How New Hampshire Voted

Which party’s results will be more meaningful tonight? That is, which will tell us the most about how each primary is likely to proceed?

https://twitter.com/RitchieSKing/status/697213768972050432

https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/697184656265969664

Harry, I guess I’m a little more bullish than you on Trump, depending on what margins he gets! Trump winning with 25 percent of the vote is quite a bit different from him winning with 35 percent of the vote. And it matters how the other candidates line up. If Trump gets 35 percent of the vote or something and the “establishment lane” is a mess, that’s a really excellent result for him and I wouldn’t be too dismissive about his chances going forward.

I still remain very pessimistic about Trump’s chances going forward. Still, it seems likely that he is going to follow up a second-place finish in Iowa with a first-place finish in New Hampshire. Trump may be the only candidate to finish in the top three in both states. The idea that he’s magically going to vanish doesn’t seem likely to be borne out.

https://twitter.com/xanaoneill/status/697211863344386048

Greetings from Bow, New Hampshire! We arrived at the Bow Memorial School polling site in this town of 7,500 (it’s just outside of Concord) at about 5 p.m., as people were getting out of work and hitting the polls — walking in, we saw a truck hitched up to an old-timey trailer with a big old “Kasich” sign tacked onto it, a couple of people were conducting exit polls, and kids were whining to go home. Inside, town Selectman Harry Judd showed us a tally (updated every half-hour, in theory) of how many voters had cast a ballot thus far, compared with the same time slot in the 2012 and 2008 elections. From 7 to 7:30 this morning, 175 people had voted, compared with 120 in 2012 and 207 in 2008 at the same time. The numbers were a raw total of voters, not yet broken out by party. Turnout throughout the day looked stronger than in 2012 (when there was no Democratic primary) and similar to numbers from 2008, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton battled it out in the state. The biggest numbers thus far had come in the 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. hour, where numbers appeared to be exceeding 2008 turnout. Earlier, New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner predicted that turnout for today would be about 550,000, which is about 25,000 more votes than were cast in 2008. But Judd said Bow is not representative of the state. “We always vote heavier,” he said, noting that the town was a heavily Republican one. The selectman himself is a statistical outlier — “I was the first registered Democrat to be elected in 275 years.”

BOW, N.H. — When visiting the polling site at Bow Memorial School today, we ran into a pair of women collecting exit poll information for Edison Research. Louise Knee of Bow (left in picture above) had been outside the gymnasium exit since 6:40 this morning. Ramona Branch of Dublin, New Hampshire, had arrived about an hour before we got there to check in and relieve Knee during the final push toward the polls’ closing at 7 p.m. We’ve been hearing a lot about record turnout today. Knee and Branch had a data point of their own that supports that. Halfway through the day, Edison Research called them and said they should switch from sampling every fourth voter to every eighth. Their pitch to voters who have cast their ballot and are rushing back to their car? “Excuse me, do you have 90 seconds to take a quick poll?” They then ask which party the voter cast their ballot for and hand them one of these two forms. There are three variations of the GOP and the Democratic form, covering a wide range of questions from favored candidates to more ideological questions.

Knee said that, anecdotally, she was noticing two types of voters: “A lot of people don’t even know who they are going to support when they are walking in. And the rest knew exactly who they were going to vote for months ago.” And why are these two willing to stand out in the cold and ask people who they voted for? Well, they are getting paid by Edison. But, also, said Knee, “it’s your civic duty.”

It depends a lot on how close Kasich is to Trump and how well the other conventional candidates do; the permutations here are a lot more complicated than they were in Iowa. The only thing it seems totally safe to presume is that Kasich wouldn’t drop out.

You and I have both been pretty bullish on Kasich driving around New Hampshire this week, Nate. If Trump comes in first and Kasich second, what does that mean for the Republican race?

https://twitter.com/Kccrod/status/697207147411677185 A: Carly Fiorina. Maybe Ben Carson, although if he didn’t drop out after Iowa, there’s no particular reason for him to do so now. And if the pre-election polls are right, Chris Christie will have performed the worst among the “New Hampshire lane” candidates, and there might be some pressure on him to drop. But even that isn’t certain if we get a messy result on the Republican side tonight and it looks like Rubio is in trouble.

No Republican as bombastic as Donald Trump has ever won New Hampshire, so in many ways, there’s no precedent for this year’s GOP vote. But past results could provide important guidance as votes begin trickling in tonight. If John Kasich wants to sneak into a surprise second-place finish, he’ll have to perform very well in the same kinds of places where Jon Huntsman — another Boston Globe-endorsed Republican — did well in 2012. Huntsman’s best towns tended to be among New Hampshire’s most liberal and academic: Hanover, Keene, Concord, New London, Durham, Bow, Portsmouth and Exeter. For Kasich to earn second place, he’ll probably need to win more than a fifth of the vote in these towns. Meanwhile, if Ted Cruz wants to stun the naysayers who say his appeal among evangelical voters doesn’t translate in the Granite State, he’ll need to do well in the places where Rick Santorum performed best in 2012. These include the heavily Finnish enclave of New Ipswich (home to the Apostolic Lutheran Church, “an evangelical Laetadiasnist religion founded by Scandinavian immigrants”), Weare (where Cruz held a meet-and-greet at a sports bar last week), Rindge, Rochester, Barrington and Claremont. If Marco Rubio wants to do well, he needs to win the same constellation of well-educated, upper-income suburbs he won in Iowa. These include Amherst, Hollis, Bedford, Windham, Bow, Hampton, Merrimack and Londonderry — all places where Mitt Romney did well in 2012. If he’s not coming in at least second place in these towns, he’s probably not coming anywhere near second place statewide. If Bush is out-polling Rubio in any of these towns, it would be a particularly bad sign for Rubio. As for Trump, we might expect his support to be strong in blue-collar towns with low proportions of college graduates. If Trump towers over the competition tonight, he’ll probably be thanking GOP voters in places like Manchester, Rochester, Laconia, Goffstown, Salem and Derry.

This is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while. Milo Beckman, a recent Harvard graduate, designed an applet that simulates the results of tonight’s Democratic and Republican primaries based on FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts and generates fake, New York Times-style headlines about them. You can play around with Milo’s program.

Instead of filtering Republican candidates into the “establishment lane” and “outsider lane,” a distinction that’s problematic for all sorts of reasons including that the term “establishment” is fairly meaningless, I wish another distinction had caught on instead: describing Republicans as being in the “Iowa lane,” “New Hampshire lane” or “both lanes.” Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum belong (or belonged) in the Iowa lane. Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina belong in the New Hampshire lane. Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul probably belong in both lanes. This distinction is useful for a candidate like Fiorina, who has never held elected office but who was the CEO of a major company and a Republican candidate for Senate in 2010, and who has conventionally conservative policy positions. Is Fiorina really an “outsider”? I don’t know. But she’s definitely in the New Hampshire lane, as she has much more of a presence here than she did in Iowa.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how hard the presidential candidates work. And I’d argue that no candidate for president has worked New Hampshire harder during this campaign than Republican John Kasich. I went to Kasich’s final New Hampshire town hall last night. It was his 106th. That’s 106 speeches and 106 question-and-answer sessions. And even on No. 106, Kasich seemed to still be enjoying himself. We’ll see in a few hours if all his effort pays off.

https://twitter.com/xanaoneill/status/697206828539580417

Sanders’s huge lead makes this year’s Democratic primary a much different story from 2008, but there are echoes. If Clinton wants to beat expectations in New Hampshire tonight, she’ll have to perform well in a lot of the same places where she beat Barack Obama in 2008. In 2008, Clinton’s entire 7,589-vote statewide margin over Obama was attributable to just five heavily working-class towns: Manchester (the largest city), Nashua (the second-largest city), Salem (a suburb on the Massachusetts border), Rochester (a mill town on the Maine border) and Berlin (a mill town in the north country). If Clinton wants to keep things close with Sanders tonight, she’ll need to win these towns. If Sanders is winning them, it’ll be a sign that he has broken Clinton’s grip on working-class Democrats and is headed for a big victory. Meanwhile, Obama’s five biggest margins in 2008 came from liberal, academic, stereotypically granola towns: Hanover (home to Dartmouth College), Keene (home to Keene State College), Durham (home to the University of New Hampshire), Concord (the capital) and Portsmouth (an artsy, high-income coastal city). If Clinton is winning at least 40 percent of the vote in any of these towns, it could be a good sign for her. But if Sanders is winning them by more than 2-to-1, we could be in for a “Bernie blizzard.”

https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/697205057192861697

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Your roving FiveThirtyEight politics team has been doing a little campaign office-hopping in New Hampshire — how else would you have us spend our day but careening down icy roads and trying to figure out how the heated steering wheel function on our rental car works? The last few days before an election are basically peak organizing time, and one thing we’ve had our eye on during the campaign is how campaigns use data to target voters. But we’ve also been paying attention to what they’re collecting to refine their data sets. With this in mind, we sallied forth into offices filled with soggy welcome mats and empty pizza boxes. Our first stop was John Kasich’s Manchester office; the Ohio governor has been the talk of the town in New Hampshire, and it would be an understatement to say that the life of his campaign depends on his doing well here tonight. The Kasich campaign has four other offices around the state, but Manchester is its beating heart, with at least 14 full-time staffers. Jeff Polesovsky, Kasich’s national political director, said there are six staff members in South Carolina but that the majority of the campaign’s efforts are focused for the moment on the Yankee vote. See more The Kasich mothership is situated in a repurposed old house, and it was a full one when we got there. Six students were phone-banking in the front room, a couple of staffers were running logistics from their laptops in a cozy office, and volunteers streamed in and out the back door. According to staff, there were about 150 people out walking neighborhoods Monday. Kasich’s team, along with a number of other campaigns, is using the i360 platform to direct volunteers in the field to the best doors to knock on and to help plan the most efficient routes. The information gathered is automatically fed back to headquarters and updates existing data sets so that organizers can direct additional resources to neighborhoods where the going is slower. Down the road, Marco Rubio’s Manchester’s office had a more corporate feel. The campaign has taken over half a floor in an office park building, and we had to wander down a long hall and through a couple of mostly empty rooms to get to the center of the action, where the phone-bankers abounded — 26 of them, according to our count. There was one particularly notable ‘banker: “George Pataki here — I was governor of New York for 12 years,” a very tall man was saying into an iPhone when we entered the room. See more Our last stop was Chris Christie’s office, half the second floor of a low-slung building with a medical office below it. While the campaign declined to comment on the record, it seemed apparent that Christie had a similar “get out the vote” effort to all the others. About 16 phone-bankers sat around folding tables; they appeared to be using a phone interface similar to the one we saw at Ted Cruz’s Iowa office, where responses can be logged directly into the database via the phone keypad. The anticipatory mood all around would be accurately described by Christie himself a few hours later at his last town hall event before the election. “This is political Christmas Eve in America,” he said. “It’s Christmas Eve for politicians, and you all get to play Santa Claus.”

The only thing that’s interesting to me is the polarization. Both the Democrats and Republicans have fewer self-described moderates than in prior years. I guess that makes sense given where politics are these days, but it’s still strikes me as rather interesting given that New Hampshire is thought of as a more moderate state.

Gang, anything striking in these preliminary exit poll results?

And here are the 2008 results, for Democrats and Republicans:

As we start to get results in a little bit, here’s a good reference: The results of New Hampshire’s 2012 Republican primary:

While our forecast models regard Donald Trump as the likely but hardly certain winner in the Republican race tonight — they give him, respectively, a 69 percent and 75 percent chance of winning New Hampshire — our forecasts don’t equivocate as much in the Democratic race. Instead, both our polls-plus and polls-only models give Bernie Sanders in excess of a 99 percent chance of winning. The difference comes despite the fact that both Trump and Sanders lead their nearest opponent by roughly the same margin in the polling average, about 15 percentage points. As off the mark as primary polls can be, for a candidate to lose while leading by 15 points in the polls is almost unprecedented. The one big exception came in New Hampshire, however: Walter Mondale led Gary Hart by 16 percentage points in polls of the New Hampshire Democratic primary in 1984 but wound up losing the state. (In fact, Hart won fairly easily, by 9 percentage points.) An important caveat is that there weren’t nearly as many polls in 1984 as there are now. There were plenty of polls, by contrast, in the Democratic race of 2008, and they all showed Barack Obama ahead of Hillary Clinton by about 8 percentage points. Clinton won New Hampshire instead. Still, Clinton’s task is almost twice as hard now, as she has to make up a 14- or 15-point deficit. Translating a small-but-nonzero chance of a Hart/Mondale type of upset into an exact probability is challenging. But as I explained earlier, the most important factor in the model is how many viable candidates there are in the race; the more candidates, the wilder things tend to be. In the Republican race, there are somewhere between five and seven viable candidates, depending on how you count them, making the race about as wide open as we’ve ever seen in a primary. That’s why the Republican forecast has much wider error bars, making Trump a more likely upset victim than Sanders. The fluidity of the Republican race is also borne out in some other data. Polls before tonight showed that Republicans were less likely than Democrats to have firmly decided on a candidate. And according to preliminary exit polls, almost half of Republican primary voters decided on a candidate in the past few days, while just one in five Democratic voters did. Still, models are only approximations of reality, and showing that 99 percent number for Sanders makes me a little nervous. Not a lot nervous, but I’d gladly take Clinton at 100-1.

How much will the results of the Republican Iowa caucuses affect voters in New Hampshire and beyond? A pair of polls from Morning Consult provides some clues. The Washington, D.C., technology and media company that conducts weekly online polls asked more than 2,000 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents nationwide whom they supported in a poll just before the caucuses Feb. 1. Then it asked a subset of those same people the same question over the four days after the caucuses — providing a rare chance to track the sentiment over time of the same group of people, rather than a different random sample of people. (See the full results of the poll; free registration required to access.) The results were positive for Donald Trump. About one in nine Trump supporters had changed their minds and switched to a different candidate after Trump finished second to Ted Cruz in Iowa. That might sound like a lot, but Trump supporters, according to this data, were more likely to stick with their candidate than were backers of his major rivals, including Cruz.

Trump supporters were more likely to switch to Cruz than to Marco Rubio. Meanwhile, Cruz and Rubio supporters who changed their minds were more likely to switch to the other man than to Trump. That’s consistent with the trend in national polls after Iowa: Trump’s support dips, but he remains the big leader.

Whose supporters stayed loyal after Iowa?

	CANDIDATE SUPPORTED AFTER IOWA
CANDIDATE SUPPORTED BEFORE IOWA	DONALD TRUMP	TED CRUZ	MARCO RUBIO
Donald Trump	89%	4%	2%
Ted Cruz	6	84	8
Marco Rubio	3	10	83

For a different look at how Iowa might have affected voting today in New Hampshire, watch this video compiled by my colleagues who have been in the state over the past few days and have asked voters how much Iowa mattered to them. https://twitter.com/FiveThirtyEight/status/696822272183525376

MANCHESTER, N.H. — It’s New Hampshire primary night! And we’re holding nothing back. Stick with us throughout the night as we dive into the Republican and Democratic results. Donald Trump seems poised to win the first-in-the-nation primary. So does Bernie Sanders. But the margins matter. For instance, a strong second-place finish by Marco Rubio would help him solidify a spot atop the so-called establishment lane of the Republican primary. But if Rubio finishes behind John Kasich and/or Jeb Bush and/or Chris Christie, the muddle is likely to reign. Hillary Clinton seems like she just wants to keep things close, and “close” is in the eye of the beholder. So grab a drink, leave a comment and send us your questions. It’ll be a ride.

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