11 February 2020

The New Hampshire Primary Results

The exact percentages of the vote captured by the Democratic candidates for the Democratic party Presidential nomination aren't yet certain, but the rank order of the outcome is pretty clear with 70% of the vote counted.

1. Sanders 26.3% (6 delegates) 2nd in Iowa delegates (12)
2. Buttigieg  24.2% (6 delegates) 1st in Iowa delegates (13)
3. Klobuchar 19.9% (4 delegates) 5th in Iowa delegates (1)
4. Warren 9.2% (0 delegates) 3rd in Iowa delegates (8)
5. Biden 8.3% (0 delegates) 4th in Iowa delegates (6)
6. Steyer 3.5% (0 delegates) No Iowa delegates
7. Gabbard 3.2% (0 delegates) No Iowa delegates
9. Patrick 0.4% (0 delegates) No Iowa delegates

The final delegate count from New Hampshire will be Sanders (9), Buttigieg (9) and Klobuchar (6). In delegate count, at night's end, it will be:

1. Buttigieg (22)
2. Sanders (21)
3. Warren (8)
4. Klobuchar (7)
5. Biden (6).


Andrew Yang (8th in New Hampshire) and Michael Bennet (10th in New Hampshire) dropped out today after poor showings in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

UPDATE February 12, 2020. Deval Patrick (9th in New Hampshire) has dropped out of the race today. END UPDATE.

In terms of individual contributions reported to date and cash on hand, the rankings are:

1. Sanders $95.9 million ($18.2 million cash on hand)
2. Buttigieg $76.2 million ($14.5 million cash on hand)
3. Warren $71.1 million ($13.7 million cash on hand)
4. Biden $60.8 million ($8.9 million cash on hand)
5. Klobuchar $25.3 million ($5.0 million cash on hand)
6. Gabbard $10.0 million ($2.8 million cash on hand)
7. Steyer $2.9 million ($5.4 million cash on hand)
8. Patrick $1.9 million ($1.4 million cash on hand)
9. Bloomberg $0 ($12.0 million cash on hand)

Steyer, Gabbard and Patrick would each be well advised to drop out after their dismal showing in Iowa and New Hampshire, comparatively weak fundraising from individual donors (a proxy for national grass roots support), and weak showing in other polling, insures that none of these three candidates has even a prayer of becoming the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2020.

Bloomberg wasn't on the ballot in Iowa or New Hampshire, and won't be on the ballot in the next two contests, in Nevada or South Carolina, either. He will enter the race on Super Tuesday (March 3, 2020), which is pretty much the last possible moment. No Presidential candidate to enter the race so late has ever won the nomination. His billions of dollars of personal wealth is the only reason he's taken seriously as potential candidate at all and is left among the six viable candidates.
[N]o Democratic presidential candidate has finished lower than second in New Hampshire and has gone on to win their party’s nomination. That’s looking good for Sanders, who’s leading the state, followed by Pete Buttigieg, who virtually tied Sanders in the Iowa caucuses.  
The great hope of Biden seems to have faded after his dismal fourth-place finish in the Hawkeye State, and during last week’s Democratic debate he practically conceded New Hampshire in his opening remarks.

No candidate for the Democratic nomination other than Bill Clinton, who came in 4th in the Iowa Caucus, has ever placed worse than 3rd in the Iowa caucus.

Any candidate other than Sanders or Buttigieg to win the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2020 would set a new low for poor performance in early primaries.

Biden, with a 4th place finish in Iowa, a 5th place finish in New Hampshire, a 4th place ranking in individual contributions, and a 5th place ranking in cash on hand, despite being a front runner before any votes were cast, would really have to struggle to win the nomination. And, it is hard to see anything so special about Biden that he can break longstanding precedents regarding performance in early primaries en route to the party's nomination. 

Biden is in first place in an aggregate of the two Nevada primary polls taken to date, but those are a month old (the last one finished on January 11). Biden still leads in a nine day old South Carolina poll. Biden is second in national polling (behind Sanders), but Biden, Bloomberg and Warren are all slipping in their national polling and a poor New Hampshire primary showing won't help Biden's national polling either.

3 comments:

neo said...

Since ur a liberal oberlin grad democrat,

would you like to see your own state of colorado turned into a california, new york, or illinois,

or the entire usa? what if the entire usa adopted california illinois democrat rule and policies?

if enough californians flee from california to colorado, texas,florida, etc, and continue voting democrat it just might happen

btw how do u feel if bernie wins the nomination?

andrew said...

Since ur a liberal oberlin grad democrat,

I am.

would you like to see your own state of colorado turned into a california, new york, or illinois,

or the entire usa? what if the entire usa adopted california illinois democrat rule and policies?

if enough californians flee from california to colorado, texas,florida, etc, and continue voting democrat it just might happen


I think that liberal policies are preferable to conservative ones, and I believe that California, New York and Illinois have state laws that are generally superior to those of Texas or Florida.

I think that it is a good thing that Colorado has over the past couple of decades gone from being basically a red state, to a purple state, to a blue state, and I would agree that migration to Colorado from California is one of multiple reasons that this has happened.

Colorado's current outstanding prosperity is significantly and causally, but certainly not entirely, a product of those liberal leaning policies, particularly the early legalization of marijuana.

California and New York each have their domestic problems. In California, a number of bad citizen initiatives have harmed the functioning of state and local government (especially Proposition 13 related to property taxes) in a state with an already weak legislature. In New York, centralization of power and gridlock at the state legislative level has been a pervasive problem, and policy precedents dating all of the way back to the Dutch Colonial era combined with inertia, have made it a state that has been slow to adopt reforms and modernize its systems (for example, it was one of the last states to adopt no fault divorce and its court system is an absolute archaic maze). Colorado has a better legislative process than either of those states and one with less of a history of corruption than Illinois.

I sincerely hope that Colorado will continue on a track of adopting good policies at the state level, while having a modern, minimally corrupt legislative process compared to most other states. Frequently, Colorado is a leader making changes in state law that other blue states follow, rather than the other way around, I hope that its legislative innovation continues.

andrew said...

btw how do u feel if bernie wins the nomination?

I would be fine with Bernie Sanders winning the nomination. I believe that he would be as strong, or nearly as strong, vis-a-vis Trump, as most of the other seven contenders for the nomination.

I think that Biden and Bloomberg would be most likely to lead to a Trump win in the general election in 2020, because they would alienate a large share of the Democratic based leading to low turnout, low levels of volunteer effort, and low levels of financial support from the base, at a level that would make similar problems in Hillary Clinton's run that significantly contributed to Trump's victory much worse. Biden is also an awful campaigner. The notion that Biden or Bloomberg would win over any Republican voters is laughable, and Sanders strong economic message is more powerful with unaffiliated voters than the messages from Biden or Bloomberg who are very vulnerable and make it hard to attack Trump as the racist he is due to their own flaws on that point.

Gabbard and Steyer have no realistic prospects of winning the nomination. Gabbard would be a bad choice. Steyer wouldn't be horrible, but has low name recognition, and no experience in political office.

Support for Bloomberg and Steyer conflates to the extent that campaign contributions are important because they are a proxy for strong grass roots support and the extent to which what they buy actually matters all that much when everyone has significant funding.

This leaves in addition to Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar as the strongest candidates. Klobuchar lacks name recognition and has a relatively weak base, and Buttigieg is also not widely known or experienced.

The biggest concerns related to Sanders as a nominee are his advanced age (he is five years older than Trump and the oldest candidate in the race, and recently had a heart attack), and the fact that the mainstream media is actively biased against him mostly because he has identified as a Democratic Socialist, even though substantively he has a less liberal voting record than Warren. Many people in the Democratic party is terrified that Sanders would lose to Trump (without good justification in my mind) which makes the nomination fight tough for him, and could deflate support from moderates and more importantly, from wealthy donors. But, Sanders has done a great job of winning support from individual donors and would continue to do so.

Warren is eight years younger (and women live longer than men on average), could be a could bridge between Bernie Sanders supporters from 2016 and Hillary Clinton supporters from 2016, is a good orator, and has good name recognition, in addition to being a U.S. Senator and former Harvard Law Professor (a background not dissimilar to University of Chicago law professor Barak Obama). The prospect for a progressive Democrat who would be the first female U.S. President is attractive to many Democrats. The fact that she lived many years of her life in Oklahoma and Texas also tend to prevent her from making tone deaf missteps. Honestly, she is still may favorite Democratic candidate, although I am still undecided.

Klobuchar has similarities with Warren, but is more conservative, which would make her a harder sell for people whose first choice was Bernie Sanders, but she would probably not have the strong negative impacts in the general election on support from the base that Biden or Bloomberg would.

Buttigieg would have to run a JFK style campaign, substituting anti-Catholic sentiment for anti-LGBT sentiment. But, his youthful vigor, his genius intelligence, has status as a military veteran, and numerous almost saint-like anecdotes about his moral personal acts all make him attractive in contrast to Donald Trump. Still, his lack of name recognition and experience at any office higher than Mayor of a medium sized city in Indiana while good in showing that he can campaign in territory that isn't naturally "blue" is also definitely a barrier for him to overcome.