What Went Down In The New Hampshire Primary

Votes are starting to come in!!! 🎊🎉🎉🎉

Obviously, when everyone comes up to New Hampshire in the few days before the primary, they’re primed to see all the candidates, especially given the indeterminate results of the Iowa caucuses this time around. But I also wanted to take the pulse of voters and get a picture of their mind sets heading into the election. I wanted to talk to people not necessarily about who they would end up voting for, but about how they were wrapping their minds around the state of the country, if not the race.

A lot of voters told me they were worried about whether any of the Democratic candidates could beat Trump, if the media would responsibly cover the race, and what would happen if their friends found out about their political preferences. It’s not exactly an exuberant spirit that’s moving through the Democratic electorate right now, but rather a business-like frenzy to decide what their best course of action is.

We know from crunching the numbers that the first states to vote in the presidential primaries play an outsized role in determining the nominees. This year, more than ever, Iowa and New Hampshire have taken heat for both having so much power and being so unrepresentative of the Democratic Party. So who exactly are these voters that the parties have endowed with so much power? While we were in New Hampshire, we explored that question, and Galen even ended up getting a tattoo (kinda). Check it out!

On Sunday, I zigzagged across New Hampshire and caught four campaign events. First, at 11:30 a.m., Biden spoke in the basement of Gilford Community Church in the beautiful Lakes Region. The event was intimate (remember, it was during the middle of a weekday and in a pretty rural part of the state to boot), which played to Biden’s strengths as a retail campaigner; I thought his strongest moment was when he talked about the struggles he faced getting over his stutter. He paid tribute to Brayden, a boy in attendance who also has a stutter, and showed the audience the written copy of his speech, which had annotations on it to help him anticipate tricky passages to sound out.

Then, at 3 p.m., it was off to a Klobuchar talk at Exeter Town Hall. The space wasn’t huge, but it was overflowing with people — the fire marshal kept a significant number of people out on the front steps, where they had to crane their necks to even hear small snippets of Klobuchar’s speech, which focused heavily on blue-collar jobs. She concluded with a heartfelt plea that those in attendance spread her message to their friends and family. “What New Hampshire has done time and time again is see through the big money and the big names.”

At 5:45 p.m., I then made my way to South Church in Portsmouth, where Warren held a town hall. She answered five audience questions but spent most of her time talking about her middle-class upbringing, her record of standing up to corporations and her anti-corruption plans. Multiple times, she argued for her own electability, saying she got the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau passed when no one thought she could, and then she beat a popular incumbent Republican senator from Massachusetts.

But the most impressive event of the day probably came at 7:30 p.m. at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, where Sanders held a rally-cum-concert featuring the band The Strokes. Whereas the other three candidates still seemed like they were in “win over new voters” mode, this event was all about getting attendees riled up to vote. Several Sanders surrogates — most notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — gave impassioned speeches that whipped the crowd of thousands (mostly college students) into a frenzy. Sanders later claimed that three times as many people attended the rally as any other Democratic candidate’s event in New Hampshire, but remember that crowd sizes can be misleading as a metric. The fact that this rally was held on a college campus — i.e., a place where many Sanders supporters are already concentrated into a small area — and also featured a free concert by a famous band certainly helped juice attendance numbers.

A disappointing finish for Biden in New Hampshire — following his fourth-place showing in Iowa — could start to undermine one of the central selling points of his campaign. For the last five months, we’ve partnered with Ipsos to ask likely Democratic primary voters about the candidates before and after each debate. Biden always led in one question: ability to beat Trump. After Friday’s debate, however, he fell behind Sanders.

It’s probably not a coincidence that voters began to reevaluate Biden’s chances a few days after his fourth-place showing in Iowa. The first time we asked this question, back in September, Biden held a double-digit lead over everyone else.

OK, I just got to the Buttigieg party in Nashua at the community college here and people are still waiting in one long snake of a line to get in so, more soon — it might be a little while until we actually get the candidate on the premises, I think. But the group on hand seems to tilt heavily towards students, though there’s definitely more age diversity than say, the Sanders rally at a college we went to last night.

Yesterday morning, we visited an entirely volunteer-run Buttigieg field office in Concord, just a few blocks from the state house, where teams of canvassers were getting ready to go door-knocking. Once they were checked in and given a map of doors to knock as well as pamphlets to hand out, Liz Boucher, the office’s training captain, quickly briefed them on how to approach voters.

Boucher role-played a hypothetical conversation with a fellow volunteer who pretended to be answering her door. Boucher introduced herself as a Concord resident and a volunteer for Buttigieg, then asked the “voter” if she was considering voting for Buttigieg. The “voter” said she was leaning toward him, so Boucher asked if she had any concerns Boucher could address. The “voter” mentioned that health care was her number-one issue, and Boucher explained Buttigieg’s “Medicare for all who want it” plan and emphasized the choice it gives patients.

Boucher told us afterward that they conduct a similar training before every canvassing launch — even for experienced canvassers, some of whom have been door-knocking for Buttigieg for months. (Some people who showed up on Monday were first-time canvassers, though, and Boucher spent a few extra minutes with them.) Boucher said she fell into the role of training captain almost by accident. She had no political experience but “felt a sense of calmness, kind of how I felt with Obama,” after seeing Buttigieg speak at an event in nearby Exeter. She signed up to canvass last September in her own neighborhood and discovered she had a knack for it; a dietitian by trade, she is used to motivational interviews with clients. “It’s the same type of thing at the door, where you’re really empathizing with individuals, hearing their concerns and talking them through that so that they can then come to the conclusion on their own that Pete is their candidate,” she said.

We then followed two canvassers in their early 20s as they knocked doors. They had been in Iowa ahead of the caucuses and then drove all the way to New Hampshire for the primary. Asked what about Buttigieg inspired them to commit this sort of time and effort, one of them said he liked Buttigieg’s outsider background and broad appeal, which might enable him to attract voters from outside the party. “While it’s important to vote your conscience, it’s also important to vote in a way that’s going to be most effective to getting I think a very damaging president out of office,” he said.

As it was a Monday, though, many people weren’t home. If doors went unanswered, volunteers left a sticker to let voters know they’d knocked — some houses had myriad stickers and campaign literature from campaigns. In one instance, the sticker wouldn’t stay on the door, so the canvassers left a glossy pamphlet usually reserved for actual respondents tucked in the screen door. But after each knock, the volunteers would input responses — or lack thereof — on a phone app and would jot down the info on their “turf” sheet. (One of the canvassers told us that the older people doing administrative work back at the office preferred the paper records.)

When someone finally answered, the woman said she planned to vote in the Republican primary on Tuesday. The only other home where someone answered had a small “Bernie” sign tucked in the front screen door. Despite that, the volunteer knocked — just in case someone in the apartment wasn’t firmly behind Sanders. A young woman answered and said that everyone there planned to support Sanders, so it was back out to the street and onto the next door.

Polls have now closed in all of New Hampshire except the municipalities of Brookline and Kensington (where polls close at 7:30 p.m.) plus Atkinson, Amherst, Derry, Exeter, Fremont, Hampstead, Hampton, Hampton Falls, Hudson, Kingston, Londonderry, Milford, Nashua, Newton, Pelham, Plaistow, Sandown, South Hampton, Stratham and Windham (where polls close at 8 p.m.). Results will soon start trickling in from the rest of the state, but no projections will be issued until polls close everywhere.

Republicans have a primary in New Hampshire tonight as well, and it will be just as suspenseful as the Iowa Republican caucuses were a week ago. Trump will win, but his share of the 22 delegates at stake will depend on how well Bill Weld does across the border from his home state of Massachusetts. The rules in New Hampshire are the same as they were in 2016: proportional allocation with a 10 percent qualifying threshold. Weld will have to do much better this week than last week, as the bar has been raised from the no threshold to 10 percent. It only gets harder in the contests after tonight, too.

Voters outside the earliest primary states may have to wait weeks or months to have their say in who the Democratic nominee should be, but that doesn’t stop some candidates’ most devoted followers from trying to get a crack at the action early. Wander into a campaign rally in the days before the New Hampshire primary and you’re about as likely to run into an out-of-town volunteer as a lifelong Granite Stater. Over the course of just a few days in New Hampshire, I talked to people who had traveled to New Hampshire from far-flung states like Florida, California, Washington and Illinois, as well as those who had a shorter jaunt, from places like New York or Massachusetts.

One of those people was Jake Wagner, 27, who can only be described as a Klobuchar super-fan. Many of the New Hampshire voters I talked to were still grappling with which candidate to support, but Wagner’s mind was made up long ago. He was so committed to Klobuchar’s cause that he flew from his home in Buffalo, New York, to Minnesota for Klobuchar’s campaign kickoff event back in 2019. On Friday, he drove up from Buffalo to canvass across New Hampshire with three friends — two Sanders supporters and one Warren supporter. “Having an opportunity to look people in the eye, to tell them why Amy Klobuchar is the best candidate to defeat Trump — it’s been very empowering to feel like I’m making a difference in this process,” Wagner said.

For some of these folks, like 23-year-old Jack Hofstager, New Hampshire isn’t the beginning — or even the end — of their early-state journey. Hofstager began canvassing for his chosen candidate, Buttigieg, at the beginning of January in his hometown of Dubuque, Iowa. As soon as the caucuses were over, he hopped in his car with a friend and began the long drive to New England, where he’s been knocking on doors since Thursday.

But canvassing can get very tedious very quickly, as I learned when I followed Hofstager through the slushy streets of New Hampshire on Monday morning. The sidewalks were still icy, and I was grateful I had remembered to pack my snow boots as I traipsed behind Hofstager through a mostly deserted residential neighborhood. But even after we discovered we’d been walking for 15 minutes in the wrong direction as a light freezing mist began to fall, Hofstager stayed chipper, telling me that he was planning to keep volunteering for Buttigieg even after New Hampshire. “I think this is the most important election of my lifetime,” Hofstager told me as we traipsed through the snowy town of Concord. “So I just feel lucky that I have the ability to be here.”

Micah, Nate was the only one who wanted to stay for The Strokes. Others can confirm.

Tony, be honest, was that a case of “we should really do some reporting to justify attending this concert”?

This weekend, Democratic candidates held canvass kickoff events all over New Hampshire in an effort to encourage their supporters to go knock on doors and get out the vote ahead of today’s vote. You can actually learn a lot about a campaign from events like these: How organized is the operation? How many people turn out? How enthusiastic are voters about the candidate?

I stopped by the Warren launch event in Manchester on Saturday, and here’s what it looked like.

The first thing you need to do if you’re running a campaign and kicking off a canvass is to separate the committed from the curious. Ahead of the event, excited supporters began filtering into Manchester Community College, and Warren staff and volunteers immediately asked them why they were there: Did they just want to hear Warren speak or were they planning to canvass for votes? The canvassers got a yellow sticker and the non-canvassers a green one (volunteers were wearing red stickers). Those planning to knock on doors got their “turf” packets with information about where they were going and campaign materials to hand out to voters.

The Warren supporters then moved into an event space that could hold roughly 500 people. This event got good turnout, and many people had to wait outside the room in a large common area because of fire code concerns. (Actually, many supporters couldn’t even get into the building for the same reason.)

The event was scheduled for 1 p.m. Eastern, but it started late. (It’s rare that a campaign event actually starts on time.) Eventually, state Rep. Jackie Chretien got up on stage and introduced Warren. The Massachusetts senator ran through her stump speech, including the story behind the phrase “nevertheless, she persisted,” which has served as a campaign motto.

After getting a “group selfie” with the attendees because there wasn’t time for Warren to do her usual selfie line — her supporters needed to go canvassing, after all — Warren departed. The crowd began to disperse and headed off to go knock on doors in Manchester and the surrounding area.

Recent New Hampshire polls haven’t looked great for Warren, but if you’re looking for a reason to believe she might be able to beat those numbers, this event provides some fodder. The crowd was big and enthusiastic. The campaign was organized. (Indeed, we’ve heard good things about Warren’s ground game our entire time in the Granite State.) Of course, the same things could be said about a Yang event I attended in Nashua, so … we’ll see.

Part of the FiveThirtyEight crew visited the Bernie Sanders rally/The Strokes concert last night at the University of New Hampshire and spoke to some Sanders supporters about why they plan on voting for him.

I’m live-blogging tonight from Warren’s primary night party, which is in a vast building that feels like a gussied-up airplane hanger. The Warren folks have spruced it up for tonight’s festivities — across the room, I can see high-top tables with pale green tablecloths and small bouquets of flowers, and a couple of bars with bottles of wine chilling in buckets. (The ice seems entirely unnecessary, though, because there doesn’t seem to be any heat in here — I’ll have to type fast to keep my fingers warm!)

As supporters filter in and we start to get some results, I’ll be keeping close tabs on the mood in the room tonight, since a lot is on the line for Warren after a disappointing third-place finish in Iowa. Right now, she’s also around third place in New Hampshire polls, but she’s very close to Biden and Klobuchar, which means it’s entirely possible that she could finish fourth or even fifth tonight, which would be especially embarrassing for a candidate whose home state (Massachusetts) is right across the border from New Hampshire.

Warren’s campaign seems to realize that a disappointing outcome could be in the offing for New Hampshire, though. Just a few hours ago, Warren’s campaign manager sent a lengthy memo to reporters and supporters, pointing out her rivals’ flaws and arguing that Warren will emerge as the “consensus choice of the widest coalition of Democrats in every corner of the country” on Super Tuesday. But if another loss is looming, it’s hard to see how Warren will be able to pick up momentum heading into Nevada and South Carolina — especially since she’s poured far more of her resources into Iowa and New Hampshire, leaving her with a much smaller presence in the next two states.

Before we get any actual results, we’ll get an exit poll from Edison Research on behalf of the National Election Pool. Much like with the entrance polls in Iowa, the pollster will interview a sample of voters at various primary locations — usually around 2,000 interviews — and the poll will hopefully give us a sense of how the results might play out, or at least how certain voting blocs might break.

Exit polls also give us a better understanding of how primary electorate demographics are changing. Like in Iowa, New Hampshire’s primary voters are overwhelmingly white (more than 90 percent), and more than half have been women in recent years (55 percent in 2016). But the percentage of voters with a college degree has also been on the rise, hitting 60 percent in 2016. Additionally, the percentage of voters making over $100,000 and the number who describe themselves as “very” or “somewhat liberal” has also increased — so it will be interesting to see how the 2020 Democratic electorate in New Hampshire compares, as the makeup of the primary electorate could make a big difference this year.

If, say, voters continue to identify as more liberal, Sanders or Warren could stand to benefit. Conversely, an uptick in voters who identify as conservative or moderate might help Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Biden, who have been campaigning hard in more rural areas. (New Hampshire holds a “semi-open” (or “semi-closed”) primary that allows unaffiliated voters to cast a ballot in either party’s primary, so more unaffiliated voters — and there are a ton in the state — might choose to vote in the Democratic primary this year than in 2016 because the GOP primary isn’t competitive.)

But remember not to read too much into exit polls — they’re no substitute for actual results. And the top-line horse-race numbers can and have been wrong. (That is, they haven’t matched the eventual results.) That’s why media organizations generally don’t report them.

Still, I’ll be watching for exit poll data as it comes in — hopefully this time, it won’t be the only data to come in on the night of the vote — so please get in touch if you have questions.

Sanders won New Hampshire in a landslide in 2016, garnering 60 percent of the vote overall. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that he beat Clinton among many major demographic groups, according to exit polls. Among the groups I looked at, there was only one exception: voters over 65, who broke for Clinton 54-45.

But even though Sanders won most demographic groups, some differences are still notable. He did better among men than among women; he did much better among young people — especially the under-30s, but also under-45s — than older ones; and he did better among white people than nonwhite ones. (And since 93 percent of voters were white, that mattered.) He also did better among the very liberal and among voters without a college degree, and with those earning under $100,000 a year.

How will this play out this year? Well, in Iowa, according to the entrance poll, 56 percent of voters who said they had voted for him in 2016 said they were planning to vote for him again — though only 31 percent of 2020 voters said they’d voted for him in 2016, a big drop from the 50 percent of votes he won in the last election cycle. (By contrast, 54 percent of 2020 Democratic caucusgoers said they had voted for Clinton in 2016, a bit higher than the 50 percent of the vote she won there, and her 2016 voters split up almost evenly between Buttigieg, Biden and Warren.) But the combination of his regional advantage in New Hampshire and his polling lead means that he remains the front-runner today.

This year, three Democratic presidential candidates — Patrick, Sanders and Warren — hail from a state that neighbors New Hampshire (plus, Weld is still running in the Republican primary!). As I wrote last year, that has historically been a significant advantage for candidates here. Out of the nine notable presidential candidates from a neighboring state since 1972, six finished first in New Hampshire, and none has ever finished lower than second.

This year, Sanders seems like a good bet to finish first, and if not, he’ll probably be second. However, Warren looks like she’ll have to fight not to make history as one of the first neighboring-state candidates to finish third (or even lower). In fact, we’ll have history even if Warren pulls of a surprise first- or second-place finish, because Patrick will almost certainly fail to crack the top two. (He finished with less than 1 percent of the vote in 80 percent of simulations in our final New Hampshire forecast.)

But regardless of where they finish, Warren and/or Patrick could still derive some benefit from being a fellow New Englander; they may still outperform their national polls in New Hampshire, as the previous nine candidates from next door have done.

Ever since he jumped into the race, Biden’s pitch to Democratic primary voters has basically boiled down to one idea: This election is all about beating Trump, and Biden is the candidate with the best shot of pulling it off. But in New Hampshire, some voters were starting to question whether he really does have what it takes to win against Trump in November.

After a Biden rally on Sunday, I talked to Laura Norse, who said she was torn between Buttigieg and Biden. “I wanted it to be Joe,” she said. “But I’m not 100% on Joe yet. I’m just not sure that he’s going to be the bulldog that it’s going to take to bring down Trump.” Later in the conversation, she got a little emotional about Biden.

All eyes are on New Hampshire tonight, but what role do early states really play in determining who will become a party’s nominee? After all, New Hampshire will award just 24 pledged delegates out of the almost 4,000 available in the Democratic primary. Iowa awarded just 41. Check out our video, where we crunch the numbers and try to answer that question:

There was lots of chatter after Iowa that the media was engaging in Warren “erasure” by ignoring her third place finish in Iowa — ahead of Biden — in which she outperformed her polls. But identifying systematic media bias is a difficult task. However, one thing to look at is the amount of coverage candidates are getting. Political scientist Dominik Stecuła has been analyzing the amount of coverage candidates are receiving monthly, and he did some post-Iowa analysis. Indeed, Warren went from having the second-most number of stories referencing her name to having the fourth-most.

On Saturday night, I went to the rowdiest campaign event of my life. The New Hampshire Democratic Party’s annual McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner is not the rubber-chicken donor event it might sound like; while there were dinner tables set up on the floor of the Southern New Hampshire University Arena in downtown Manchester, the atmosphere was dominated by thousands of screaming supporters of various candidates. The Buttigieg section shook noisemakers; the Sanders section held up light-up pink placards; the three sections of Warren supporters all wore liberty-green shirts and synchronized electronic wristbands that blinked out patterns in red, white, blue and green lights.

After several introductory speeches — by Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley, Rep. Chris Pappas, Rep. Ann Kuster, Sen. Maggie Hassan and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (for whom the dinner is co-named) — all 10 major presidential candidates who are contesting New Hampshire gave condensed, roughly five-minute versions of their stump speeches.

Their sections of the arena went wild when each candidate came out; there was even some bad blood on display, as some Sanders and Warren supporters booed and chanted “Wall Street Pete” during a section of Buttigieg’s address. The whole event felt like a sports game between bitter rivals, but one where everyone still managed to have a good time and revel in the competition.

Do you have a question about the New Hampshire primary you’d like us to answer in a video later tonight? Let us know in the community tab on YouTube:

Even though the Democratic candidates’ religious identities haven’t necessarily been in the foreground of the 2020 race, they have talked about their faiths on the campaign trail. In particular, Buttigieg has made his faith central to his pitch to voters, and at her CNN Town Hall last March, Warren discussed how her Christian faith shapes her politics. And as he did in 2016, Sanders has also addressed his relationship to his Jewish faith in recent months.

Candidates’ faith might not loom as large in the minds of Democrats as it does in the minds of Republicans, but the Democratic Party is still made up of religious voters. In fact, according to the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Study, 47 percent of Democrats say religion is very important to their life, 29 percent say they attend weekly religious services and 50 percent say they pray daily.

But all of these numbers drop considerably in New Hampshire, which Pew ranked as the 50th most religious state in 2016 (tied with Massachusetts). Among New Hampshire residents, 43 percent profess absolute certainty in their belief in God and 33 percent say religion is very important to their life. (These percentages are for the entire state, not just New Hampshire Democrats.)

No, there aren’t that many delegates on the line tonight in New Hampshire — just 24 pledged delegates — but they will be allocated proportionally to candidates who clear the 15 percent qualifying threshold statewide and in both congressional districts. Eight statewide and eight in each of the two congressional districts. The only quirk? That pool of statewide delegates is actually two separate pools: at-large and pledged party leaders and elected officials. The rounding may work a little differently with them separated than if they were allocated as one pool of statewide delegates. But many of these same principles will apply in the weeks ahead in subsequent contests.

Here’s a CrAzY Arkansas poll that is the first state poll to show Bloomberg leading anywhere, I believe … even though he also has only 20 percent of the vote. This would be a path toward a contested convention, for sure.

Sanders isn’t just a favorite going into tonight (our model gives him a 75 percent of winning the most delegates in New Hampshire). He’s also ahead in fundraising. The release of candidates’ complete fundraising numbers from 2019, a little over a week ago, bolstered Sanders’s credibility as a grassroots fundraiser. He raised more money from individual donors last year than any other Democratic candidate. The only candidates operating with more funds, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and billionaire Tom Steyer, are financing their campaigns almost entirely from their own deep pockets.

Two weeks ago, we launched “When Women Run,” a project that examines what it’s like to run for political office as a woman. Part of the project looked at which states have been more likely to elect women. So, with three women seeking the presidency, how does New Hampshire fare in electing women?

Really well! New Hampshire’s Congressional delegation is 75 percent female — the highest in the nation. And unlike 20 states in the U.S. who have only ever had male governors, New Hampshire has been led by three women in the state’s history. Vesta Roy, a Republican, briefly served as governor in 1983 after the sitting governor fell ill and died. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, both Democrats, also served as governor. (Shaheen and Hassan currently serve in the U.S. Senate.)

And women’s representation in New Hampshire’s state legislature has also typically been above the national average. One possible reason: New Hampshire is one of just several states that use multi-member districts, a system that might be more friendly to women’s candidacies. Overall, New Hampshire has a strong history of electing women to all levels of government.

New Hampshire has a semi-open primary, which means that independents as well as registered Democrats can vote in the contest. And in 2016, independent voters were a big part of the story — according to the exit polls, 73 percent of independent voters in the Democratic primary backed Sanders, and 40 percent of voters identified as independents.

One question here in 2020 is whether Sanders will be able to hold onto that independent support. It’s hard to answer that, though, because it isn’t all that clear who independents are politically.

Political scientists argue that most independents lean toward one party or the other and vote accordingly — in other words, there are very few true independents. Instead, independents include what we traditionally call Republican “leaners” (voters who look much like Republicans in their attitudes and behavior) and Democratic “leaners,” plus a few independents who truly don’t have a strong partisan leaning.

As for how independent voters could affect the 2020 race, there is an idea that here in New Hampshire, the primary tests candidates’ ability to connect with voters beyond just their party’s base, which may even have implications for how they could perform in the general election. Concerns about “electability” and defeating Trump are so high among Democratic voters this year that if one of these candidates is perceived as doing better among independents, he or she could have a real advantage.

The question, of course, is whether there will be a candidate who appeals to independents like Sanders did in 2016. After all, Buttigieg and Klobuchar have also tried to position themselves as someone who can win over Republican and independent voters. Lower-tier candidates like Yang and Gabbard have also made these appeals. So one thing to watch tonight will be just how crowded the independent lane in New Hampshire really is.

Biden is done with New Hampshire. This afternoon, as the state’s voters cast their ballots, the Biden campaign announced that the former vice president would not be staying for his planned primary night party but would instead be flying to South Carolina, a state that’s thought to be more electorally fruitful for him.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast, Biden has less than a 1 in 100 chance of winning New Hampshire, so it seems as if his advisors read the tea leaves and want to avoid another not-a-victory speech on election night. Instead, Biden will be throwing a South Carolina “launch party” this evening. (Biden has a 1 in 3 chance of winning South Carolina, according to the forecast; never mind that Nevada votes before South Carolina.)

The message from the Biden campaign seems clear enough: Their strength lies with black voters and black voters aren’t in the first few states. It’s notable that around the same time the campaign announced that Biden would be leaving the snowy north for balmy South Carolina, it also released a number of endorsements from Louisiana, another state rich in black voters (and the home state of one of his national campaign co-chairs). It’s a strategic retreat for the Biden campaign, but a retreat nonetheless. Biden is back on his heels just when he needs to be scrapping for the top spots.

I’d say the general rule is: Assume you learn nothing during Election Day itself until votes start coming in. That is to say, speculation about turnout, the early exit polls or rumors thereof, the “feeling on the ground,” etc., don’t usually tell you a whole lot. With that said, the fact that Biden hightailed it out of town and that Warren’s camp sent out a long memo talking about how they were in it for the long haul would not necessarily betray confidence from those campaigns in tonight’s results.

New Hampshire has been holding the first primary in the nation since 1920, but it didn’t take on the significance that it has today until more than half a century later.

In the early 20th century, a dozen states began holding primaries as part of the Progressive Era reforms, which aimed to make elections more small “d” democratic. But early on, New Hampshire’s ballot only listed delegates who were in contention to attend the party’s convention; the names of actual candidates for the nomination were not listed on the ballot until the middle of the century, and even then the primary was more of a beauty contest than a definitive vote on who would be the party nominee.

But after a disastrous Democratic nominating convention in 1968 and the subsequent McGovern-Fraser reforms, the early primary took on a whole new meaning. In 1976, Jimmy Carter camped out in Iowa, performed well in the caucuses there and picked up enough momentum to win the next contest — the New Hampshire primary — and, eventually, the nomination.

Since then, the power of going early in the primary calendar has been clear and New Hampshire has secured its position with a state law requiring that it be the first primary in the nation. Iowa’s use of caucuses has prevented conflict with New Hampshire’s state law, but if last week’s mess in Iowa pushes the state toward a primary, that could all change.

When New Hampshire primary voters showed up today, they were greeted with a familiar sight: paper ballots, to be marked with a pen or pencil.

It’s one step of the voting process that has remained decidedly low-tech for decades. After last week’s Iowa caucuses were summarily derailed — in part due to an app intended to report the results — the Granite State’s comparatively analog primary will come as a relief to anyone worried about election security.

Before voters even mark their ballots, they’re usually checked in using paper voter registration lists (some polling places have tablets, but are required to keep a paper registration on hand).

Once they’ve made their choice, voters’ ballots are then typically fed into a ballot counting machine, one of the few points in the process where technology plays a role. But even these machines are fairly low-tech: they’re not connected to the internet, and all the external ports are covered up except the one that provides power, according to David Scanlan, New Hampshire’s Deputy Secretary of State. And in some polling places, ballots are still counted by hand.

Once the votes are counted, moderators at each poll site read out the results while a clerk double-checks them by hand. The results are posted at the poll site, then the ballots (or polling machine tapes) are delivered to one of 36 central locations across the state.

News organizations like the Associated Press have stringers collect these local totals from polling sites and county clerks, then phone in the results to AP’s vote entry clerks. These results are then shared with other media, including us at FiveThirtyEight. While a winner will most likely be declared this evening, results are not technically official until tomorrow morning, when the official paper records are physically delivered to the Secretary of State.

“The official returns are recorded on a paper form and delivered to the Secretary of State by the state police the morning after the election,” Scanlan told FiveThirtyEight.

By sticking with paper ballots (which can be recounted if necessary) and limiting the amount of technological intervention, New Hampshire’s primary can ensure higher security and avoid many of the complications that led to complications in Iowa. Of course, having a primary — where voters simply cast a ballot for their top choice, rather than trying to gather supporters in a school gym, as in a caucus — helps reduce the risk of chaos as well.

Two particularly interesting stats from preliminary exit polls so far:

First, 62 percent of voters decided this month who they would vote for, with 48 percent deciding in the last few days. That’s way up from previous years; in 2016, just 31 percent decided “in the last few days” or “last week.” So, in other words, this number has doubled.

And second, 48 percent (!) of voters say that Friday’s debate was important to their vote today.

Note: The early exit poll waves seem to have a disproportionately large number of older voters, so we’ll see how these numbers change as the sample grows. But in general, this seems like an unusually late-deciding electorate, and one for whom the debate — which didn’t have a particularly high viewership, compared to earlier debates — may really have changed things.

At noon Eastern today, we froze our 2020 Democratic primary forecast again. Until we get the final results for New Hampshire, we won’t update our forecast with any new polls, endorsements or additional information. Once the results are in, we’ll get things back up and running and see what the race looks like.

As of now, here’s where our final New Hampshire forecast stands. You can see Sanders is favored to win the most votes, although there’s still a chance that Buttigieg wins:

Our forecast thinks, on average, Sanders will win 28 percent of the vote and Buttigieg will win 23 percent. But as you can see in the chart below, the margin of error is fairly wide, so the difference between Sanders’s and Buttigieg’s final vote share could be a lot smaller — or bigger. It’s also possible that one of the other candidates will surprise us!

The New Hampshire primaries are about to begin, and one of the things we’ll be keeping an eye on: How close were the polls to the final results? For reference, here is where FiveThirtyEight’s New Hampshire polling average stood before we launched the live blog today:

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Welcome to New Hampshire primary night!! Hopefully, we’ll actually get results tonight in a timely fashion (looking at you, Iowa).

But don’t worry, we’re ready to go. A crew of us has been here on the ground in New Hampshire since the debate on Friday, and we’ve been busy covering candidate events and hitting the campaign trail (and maybe a tattoo parlor) ever since.

Now we just need to dive into some results. FiveThirtyEight’s Anna Wiederkehr will have more in a moment on where things stand in our primary forecast, but it essentially boils down to this: Sanders is favored to win the first-in-the-nation primary, but there’s a still a chance Buttigieg closes the gap and snatches the victory.

The math suggests it will be a lot harder for someone like Warren or Klobuchar or Biden to pull this off — check out editor-in-chief Nate Silver’s piece on 28 scenarios for how things could shake out in New Hampshire and beyond — but remember that whoever finishes in second or third place could capture a lot of media attention, too, depending on the margin. For instance, a strong second-place finish by Buttigieg could keep him viable, and a second-place finish by Warren or Klobuchar could jumpstart either one of their campaigns.

As always, thanks again for joining us. We’ll be watching the results come in together — you, me and our team of political analysts. So stay tuned as we update the blog with analysis, charts, thoughts, questions, ideas, idle fancies and more. And be sure to send any questions you have our way @538politics.