FiveThirtyEight’s New Hampshire Diary

The Washington Post reported today that Bernie Sanders will head to New York City this weekend to make a not totally surprise cameo on “Saturday Night Live.” (This week’s show is hosted by Larry David, whose impersonation of Sanders is Tina-Fey-as-Sarah-Palin-level accurate.) At 5 p.m. today, Sanders is scheduled to go the New Hampshire Democratic party’s McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club dinner, along with Hillary Clinton. After that, according to a New England news station, his next planned New Hampshire event is a rally on the night of the primary. He’s done campaigning here. Clinton is also going to be leaving town this weekend — she’s headed to Flint, Michigan, on Sunday to talk to residents about the ongoing water crisis there — but she’ll be coming back to New Hampshire on Monday for a get-out-the-vote event. The reason both Democratic candidates appear to be phoning it in is clear: Sanders has a tremendous advantage in New Hampshire, and neither candidate has much to gain by expending additional resources here. In fact, both of our primary forecasts put Sanders’s chances of winning at greater than 99 percent.

EXETER — A few hours ago I gave Donald Trump some guff for canceling his afternoon event in Londonderry because of the snow. Bernie Sanders didn’t cancel his rally in Exeter, which I tried to attend. The problem is that the snow was falling so heavy and the roads were so bad that my colleague Micah and I ended up arriving 50 minutes late. I guess I had it coming.

HOLLIS — We’re here for John Kasich’s 99th town hall in the Granite State, where there are, I’d guess, 150 voters present. If this is a typical crowd for a Kasich town hall that means about 15,000 people have seen him at one of these events. That makes more of a difference than you might think. In 2012, 15,000 people would have represented about 6 percent of New Hampshire’s Republican primary turnout. Obviously, not every person who comes to one of these events will for Kasich because of it. But this is a state where retail politicking can make a difference.