Warren asked the crowd to pitch in a few dollars and sign up to volunteer. A man yelled from the crowd, “We’re with you!” Another woman yelled, “We love you!” Almost feels like the crowd is reassuring her at what has to be a deeply discouraging moment.
I’ve been asking Warren supporters what they think Warren should do if she comes in fourth or fifth tonight (which seems increasingly likely). So far, everyone wants her to stay in the race through Super Tuesday. But one of her volunteers, Theo, admitted that it’s not looking good for Warren as he had hoped. His explanation? Warren peaked too soon. “New Hampshire voters stay undecided until the very end,” he said. “So it’s that person who captures people’s attention in the last week who can get the edge. It’s what makes our primary so exciting — but it can also break your heart.”
I’m very glad that we, as a site, have settled on KLOBUCHARGE as the operative term here.
https://twitter.com/laurabronner/status/1226891951741587457Klobuchar has strong support among older voters and moderate voters — Biden constituencies — so she may have gained from Biden’s decline. Buttigieg still has a broader potential base, with some support from younger and older voters and some support from moderates and liberals.
Did someone say Klobucharge? We spoke to a New Hampshire voter, Susan, at her sugar house in Chester, N.H. She was considering voting for Klobuchar in the primary but was still undecided when we met her. I wonder how she voted today.
It’s early but so far it looks like the polling averages are going to do quite a good job on most of the candidates. Low on Klobuchar, though. We’re going to look under the hood and see if there are more aggressive assumptions we can make about candidates who seemingly have late momentum.
OK, so going into the primary, Klobuchar was polling at 10 percent in New Hampshire, but she’s now up to 20 percent with 30 percent of precincts reporting. What can we point to as fueling the Klobucharge? And is it fair to say that her rise has come at Buttigieg’s expense? Or is it more complicated than that?
A bunch of us went to the Sanders rally last night at the University of New Hampshire. It was an impressive event with lots of surrogates and even a performance from The Strokes — certainly the most best-attended Democratic event I’ve been to here. A scene like that can make you forget for a moment just how low turnout can be among younger voters. According to tonight’s exit polls, Sanders won the 18-29 vote by 53 percent, but they only made up 12 percent (!) of the electorate.
As in previous years, exit polls suggest that the New Hampshire primary electorate is majority women. And there’s a gender gap in vote choice, too: Sanders is leading substantially among men, while women are split more evenly, with Klobuchar, Buttigieg and Sanders all doing well.
Gender: How 2020 primary voters compare to past years
Breakdown by gender of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters in 2020 and recent presidential election cycles, according to preliminary exit poll data
| Gender | 2000 | 2004 | 2008 | 2016 | 2020 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Men | 38% | 46% | 43% | 45% | 43% |
| Women | 62 | 54 | 57 | 55 | 57 |
Meanwhile, Klobuchar’s campaign wastes no time in bidding the #YangGang adieu on Twitter:
Nate, here you go:
Bennet is getting 0.3 percent of the vote so far tonight, and Patrick is getting 0.4 percent. One might assume they’re very likely to drop out. Then again, one might have assumed that they’d have dropped out already.
Warren has now slipped into a version of her stump speech, attacking corruption and promoting her wealth tax. (Mild chants of “two cents!” from the crowd.) It doesn’t seem like she wants to dwell on her disappointing finish. Instead, she’s heading back into friendlier territory — saying the Democrats need a candidate who can “take on corruption and win.”
Reporter Jake Lahut, formerly of The Keene Sentinel, points out that turnout is down in Durham, home of the University of New Hampshire, possibly affected by the state’s push for residency requirements.
As in Iowa, Sanders is doing particularly well among young voters, especially those under 30 — but also those between 30 and 45. Among older voters, Klobuchar and Buttigieg have done well.
Yang stopped speaking while the crowd chanted “2024,” then said “We’ll be back soon” and “the Yang Gang isn’t going anywhere.” Not exactly a vote of confidence in the current field. (He then walked off the stage to “Return of the Mack,” one of my favorite 2020 stylistic choices.)
Interestingly, though, Warren is taking other candidates to task for their attack ads — after releasing a memo earlier today that pointedly detailed her rivals’ weaknesses. “We need a nominee that the broadest coalition of our party feels like they can get behind,” she says.
Turnout in Concord surpassed the 2008 Democratic primary by 5 percent and the 2016 primary by 15 percent.
Over in the Republican contest, with roughly 20 percent reporting, Trump has been declared the winner, but Weld is actually flirting with the 10 percent threshold to qualify for some small share of the 22 delegates at stake in New Hampshire. Again, it only gets harder for Weld to gain delegates after tonight.
A single-digit performance for Warren is flat-out bad. And for all the talk of how Klobuchar’s rise may have stopped Buttigieg’s surge short of taking the lead, the fact that Klobuchar is leading with college-educated voters shows how she’s taking from Warren’s potential base, too.
If your whole campaign is about being “electable,” and you come in fourth and maybe fifth in the first two states, I don’t see how the media doesn’t make a narrative out of that if you’re Biden. Voters in New Hampshire certainly brought up that point at two of his rallies that I was at.
If Klobuchar is really going to get a surge out of a third-place finish, assuming that’s where she ends up, (though this is something I’m a bit skeptical about, to be honest), this might actually be a case where some high-profile endorsements matter a lot. She has few of those so far outside of Minnesota.
“I want to congratulate my friend Amy Klobuchar for proving the pundits wrong,” Warren says, after noting that Sanders and Buttigieg had a good night. She’s now basically repeating the memo her campaign released earlier. The message — it’s going to be a long process, and we’re just getting started.
According to the exit poll, 41 percent of voters today had a total family income of $100,000 or more in 2019. Among those voters, Buttigieg did particularly well, followed by Klobuchar. Among voters with a lower income, Sanders did well — followed by Buttigieg.
One thing about holding your election watch party in Nashua, right on the Massachusetts border? You get a few Bostonians coming to check out the action. I just spoke with Johanna Milburn, from east Boston, who’s a Buttigieg supporter despite, she said, wanting to have seen a woman be the party’s nominee.
“I think I’ve been overwhelmed with the number of candidates and as much as I would like to see a woman president I do wonder if the country and the world is too misogynistic.”
Milburn said she loves Warren, her senator, but that ultimately, her pragmatism won her over to supporting Buttigieg over Warren. “People have really strong reactions to her and they dont like her voice and I find that idiotic but that’s how people feel.”
Warren, it should be noted, is not looking good in tonight’s results, though of course, Klobuchar is making a somewhat strong showing.
Warren is coming on to speak now. Definitely feels lively in the crowd as she walks up to the podium, but everyone I’ve talked to so far tonight seems pretty glum. It’ll be interesting to see how she spins what looks like a pretty disappointing performance tonight.
It matters to the extent the media thinks it matters, I suppose. It probably shouldn’t matter because they both did badly. It’s a little harder to excuse it for Warren than for Biden, too, since New Hampshire should be one of her stronger states.
Nate, question for you: Does it “matter” whether Biden or Warren finish in 4th or 5th — or whether either of them finish in single digits?
Yang made a real investment in New Hampshire, with seven field offices, according to my count — two more offices than Klobuchar, who looks like she could be headed for a top-three finish. He also invested deeply in Iowa (16 offices), and had a committed volunteer base. His campaign organization was serious, even if his chances at winning were not. Yang’s endorsement could be consequential if he makes one before Super Tuesday.
New Hampshire is a state where the vast majority of current residents weren’t born there, according to an analysis of Census data by the Washington Post.
The greatest share of migrants to New Hampshire are from Massachusetts.
Can migrants fundamentally shift a state’s political culture? Whether those Massachusetts-turned New Hampshirites broke for Warren would be interesting to look at (it doesn’t seem like it so far), as would the broader effect of migrants on the state’s partisan lean, over time. For instance, an academic paper found that Obama’s success in North Carolina in 2008 (a state that hadn’t picked a Democrat since 1976) was due in large part to migrants moving to North Carolina from New York and other non-southern states.
ABC has assigned half of New Hampshire’s 24 pledged delegates — four each to Sanders, Buttigieg and Klobuchar. If the current results were to hold, Sanders and Buttigieg would each end up with nine, and Klobuchar would get the other six. But small changes in vote numbers could alter those totals.
Yeah, Nate, that’s what I noticed too. We’re used to Iowa and New Hampshire winnowing the lanes. Instead, the moderate lane is now three top candidates large! That’s unsustainable.
I mean … it’s true — and important! — that the moderate “lane” is doing quite well relative to the liberal “lane” even in New Hampshire, which has a pretty liberal electorate. But the moderate lane shows no sign of becoming less crowded any time soon. It may be getting more crowded with Klobuchar!
Debates can matter, Meredith, but we arguably haven’t seen the clear and direct effects of a primary debate since Newt Gingrich in the Charleston debate before the 2012 South Carolina primary. And that was a response to one of the moderators.
Nathaniel’s earlier point about Sanders’s strength in the southeastern part of the state is correct. Manchester is the state’s largest municipality, and the only one with more than 100,000 people. Currently, Sanders leads with 33 percent there, ahead of Buttigieg’s 20 percent. In 2016, Sanders beat Hillary Clinton 55 percent to 41 percent there.
Matt, yeah — it’s really interesting! Just 14 percent of voters say that this is their first Democratic primary, which also doesn’t suggest that he’s driving new voters to the polls. (And some of those, as Geoff noted earlier, might be Republicans who aren’t particularly entertained by their own primary this year.) Sanders is doing about equally well among those who have and who haven’t voted in a Democratic primary before.
To Laura’s earlier point about low turnout among 2016 Sanders supporters — Sanders’s supporters were also missing from Iowa. He may gain in both states from younger 2016 non-participants, but he could face a negative media narrative (even in a potential victory) if his 2016 supporters are not turning out or are abandoning him. If the exit polls continue to show low participation among young voters and if (like Iowa) the overall turnout is disappointing, that might dent Sanders’s electability argument.
Political scientists, take note — debates matter!
It’s sort of fascinating to watch this crowd watch the cable coverage with the sound off. They just reacted with a huge cheer to the result of a single exit poll question that was … not precinct results. But understandable of course. And yet it shows the power and importance of clear presentation of election results on TV!
Among the 49 percent of voters — a huge share! — who say that Friday’s New Hampshire debate was important to their vote, Klobuchar did particularly well. Among those who didn’t think the debate was important, Sanders is leading.
That is true, Nate, but those areas also include Manchester and Nashua, the state’s two biggest cities. Those places will likely be good for Sanders, based on the 2016 results as well as Sanders’s performance in urban areas of Iowa, and should wipe out any net gains Buttigieg makes in the smaller, affluent suburbs.
I’m sure the rest of y’all are on this beat — trying to blog in between TV appearances here — but it’s worth noting that while New Hampshire is counting its vote decently fast (thank god!), there isn’t a lot of vote in yet from the southeastern part of the state, including Manchester and the Boston suburbs. Those areas could be a little better for Buttigieg and Klobuchar and a little worse for Sanders than what’s in so far.
So, we’re at the “hurry up and watch cable results” portion of the evening. I decided to wade into the crowd to ask a few people how they’re feeling about Buttigieg’s chances tonight. Unsurprisingly, the people who show up to a watch party like this are a self-selecting bunch, and even what’s looking like a little bit of a Klobuchar surge wasn’t shaking people. I wanted to ask these New Hampshire die-hards about what comes next for Buttigieg, though. Many supporters of rival campaigns have said his support is too white to make him viable past the early states. Critics say that his appeal doesn’t translate in states like Nevada and South Carolina.
Donna Woodcome of Hudson, New Hampshire, said she wasn’t worried about him winning over black voters. They just had to get to know him, she said: “I know what convinced me was hearing him speak in a town hall. I was convinced after the first town hall. I think his message is very strong. I think he has very broad appeal.” William Hill of Wayland, Massachusetts, said that, “Success begets success. He was not a household name to many people but now that he finished first in Iowa and looks to finish strong in New Hampshire I think maybe a lot of people will take a look at him.” (Hill and Woodcome, like most people in the room tonight, are white.)
Meanwhile, our friends at ABC say Trump has won the GOP primary, stunning everyone I know. Currently, he’s at about 86 percent, which is on the high side for an incumbent president running in the New Hampshire primary. My former colleague Kyle Kondik at the University of Virginia Center for Politics wrote about this today. Trump might like that he’s currently got about the same percentage as Ronald Reagan did in the 1984 Republican primary.
To Nate’s point about Yang’s future: When we were at his rally in Nashua a few days ago, someone asked him if he would settle for a Cabinet position, and in his answer he brought up the vice presidency — even though the questioner hadn’t mentioned that. 🤔
A quick reminder that there is a GOP primary tonight as well. Here is Galen talking to a couple of Republican voters, Mike and Dick, who we found ice fishing on frozen Massabesic Lake. We figured if the ice could hold a snowmobile, then a reporter, a cameraman and equipment should be ok.
Kind of a shame that the Yang dropout comes when we’re busy tracking so much other stuff. He ran an overachieving campaign that brought new types of voters into the Democratic fold, and he probably has an interesting future in politics if he wants one.
Something really notable: According to the preliminary exit poll, 49 percent of New Hampshire voters said they supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, compared to just 30 percent who said they supported Sanders. Given that Sanders won the primary with 60 percent of the vote, that’s massive — his 2016 supporters seem to have disproportionately not turned out this year.
Here’s The Washington Post’s Matt Viser confirming Yang is dropping out.
Per our friends on the ABC News decision desk’s analysis of exit polls and vote so far, it’s too early to call the Democratic primary, but it’s a three-way race with Sanders leading and Buttigieg and Klobuchar vying for second.