Democrats Poised to Leave New Hampshire With 2020 Muddled

(Bloomberg) -- Democratic voters who believed the New Hampshire presidential primary would produce a clear front-runner to take on President Donald Trump are likely to be disappointed.

Senator Bernie Sanders is favored to win on Tuesday, holding a solid lead in the last surveys before ballots are cast. Yet a victory in New Hampshire is unlikely to bestow national leader status on Sanders, as other top candidates show strength in polls in the next round of states.

As polls throughout the Granite State opened Tuesday morning, up to 40% of voters there were undecided. Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Senator Amy Klobuchar could each claim a measure of success, leaving the field as scrambled as it was before the Iowa caucus debacle.

But the primary could deliver dire news to former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Elizabeth Warren -- two candidates who were once riding high only to be crushed in Iowa, and now lag in the latest New Hampshire surveys. Biden is planning to leave New Hampshire and head to South Carolina before the results even come in.

After Tuesday, the race enters a new phase -- a cross-country dash where the kind of one-on-one politicking that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire enjoy is impossible. Voters are still focused on who can beat Trump rather than a fondness for any particular candidate, as the latest national poll from Quinnipiac University showed on Monday.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” filmed in Manchester, New Hampshire, Biden continued to argue on Tuesday that he is best positioned to help Democrats win back states like Pennsylvania that Trump won in 2016 and help Senate candidates in swing states, but he refused to say that Democrats could only win with him.

“We could run Mickey Mouse against this president and have a shot,” he said.

At stake in New Hampshire are 24 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, a small prize compared to Super Tuesday on March 3, when 14 states and territories, including California and Texas, vote. But it holds outsize importance because it is the first primary election of the 2020 nominating contests.

On Monday, Sanders opened his arms to moderate voters who might not like his democratic socialist policies but are looking for an alternative to Trump.

“Disagree with me on health care — fine. Disagree with me on foreign policy — fine. But I will not be lying to the American people every single day,” he said.

During the event, chants of “Bernie beats Trump!” filled the room.

That may be possible. The Quinnipiac poll released Monday showed all five of the top Democrats defeating the president, with Sanders winning 51% to 43% in a hypothetical general-election matchup.

The poll also showed that beating Trump was the priority for 49% of Democrats or Democratic-leaning voters, while 46% were primarily looking for a candidate they agreed with.

On Monday, Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, tried to woo Sanders’ progressive supporters while sticking to his centrist tack.

“The moment that we live in is one with an extraordinary majority ready to do bolder things than we’ve ever done, an American consensus that would help make the next presidency the most progressive we’ve yet had and yet can do it together. As long as we don’t go chasing after the extremes,” he said in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

Klobuchar is also trying to walk into the opening that Sanders’ surge and Biden’s fall creates for a moderate alternative. She had risen to third place in tracking polls taken after she closed Friday’s debate with a moving appeal to working class voters who abandoned the Democratic Party for Trump in 2016.

“I am someone who can bring people with me, that doesn’t shut them up, that is what I have done in the U.S. Senate, that is how I have gotten a lot of stuff done,” Klobuchar said in Manchester on Sunday. Her stump speech includes references to carpenters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin dairy farmers and dock workers in Michigan, all states Democrats lost in 2016 and that the party needs to win in 2020.

Her campaign said Sunday it had raised $3 million since Friday.

Even those who watch New Hampshire politics are cautious about predictions. Former Governor John Lynch, who has endorsed Biden, said at a Bloomberg News reporters roundtable in Manchester on Monday that the polls showing Biden at best in third place should be taken with “a little grain of salt.”

Lynch recalled a poll in 2008 just before that year’s primary showed Barack Obama leading by low double digits. Hillary Clinton won by 2.6 percentage points on primary day.

One question New Hampshire may answer is whether Warren, who came in a disappointing third in Iowa, can pull out of the dive her campaign seems to be in.

She has set aggressive fund-raising goals, asking supporters for $2 million before Tuesday. But she has sworn off big ticket events and instead relies mostly on small donations from grassroots supporters.

Another poor showing could shut off the spigot.

Biden’s campaign has long said he expects to do better in states where there are more Latinos and African Americans. Polls show him better positioned in Nevada and South Carolina and he has held commanding leads among African American voters, who see him as both heir to Obama and capable of defeating Trump.

Buttigieg, who has struggled to gain support with black voters, told “Morning Joe” he still had work to do in that area and was looking forward to campaigning in South Carolina.

He called it “an opportunity to engage African American voters who feel even more laser focused than a lot of other voters I talk to on the urgency, the almost existential urgency, of defeating Donald Trump.”

But whether Biden can keep that support is an open question. The Quinnipiac poll showed Biden’s black support nationally plummeting from 49% on Jan. 28 to 27% in Monday’s poll, a staggering drop of 22 percentage points.

Michael Bloomberg appeared to be the biggest beneficiary of the plunge, jumping 15 percentage points among black voters, from 7% to 22% over the same time period. None of the other candidates saw their numbers change dramatically.

(Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)

Biden is already turning the page on New Hampshire. He plans to address supporters there via livestream as the results come in.“I am looking forward to traveling to South Carolina this evening and Nevada later this week to carry our campaign forward and hear from the diverse voters whose voices must be heard in this process to select the Democratic nominee who will unite this country to defeat Donald Trump,” he said in a statement.

Money will be key as the primary calendar moves on. All the top candidates insist they have the funds to continue through Super Tuesday, when the race moves to expensive states like California and Texas. But it will be hard to raise the money to keep up the fight without positive results to show for it.

Bloomberg’s candidacy affects all those calculations. He isn’t even competing in the early states and is instead spending lavishly on advertising around the country, including in Super Tuesday states. He has already topped $300 million in advertising spending so far, eclipsing the rest of the field.

Tom Steyer, a billionaire philanthropist who staked his candidacy on impeaching Trump, is polling second in South Carolina. On Sunday, he lamented that the issue of race has played a small role in the campaign so far.

Steyer favors reparations for African Americans for slavery and said he would appoint a commission to determine how that might be implemented. The solution, he said, is “going to involve money.”

(Updates with Biden leaving New Hampshire early)

--With assistance from Tyler Pager, Jennifer Epstein, Ryan Teague Beckwith and Caitlin Webber.

To contact the reporters on this story: Magan Crane in Manchester, New Hampshire at mcrane19@bloomberg.net;Emma Kinery in Manchester, New Hampshire at ekinery@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Max Berley

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