How New Hampshire Voted

An early night! With first and second place settled in both the Democratic and Republican races, we’re putting a bow on our New Hampshire primary live blog relatively early. Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016, will likely go down as a historic day in American electoral politics. Trump and Sanders, separately, represent powerful currents in the electorate, and New Hampshire voters have done their best to prolong the 2016 nominating contests: Cruz, Bush and Rubio are all muddled together with 10 percent to 12 percent of the New Hampshire vote. They will finish, in some order, third, fourth and fifth. We’re also likely to see several Republican candidates drop out over the next 48 hours. Meanwhile, Sanders has a big win, but he will now have to compete in two states, Nevada and South Carolina, with much less friendly demographics. That is all to say: We’re going to have a lot more coverage of tonight’s results in the days ahead. Thanks for hanging out. ’Night! (UPDATE, Feb. 10, 2:17 a.m.): Nate, Clare, Harry and Jody recorded a late-night podcast with some thoughts on the results. Listen to it below, or subscribe in your favorite podcast player.

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One of my favorite cross-tabulations in the exit poll is its breakdown of when voters made their final decision. In Iowa, Trump faded substantially among late deciders, leading to his second-place finish. Presumably he did better in New Hampshire? Well, sort of. In the table below, which is derived from the exit poll, I’ve grouped voters who decided “just today” or within the last few days into the “late decider” group and those who made a decision “in the last month” or “before that” into the “early decider” group. The results suggest that Trump didn’t do particularly well among late deciders, winning 22 percent of their votes. But he had a lot of voters who were loyal to him from the start:

CANDIDATE	EARLY DECIDERS	LATE DECIDERS
Trump	48	22
Kasich	10	22
Cruz	12	12
Bush	9	12
Rubio	9	12
Christie	4	10

What about Rubio? Presumably Saturday night’s debate cost him a lot of support? Yes, probably, although overall Rubio actually did slightly better among late deciders (12 percent) than early ones (9 percent). What may have happened is that voters who initially were intrigued by Rubio after Iowa backed away from him after the debate; the 11 percent or so of the vote he’ll get tonight is close to where he was in pre-Iowa polls of New Hampshire.

Fiorina and Carson are projected to finish a distant seventh and eighth, respectively, in New Hampshire. Despite their poor finish today, they have the support between them of about one in nine Republican voters nationally: In our latest national polling average, Fiorina had 2.5 percent and Carson 8.3 percent. So what happens if they drop out of the race? Cruz probably would benefit more than Trump would. The online pollsters at Morning Consult added up results from January polls it conducted among 5,456 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents nationally, asking for their first and second choices among the candidates. So far Morning Consult has published second-choice data for supporters of candidates who have already dropped out. They shared with us the data for Carson and Fiorina. Among Carson supporters, 24 percent had Cruz as their second choice, 19 percent named Trump and 10 percent named Rubio. Fiorina had far fewer supporters, but they might be higher leverage: 23 percent said they supported Rubio, 14 percent named Cruz and 5 percent named Trump. (Another 18 percent named Carson, and in this scenario those supporters would need to go to their third choice, or maybe skip voting.) Of course, these polls preceded the votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, and voters’ second choices could be even more volatile than their first choices are.