How New Hampshire Voted

Our partners at ABC News have projected that Ohio Gov. John Kasich will finish in second place in the New Hampshire Republican primary. So where does he go from here? Here’s what I wrote about Kasich earlier today:

The question is how Kasich would take advantage of a strong finish. He has run pretty far to the left in New Hampshire despite having a fairly conservative record as governor of Ohio. That moderation really does help him here, but there are fewer centrist Republicans outside New Hampshire. Furthermore, Kasich doesn’t have all that much money remaining, certainly not as compared with candidates like Bush. My guess is that there’s a difference between Kasich doing pretty well and doing really well. If Kasich replicates Jon Huntsman’s 17 percent of the vote from four years ago, he might be a good story for a few days but not have much impact beyond that. If he gets to 20 percent or more of the vote, however, finishing well ahead of the other “establishment lane” candidates and even threatening to win here, that’s a different story.

Based on the results so far, Kasich is more on track for a Huntsman-esque 17 percent of the vote than something in the 20s. However, there’s one big difference between Kasich today and Huntsman four years ago. Whereas Huntsman finished behind Mitt Romney, who was broadly acceptable to Republican party elites (Huntsman also placed behind Ron Paul), Kasich has done the best of the traditional candidates tonight. It’s still not clear what that buys him, but as Republicans cast about for answers, the highly popular governor of Ohio might get at least some consideration.

We’ve been focusing so much on the ideological divide on the Democratic side that you may forget about what looks to be a developing class divide. Sanders has won every income group, except for voters from families with a total yearly income of $200,000 or more. If you look at voters’ educational attainment, he’s doing worst among voters with a post-graduate degree — beating Clinton by just 3 percentage points. The wealthiest Democrats were also Clinton’s best group in Iowa.

https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/697241018190548992

From our partners at ABC News: “Based on our analysis of the vote, ABC News projects that Kasich will finish second in the NH Republican primary. ABC News also projects that Christie will finish 6th, Fiorina will be 7th, and Carson will be 8th.” “Third place is currently a three person race between Cruz, Bush, and Rubio.”

See more CONCORD, N.H. — Jody, our designated primary-night driver, observed some potent symbolism as we pulled in front of Concord High School, where the Bernie Sanders victory party was held tonight — the school is located on Warren Street. In case you’re not picking up what we’re putting down, it seemed to portend something of the cosmic significance (or cheeky event planning) that a democratic socialist from Elizabeth Warren’s furthest left wing of the Democratic Party was about to win the first-in-the-nation Democratic primary. Almost as soon as we got inside the gym, which had been outfitted with risers that the TV media had already made liberal use of, the room was saturated with the dulcet tones of Wolf Blitzer calling New Hampshire for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The crowd — or what of it that had trickled in so far — erupted in cheers. A couple of young staffers hugged and then grooved to the sounds of “Uptown Funk.” “I thought CNN was a little early,” said Diane Watson, an English teacher at the school. “Let’s get the room filled before we say he won.” She was there with her colleague Jill Dater, also an English teacher — “We can point out the social studies department for you,” she said. When asked about recent comments by Gloria Steinem and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about women’s obligation to support Hillary Clinton, Dater, 43, cited Susan Sarandon, who said recently of her support for Sanders: “I don’t vote with my vagina.” “There’s a seat in hell for them too,” added Watson, 43, riffing on Albright’s line about the need for women to help one another advance. A couple of rows behind them, dancing in the bleachers, was Sarah Stevens, a 28-year-old substitute teacher. She agreed about the feminist dust-up, but mostly talked about how Sanders had brought her to politics — she liked that he was consistent. “He’s been saying the same things for 30 years.” Plus, she said, “he’s the first politician I’ve ever trusted.”

N.H. Republican primary results | 9:00 pm | 25% reporting

	CANDIDATE	TOTAL VOTES		VOTE PERCENTAGE
✓	Donald Trump	19,224	33.6%
2	John Kasich	8,887	15.5
3	Jeb Bush	6,689	11.7
4	Ted Cruz	6,587	11.5
5	Marco Rubio	6,005	10.5
6	Chris Christie	4,829	8.4
7	Carly Fiorina	2,535	4.4
8	Ben Carson	1,270	2.2

I don’t know who is going to drop out after tonight on the Republican side, but I have to admit that I don’t really know why Carson, Christie or Fiorina would fight on. Carson is dead last of any serious candidate on the Republican side right now with just 2 percent. He came in fourth in Iowa. Christie is last of the New Hampshire-centric candidates with just 8 percent, after doing very poorly in Iowa. Fiorina is doing even worse with only 5 percent. Even if they don’t realize it, these three candidates are almost certainly done for.

Apart from Trump and Sanders, who’s having a good night? Pollsters, that’s who. The results so far on both the Republican and Democratic sides are within a few percentage points of the final polling averages for all the candidates. The closest thing to an exception is Rubio, who has 9.9 percent of the vote so far versus an average of 14.5 percent in the polls and who (you got this one right, pundits!) seems to have been hurt by Saturday night’s debate to a degree larger than the final polls were able to pick up.

https://twitter.com/micahcohen/status/697237582271418370

If you were to sketch out the most disastrous New Hampshire outcome possible for the anti-Trump GOP “establishment,” I’d argue it would be what we’re witnessing right now. Unlike in Iowa, Trump appears to be exceeding his polling average and expectations. Furthermore, the only “breakout” candidate in the next tier appears to be John Kasich, who looks likely to win a clear second place finish thanks to strong showings in liberal enclaves. But Kasich holds little appeal outside of New Hampshire. Bush looks likely to finish slightly ahead of Rubio, setting up an establishment muddle in South Carolina. In one sense, tonight looks like Clinton’s worst night of the 2016 campaign yet. But, if tonight also means that the Republican race remains a complete mess for the next several months, it could actually turn into Clinton’s best news in the long run.

I’m a lover of election nights, and this is not the type of night I dream of. Both sides have been decided. Both were called as soon as the polls closed. Both sides are blowouts. Gosh, Iowa was just so much more exciting. Don’t worry, though, we’ll cover what looks to be a close fight for second on the Republican side!

There’s still a strong vestige of the old-fashioned moderate Yankee Republican wing trying to make its voice heard amid all the year’s messy populism. If you add up the vote for Kasich, Bush and Christie (so far), they total more than Trump’s vote. A single strong centrist who lacked some of the flaws of those three candidates might have changed the story tonight. But the combination of their egos and money splintered the moderates and handed the night to Trump.

Another sign of how painful this nomination process is likely to be for Republicans, and how Democrats’ predicament isn’t quite the same: According to exit polls, only 48 percent of New Hampshire Republican voters would be pleased with Donald Trump as their nominee. Trump fared better on the question than Ted Cruz (38 percent) and Marco Rubio (40 percent), but nonetheless, Republicans who did not vote for Trump would have trouble with him as their nominee by almost a 3:1 margin. By contrast, 64 percent of New Hampshire Democrats would be happy with Hillary Clinton as their nominee, while 78 would be happy with Sanders.

https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/697234873870897153

N.H. Democratic primary results | 8:40 pm | 18% reporting

	CANDIDATE	TOTAL VOTES		VOTE PERCENTAGE
✓	Bernie Sanders	22,878	57.6%
2	Hillary Clinton	16,036	40.4

N.H. Republican primary results | 8:40 pm | 17% reporting

	CANDIDATE	TOTAL VOTES		VOTE PERCENTAGE
✓	Donald Trump	11,570	34.1%
2	John Kasich	5,453	16.1
3	Jeb Bush	3,961	11.7
4	Ted Cruz	3,907	11.5
5	Marco Rubio	3,343	9.9
6	Chris Christie	2,610	7.7
7	Carly Fiorina	1,459	4.3
8	Ben Carson	794	2.3

Farai, I agree it’ll be interesting to see what happens if Bush finishes third. I know I’m the broken record (stuck iPod?) for the “this race isn’t changing” thesis, but I think that unless something really shifts between Rubio, Kasich and Bush, the three of them remain in a stalemate, and behind Trump and probably also — as the race moves south and west — Cruz.

One of the stories of the night is the high turnout, driven in part by the intense competitions on both sides. I recently read a really interesting paper by Heather Evans, Michael Ensley and Edward Carmines that finds that competitive races have long-term positive effects on citizens’ political interest and participation. They use House races for their analysis, but it’s not ridiculous to imagine that this might be the case for primaries too. The idea that this wild race has drawn people into political participation is pretty encouraging. But the way parties have operated since the 1970s kind of depends on limited input from the public. Absent the smoke-filled rooms and multivote conventions of the past, party leaders depend on very loose, informal methods of control. If the interest we’re seeing this year turns out to be durable, party leaders won’t be able to do this anymore.

I’ll be very curious to see if Bush will get a viability bump from tonight. So far, it looks like Kasich will take second place, but even if Bush even takes third — and even that’s not guaranteed — it could give his flagging campaign more reasons to press on. That does not, however, mean he will be able to recover front-runner status. But I wonder if Trump implodes at some point during the race (not saying he will — he has proven quite durable), whether GOP voters will reconsider the value of establishment candidates. Right now that seems like a long shot … but hasn’t most of this race?

N.H. Republican primary results | 8:26 pm | 13% reporting

	CANDIDATE	TOTAL VOTES		VOTE PERCENTAGE
✓	Donald Trump	9,668	34.2%
2	John Kasich	4,467	15.8
3	Jeb Bush	3,365	11.9
4	Ted Cruz	3,171	11.2
5	Marco Rubio	2,734	9.7
6	Chris Christie	2,219	7.9
7	Carly Fiorina	1,246	4.4
8	Ben Carson	620	2.2

So far, it looks like Kasich is on track for a distant second-place finish behind Donald Trump. But a more significant development would be Rubio finishing behind Bush, who is currently in third, or even Cruz, who is currently in fourth. The worst news for Rubio in early returns is that his weakness appears to be geographically widespread: So far he’s cracked fourth place in only one town of any real size, Portsmouth, and just barely.

Preliminary thought No. 2: I’m not sure I buy that tonight is an equally poor result for both Democratic and Republican “party elites.” It’s been clear to us for a long time that New Hampshire was an excellent state for Bernie Sanders, between its white and liberal demographics and its proximity to Vermont. The key tests of the breadth of Sanders’s constituency are still to come. For Republicans, however, New Hampshire is a state that’s supposed to winnow the field. Instead, it’s given us a mess, with four “establishment” candidates all bunched up between 8 percent and 16 percent of the vote as I type this. Although it’s not quite the worst-case scenario for the GOP — Trump’s middling performance in Iowa is evidence that he can be stopped under the right conditions — they’re in a pretty rough spot.

Looking ahead, I think South Carolina will not only be another pivotal race, with very different demographics than New Hampshire, it may also become a place where what candidates say during the primary may come back to haunt them in the general. On the GOP side, Cruz will be looking to regain ground in a state with a strong base of evangelical voters. Trump and Cruz will likely battle for the win, but for all the GOP candidates who don’t drop out, it will go full-on Hunger Games, with anyone hoping to move from behind the pack having an incentive to let loose verbally. If the level of attacks rise, so will the clippable audio and video moments that end up in general election ads. It’s long been clear Sanders isn’t competing strongly with Clinton, thus far, for black voters, key to South Carolina’s Democratic base. The fights we saw with Clinton over who holds the progressive crown are likely to intensify as well.

Kasich-Rubio is the contest I’ve been waiting for. A big question there would be what it would take for elites to rally around Kasich. According to the endorsement primary numbers, he’s got a third of the endorsement support that Rubio does.

Clinton’s biggest weakness tonight? Unlike in 2008, she’s failing to win blue-collar New Hampshire convincingly. Sanders has connected there. In fact, some of Sanders’s biggest margins so far are in towns Clinton won in 2008. So far, Sanders has won Manchester, Seabrook and Candia by double digits.

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/697227417451155456

I wrote about how New Hampshire could be very dangerous for Marco Rubio. Well, it looks like he could be heading toward a worst-case scenario. Not only is Rubio behind John Kasich for second, but he’s currently running in fifth place behind Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz. If that result holds, his 3-2-1 strategy isn’t just not going to work, it’s been blown up.

The TV folks are all over the “horrible night for party establishments” narrative at the moment. But I’m not sure this is quite right. New Hampshire, with its maverick political culture and its small size (making media buys and campaigning pretty straightforward) seems like very friendly territory to this kind of candidacy. The fact that these candidates (Sanders and Trump) have emerged is surprising, but that they’re doing well in New Hampshire? Not so much.

One more possibly preliminary thought: In some ways, tonight’s results reset the Republican race to where it was before Iowa. Donald Trump is not invincible, but he has real supporters out there, and they’ll come out and vote, especially in states with high turnout. At the very least, Trump is a formidable candidate to win plenty of states and delegates unless there’s another candidate in the mix to stop him. In states with lots of evangelical voters, that candidate could be Ted Cruz. But in other states, the answer is less obvious. Republican “party elites” are having trouble coordinating with themselves, and one another, on any of the alternatives.

Welp, that’s a wrap … the New Hampshire primary has been called for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders right as the polls closed at 8 p.m. Eastern. What a contrast with the cliffhanger of the Democratic Iowa caucuses, which went into the wee hours of the morning. Of course, this is not really a wrap but a pivot in a long race. I personally will be looking to see if some voters who favor Clinton because they perceive her as electable, but are not passionate about her candidacy, will begin to re-examine Sanders’s electability. There’s a bevy of fascinating psychological research on how voters over the years have assessed electability, including everything from physical appearance to competence.

https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/697225221959524352

Based on very early returns, if there’s any Republican who could be on track for a break-away second-place finish behind Trump, it’s John Kasich. He appears to have won two wards each in Concord and Lebanon, two heavily liberal cities that are in Kasich’s wheelhouse. But, it is still very early and this could change.

One purpose of early contests is to winnow the field — to show who has real support and who isn’t cutting it. Another related purpose is for candidates who generated doubts among elites to show that their candidacies have legs. This latter purpose was, at least according to various accounts, a big part of the role played by “beauty contest” primaries before the McGovern-Fraser reforms. The classic example is JFK showing he could do well with Protestant voters by winning in West Virginia. I think it’s possible that Republican elites have been waiting for Iowa and New Hampshire to test Rubio in a similar way, but after Saturday the Rubio questions have shifted a bit. In the post-reform system, the long invisible primary and the imperative for parties to maintain control over the process mean that we’ve come to expect Iowa and New Hampshire to be the beginning of the end. Remember the shock and discomfort that the 2008 contest was actually competitive? In 2016, it’s pretty clear the contests aren’t going to have that role. So far the likely message seems to be that insurgent, populist candidates have more support than anyone imagined. I predict there won’t be much winnowing on the Republican side: This contest will tell us very little about who is the strongest candidate among Rubio, Bush and Kasich. Trump’s predicted victory has excused them all from the pressure to win. A disappointing finish for Rubio certainly wouldn’t help him, but I can’t see him bowing out at this point.

Our partners at ABC News have called the New Hampshire Republican primary for Donald Trump! Winning New Hampshire is a huge deal for Trump. But as I wrote earlier today, it’s also important to track Trump’s margins. Fortunately for Trump, for a race to be called this early, it implies a fairly clear victory. According to Decision Desk HQ, Trump has 30 percent of the Republican votes recorded so far, and The New York Times has him with 33 percent. That’s pretty close to where polls projected Trump to end up, but we’ll see how his numbers track over the course of the night. Another piece of good news for Trump is that the “establishment lane” of the GOP looks more and more like a multicar pileup. John Kasich looks fairly likely to take second place, perhaps even a fairly clear second, while it appears to be a disappointing night for both Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush.

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/697224122116415488

ABC News has officially called the New Hampshire Democratic primary for Bernie Sanders. We gave Sanders a greater than 99 percent chance of winning the state, so this isn’t much of a surprise. Still, it’s quite something that someone who wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party until a few months ago is going to win the first primary on the calendar — and by what looks to be a convincing margin. I don’t think many people would have thought that a democratic socialist would do as well as Sanders is doing. Sanders obviously won’t be on such friendly ground in the Nevada caucuses or South Carolina primary, but the idea that Hillary Clinton is going to put Sanders away anytime soon seems far-fetched.

Clinton is beginning to show some first signs of life tonight. For example, she appears to have won a ward in Concord and kept several others close. Concord was the biggest city Obama won against her in 2008. It’s still possible she could keep Sanders’s margin under 20 percentage poitns tonight.

https://twitter.com/micahcohen/status/697222299540393989

If you’re trying to read the tea leaves in the early results, you can already see how tonight could be a good one for John Kasich. He’s doing about as well as Jon Huntsman did in Lebanon in the western part of the state. If he can match Huntsman’s numbers in other places, it will probably be good enough for 17 percent statewide and second place.

At this point, it’s pretty clear from the early results that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump will win New Hampshire, possibly very convincingly.

I really, really want to quote Buffalo Springfield lyrics: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

If tonight goes as well for Trump as the early (possibly unreliable!) hints we’re seeing, then maybe the news is simply that high turnout is good news for Trump after all. While Iowa turnout was high relative to past Iowa caucuses, it’s still very small as a share of Iowa’s population. New Hampshire’s turnout, by contrast, is high in both a relative AND an absolute sense. People love to vote here.

The record turnout we’re seeing is a result of the variety of populism that’s disrupting the race. We have socialist-leaning populism; nativist populism; a tough-talking but not-far-right Christie populism. We are awash in various messages that say it’s time to save the country from itself … and of course, some of these broadly speaking populist voters would hate the others’ positions.

We’re seeing a lot of talk of record turnout in New Hampshire — whaddya make of it?

https://www.instagram.com/p/BBlcKMnnNG0/

So far there are no real surprises in the vote totals coming in. Big wins for Sanders and Trump totally in line with the precincts that have reported so far.

There are long lines at some New Hampshire polling places, with less than an hour of voting to go. This is also the first time New Hampshire law requires voters to show ID. If they don’t have it, they can file a provisional ballot, a “challenged voter affidavit.” A 2014 Government Accountability Office study found that new voter ID regulations depressed turnout in Kansas and Tennessee. The issue has become politicized, with Republican lawmakers generally favoring the ID laws and Democrats generally opposing them. In New Hampshire, some analysts posit that this will hurt Sanders, as college students whose age demographic favors him could be unsure of the law. But early exit polls show strong voting by political independents, another strong Sanders demographic.

https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/697217601806716928

Yeah, I think the Republican results are the more meaningful. The Democratic electorate in New Hampshire basically has no black voters, a crucial part of the party’s constituency nationally. The Republican electorate in New Hampshire may be more moderate than those of other states, but when you combine Iowa and New Hampshire and two top-two finishes for Trump, it would mean something. Moreover, the fact that Rubio seems unlikely to bring the mainstream conservative lane together means that we have a still-unsettled Republican field going forward.

I think the Republican results are likely to be more meaningful, Micah, because expectations for Sanders are so high. So I doubt winning New Hampshire will move him to the front-runner spot because of the all of Clinton’s other advantages.