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| Bernie Sanders vs. the Democrat National Committee |
Following the debacle of the Iowa caucus votes the Democrats are moving into more normal waters with the New Hampshire (NH) primaries where voting is good old-fashioned ballot box stuff like most elections. It will be held on Tuesday, February 11 (Wednesday NZ time)
It’s been a while since I looked at the Democrat candidates, so let’s start with Andrew Sullivan’s list from a few months ago: the names of candidates who have quit are in bold-crossed-out:
There were others who dropped out, having barely been noticed (Gillibrand, DeBlasio), some who are still technically in the race but too low in the polls to count (Yang and AGW-fanatic billionaire Styer), and people like Tulsi who are so low in the polls they’re not even invited to the debates. And of course there has been one huge addition in the form of three-time New York mayor Mike Bloomberg (estimated worth $56 billion).
Before looking some polls about NH, some words of warning about the polling in primaries, and especially in that state:
- The sample sizes are smaller for most polls so the margins of error are higher.
- A much higher percentage of primary voters make up their mind at the last minute compared to general elections.
- To try and compensate for this, primary polls are often done in tight time frames, which is one reason why their sample sizes are smaller, but even so there are limits to how often polling can be done.
- As a result late breaking candidate surges can be completely missed or – more often – their extent is understated.
- Polls conducted in the next major primary state right after the previous state results can be screwed up by the euphoria or gut-punch of the previous victory or failure of a candidate.
- But if the pollsters try to be clever and wait for the previous primary effects to settle down they might not have time to accurately poll before the next primary.
- In this specific situation the support of an Iowa winner could result in an over-estimate of their chances in New Hampshire, and the mirror-image for an Iowa loser.
- NH can be especially tough for pollsters because more than 40% of registered voters in the state are Independents and they’re allowed to vote in one of either the Democrat or GOP primaries.
- So the NH polling has to not only try to discover which candidate an Independent will vote for but which contest they will even enter, which changes a lot depending on how competitive each one is. Given how small NH is the Independent swings between GOP and Democrat can be another factor in candidate’s late surges.
But as an example of the volatility of these polls and a possible surge….
Meanwhile, a Suffolk University tracking poll for the Boston Globe and WBZ-TV shows Buttigieg at 25 percent and Sanders at 24 percent support among likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire, according to results from Thursday and Friday evenings. Buttigieg has surged 10 percentage points over three nights.
And here’s another example from the relatively recent past when Obama got Iowa ahead of Hillary in 2008 and looked to clean up in New Hampshire.
The actual result is the top line.
It’s still likely that Sanders will win NH. He did so in 2016 against the DNC candidate, Hillary Clinton, and this time his opposition is much more fractured. Vermont borders NH so Bernie is well known and any politician who is genuine about his principles is appreciated there, and there’s no question that Bernie truly believes and is 90% honest about his beliefs. It’s the basic reason that others have fallen away in his Far Left lane; why vote for fake socialists when you can have a real Socialist.
New Hampshire does at least start to really shake things out for the candidates so I’ll wait until the dust has settled from the NH primary before looking again at the candidates and their rises and falls in detail.
However, there is one candidate, aside from Bernie, who deserves a quick look right now – Joe Biden. As I wrote here in May, 2019:
Biden is a hopeless, brainless old hack. A two-time loser in these nomination races. A swamp-creature buried in Washington D.C. politics for almost fifty years since first being elected to the US Senate in 1972. A gaffe-prone, 76-year old politician so dumb that in the 1988 nomination race he plagiarised the speeches of the almost equally hopeless British Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. A man with private and public behaviours that are distinctly disturbing in the age of #MeToo.
I pointed out in that piece, and again in June, 2019, that Biden was “winning” simply because he was the only guy in the moderate lane:
…the part that’s not Woke, not into Identity Politics, and not that keen on vast, new government schemes beyond what already exist in the form of the troubled Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid programs. The lane that includes the large majority of those white male voters forming Trump’s base, which the Democrats are desperate to “cut deep into”.
But I also said that Biden would be steadily exposed by having to flip-flop on countless past positions he’s held and that his Gaffematic Brain would betray him just as it had in the past.
And here we are. On the left are Biden’s national poll numbers from just one pollster, Quinnipac, tracking from April 2019 to now.
As you can see, Biden’s been losing support little by little throughout 2019 and into 2020.
But now he’s fallen off a cliff.
And his terrible 4th place showing in Iowa – where he barely made it over the 15% viability threshold that allows a candidate to retain their votes and hopefully get candidates – shows that the 17% figure is not an outlier.
The same pollster shows the national comparison between Biden and the others:
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| “You got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” |
- Sanders 25% (+4 since late Jan.)
- Biden 17% (-9)
- Bloomberg 15% (+7)
- Warren 14% (-1)
- Buttigieg 10% (+4)
- Klobuchar 4% (-3)
- Yang 2%
And for all the talk about how even if Joe crashed in Iowa and New Hampshire he’d win big in the South Carolina primary because all the Black voters support him – Quinnipiac has bad news nationally on that front too:
Quinnipiac national poll: Black voters:
- Biden 27% (-22 in two weeks)
- Bloomberg 22% (+15)
- Sanders 19% (+2)
- Warren 8% (+1)
- Buttigieg 4% (+4)
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| Pete Buttigieg |
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| Amy Klobuchar |
If not nationally then at least in the primaries it seems that small-town Indiana mayor, Pete Buttigieg, and perhaps more recently the almost perfectly vanilla Senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, are finally starting to eat into Joe’s “moderate” lane.
Not that they fit it as well as Joe does, but simply because they don’t come off as senile old fools with anger management issues – isn’t that right Mr “lying dog-faced pony soldier”, whatever the fuck that meant. But it’s just the latest of many such bizarre, brain-mouth malfunctions that Biden has had over recent months – just like every other time he’s run for President: all entirely predictable.
Since Joe was supposedly the dam that would hold back Bernie the question is whether the likes of Buttigieg and Klobuchar can do that job? The panic noted by many commentators in the DNC and other parts of the Democrat Party indicate that they don’t think they can.
Time to call on the Super Delegates again – and don’t the Bernie Bros know it.
No Minister 
