall Street speeches (being judged by 2016 standards). Occupy is dead, long live Occupy.
HuffPost:
New Hampshire’s Democratic primary voters confirmed Tuesday that they do, in fact, want a self-described democratic socialist as their party’s presidential nominee.
Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, had consistently led former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in polls of the Granite State since last fall, with margins that frequently surpassed 20 percent. On Tuesday, he defeated Clinton handily.
Politico:
CNN: 46 percent of GOP primary voters said they made up their minds in the last three days in the race, and 65 percent of voters said recent debates were important (with 10 percent saying they were the most important factor) to their choice. In contrast, only 22 percent of Democratic voters said they made up their minds over the last three days.
Twenty-nine percent of GOP voters said they were “very conservative.” That would be a jump from 21 percent in both 2012 and 2008.
On the Democratic side, 41 percent of voters said they want a candidate who will continue President Barack Obama’s policies, while just as many said they want the president to be more liberal. Fourteen percent said they are looking for a candidate who is less liberal.
Can say the same for Bernie, and they’ll still love Rubio.
Five Thirty Eight:
While undeclared voters may affect who finishes second, third and fourth on the GOP side, for all the attention they get, they don’t ultimately make much of a difference in the race. When I talked to Moore, he was more than eager to dispel the myth of the independent voter in New Hampshire altogether. “True independents tend not to turn out,” he said. “Independents are not going to be a significant factor.” He went on to point out that no outsider candidate — someone you think those undeclared voters would spring for — has won the primary without also winning a plurality of registered party voters.
Molly Ball on the kids:
In Iowa, where Sanders came just a few delegates short of the supposed front-runner, Hillary Clinton, he won a staggering 84 percent of the voters under 30. Just as important, he got them to vote—they made up an unusually large 18 percent of the electorate. A recent New Hampshire poll had him taking 87 percent of the youth vote in the Granite State.
Crooks and Liars features Samantha Bee for some R candidate analysis:
McKay Coppins:
Millions of people watched Marco Rubio’s televised tailspin in the opening minutes of last weekend’s Republican presidential debate — but what, exactly, they saw depended on the viewer.
To rivals, Rubio’s reflexive retreat to the same snippet of well-rehearsed rhetoric — over and over, and over, and over again — was proof of the freshman senator’s status as a lightweight. To supporters, the wobbly display was a forgivable fluke, one bad moment blown wildly out of proportion by a bloodthirsty press corps.
But to those who have known him longest, Rubio’s flustered performance Saturday night fit perfectly with an all-too-familiar strain of his personality, one that his handlers and image-makers have labored for years to keep out of public view. Though generally seen as cool-headed and quick on his feet, Rubio is known to friends, allies, and advisers for a kind of incurable anxiousness — and an occasional propensity to panic in moments of crisis, both real and imagined.
Jon Ward:
Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who was on track to emerge as the consensus candidate to take on businessman Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas until he turned in a woeful debate performance Saturday night, continued to struggle Monday to find a response to the charge that he is too inexperienced to be president.
“My experience is understood,” Rubio said on CBS’ “This Morning.”
And that’s increasingly the problem.
Rubio talked about a bill he introduced as a member of the Florida legislature to restrict the use of eminent domain, and an anti-trafficking measure in the U.S. Senate, adding those items to a list he first started to flesh out Sunday.
Rubio’s challenge is that his résumé is far thinner than those of the three current and former governors who are gunning for him and who each want to take on Trump and Cruz themselves. New Jersey Gov. Christie — whose verbal barrage on the debate stage exposed Rubio’s lack of preparation for such an onslaught — and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have both said for months that they are ready to be president and Rubio is not.
I collected the following:
David Frum on Marco Rubio's debate performance
a real time critique
Take a look, it’s a devastating story about Rubio.
Jonathan Bernstein with a contrarian view of NH and IA:
Some states have to go before others, and there are advantages for the parties in stability. If primaries and caucuses are mainly used assources of information about the candidates, then it's important for that information to be easy to understand. Party actors with experience (and even media veterans) know how to read what is going on in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Switching to two other states would require learning about different idiosyncrasies. Rotating which states go first, as some have suggested, would be even worse because no one would ever know how to interpret events.
I don’t buy it. Still too little representation by people of color.