In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under way.
Bernie Sanders won NH with about 26% of the vote -- the lowest vote share of any winner of the New Hampshire primary. Some worry that he could cruise to victory over divided opposition, as Trump did in 2016. But unlike the GOP, Democrats strictly require proportional delegate allocation, which means he could not win the same way as Trump.
Buttigieg ran a very close second. Klobuchar is getting massive attention for coming in third.
Warren is a distant fourth, with about nine percent. A lot of NH voters are in the Boston media market and commute to jobs in Massachusetts. Bay State candidates Dukakis (1988), Tsongas (1992) and Kerry (2004) all won the primary. Warren should have done better.
Biden was a sad fifth, with about eight percent.
Victorious in New Hampshire on the heels of a popular-vote win in Iowa, Bernie Sanders has forced the Democratic establishment to reckon with a prospect it has been dismissing: He's currently the favorite to win the party's presidential nomination.
The Vermont senator has seen his fortunes rise since Iowa, leap-frogging a struggling former Vice President Joe Biden as the frontrunner in two national surveys of Democratic voters — ahead by 8 points in a Quinnipiac poll and 10 points in a Monmouth poll. At a jubilant election night party here, he told a cheering crowd that his victory in the state was "the beginning of the end for Donald Trump."
The prospect was causing waves of anxiety in the Democratic Party.
“A lot of mainstream and moderate Democrats are growing increasingly nervous with the prospect of Bernie Sanders as the nominee,” said Jonathan Kott, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to centrist Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V.
