The clear cut winners of last night’s New Hampshire ABC Democratic Presidential debate were the moderates, in the following order:
Pete Buttigieg
Amy Klobuchar
Joe Biden
All three gave a very strong performance, and the odds now of Mayor Pete and Amy Klobuchar becoming an eventual team as President and Vice President has grown.
The fact that both are from the Midwest is very important, since that is the area of the nation that, had Hillary Clinton won there in 2016, we would not have the unending nightmare of Donald Trump!
The fact that there would be a 21 plus year difference in age, with the Vice President being the older part of the ticket, is no big deal, as Joe Biden was 19 years older than Barack Obama, and the team of the two of them worked very well.
It must be said that Joe Biden had his best performance, but a younger combination is better for the nation long term, with the potential for two terms moving ahead.
Amy Klobuchar definitely gave a strong performance. I think she could shred Trump.
Trump is having a post-impeachment purge. He got rid of Vindman and Sondland.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/07/politics/alex-vindman-donald-trump-impeachment/index.html
Bernie’s Coalition Doesn’t Overlap With Dem’s House Majority
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/02/07/bernies-coalition-doesnt-overlap-with-dems-house-majority/
Charlie Mahtesian has a piece in Politico Magazine that looks at how Donald Trump has shuffled the traditional battleground states in the Electoral College. The basic premise is that some states are no longer competitive, like now solidly red Ohio and solidly blue Virginia. These have been replaced by once noncompetitive states like Minnesota, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona.
There’s an argument that can be made that Bernie Sanders is in a good position to benefit from this in ways people don’t expect. In particular, while he has reputation for failing to attract minority support, the New York Times reports that he’s actually doing quite well with Latinos in the west and southwest.
[Most surveys of California voters over all now have him in a virtual tie or with an outright lead — and his support among Hispanic voters is foundational to that. A survey conducted for The Los Angeles Times by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, found Mr. Sanders with 26 percent support among likely primary voters statewide, putting him ahead of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the runner-up, with 20 percent. He had the support of 38 percent of Hispanic voters, including 41 percent of those living in households where Spanish was the dominant language.
In Texas, exit polls in 2016 found that Mr. Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, had lost the Latino vote to Hillary Clinton by a two-to-one margin. He now enjoys a commanding lead among Hispanic primary voters there, according to a Texas Lyceum survey released this week. (In Texas’ Democratic primary, white voters are expected to make up a minority of the electorate, as they did in 2016.) The Lyceum poll showed Mr. Sanders with 36 percent of the Hispanic vote, compared with 24 percent for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and just 10 percent for Ms. Warren.]
It’s hard to see how Trump could win California under any scenario, but Texas has some potential to be competitive. It’s more clearly Arizona where Sanders’ strength with Latinos could give him an advantage over other Democratic candidates.
There’s a flip side to this, however. To illustrate my point, there’s the opinion of Texas state House speaker Dennis Bonnen who was caught on secret audio tape saying, “with all due respect to Trump, who I love by the way — he’s killing us in the urban-suburban districts.â€
The urban-suburban coalition is the majority-maker for the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and it could soon be the majority-maker in the Texas House of Representatives. But these are the exact types of districts where Sanders is likely to run behind more traditional Democrats. It’s very difficult to see Sanders matching the suburban performance of Barack Obama or, especially, Hillary Clinton.
This sets up the possibility that the Democrats will run a presidential candidate in Sanders who is mismatched to their congressional majority. We can see how this will cause problems already by looking at the news out of New Jersey. Freshmen lawmakers there are not lining up behind Sanders. Rep. Mikie Sherrill just endorsed Michael Bloomberg, while Rep. Andy Kim opted for Pete Buttigieg. Freshman Rep. Tom Malinowski had previously endorsed Joe Biden. With Sanders at the head of the ticket, none of these representatives will feel safe, and the same can be said across the Delaware River in suburban Philadelphia, where the biggest employer in freshman congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan district is Vanguard. She most definitely does not want to share a ticket with Sanders.
To win in Pennsylvania, the Democrats will have to do better in districts like Houlahan’s than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. There’s virtually no chance Sanders can accomplish this.
This is why the party is not going to unite behind him. Even if he has a roadmap to victory, it will be an unconventional one. In Texas, he might ride strong Latino support and turnout to victory, but he’d end any hope the party has of winning a majority in the state House, because those urban-suburban districts would be out of reach.
However, Nate Silver’s model seems to be predicting that Sanders will go on a major run of victories now. It could be that it’s too late for him to be stopped.
Been watching the results come in from New Hampshire. Sounds like Bernie, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar are going to be the top 3. Yang and Bennet have ended their campaigns.
Effective February 11, 2020 @ 11:45 p.m. ET: Bernie Sanders has won the 2020 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary.
It was projected right around 11:00 p.m. ET.
Numbers are not final. (At time of this post, 95 percent of the vote was in.) But, it looks like Bernie Sanders garners 26; Pete Buttigieg, 24 percent; Amy Klobuchar, 20 percent; Elizabeth Warren, 9 percent; Joe Biden, 8 percent; with Tom Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard, each between 3 and 4 percent; and Andrew Yang close to 3 percent.
One way in which Bernie Sanders won New Hampshire was with having carried both whites and non-whites. Exit polls, from CNN (effective 11:45 p.m. ET), show Sanders won whites with 26 percent and non-whites with 32 percent of their votes. He also won Hispanics with 42 percent, which was +28 percentage points higher than the 14 percent for Amy Klobuchar.
Source (one has to navigate to find the link for “Exit Pollsâ€):
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/state/new-hampshire