BTRTN New Hampshire Preview and Projection: Bernie Will Win a Home Game, Pete Makes it Close

Tom on the New Hampshire primary, including our BTRTN projection.

Many Democrats have a lot to prove in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

Not least:  the Democratic Party, which must demonstrate, through its New Hampshire officials, that it can pull off an election properly, and report results efficiently and preferably completely, before midnight.

And then there are the Democratic presidential candidates, who each have separate objectives for the event, as follows:

·        Bernie Sanders is expected to win (he has led outright in 28 out of 29 polls here since mid-January and was tied with Biden in the other). Anything less, particularly in New Hampshire, a neighboring state to his Vermont home, would be viewed as a shocking outcome. He needs to hold off Pete Buttigieg, who is charging fast off his    Iowa “half win.”

·        Buttigieg would love to surge past Sanders and take the most delegates in both of the two opening contests, but he will be content with a close second, as long as there is a big gap between him and Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar, his competitors for the moderate wing of the party.

·        Elizabeth Warren needs to close the gap between Sanders and herself, before the progressive wing decides Sanders is their candidate and the money stops flowing to her.  She is trailing Sanders in the New Hampshire polls by 15 points right now, which is unacceptable, given that it is her neighboring state, too.

·        Joe Biden, suddenly in trouble, minimally needs to get past both Warren and Amy Klobuchar into third place, and the closer to Pete, the better.  Biden has been coming out swinging since Iowa; gone is that good-old-frontrunner-Joe persona and instead he is bashing Sanders and Buttigieg with abandon, looking for that comeback kid moment so many others have found in New Hampshire.

·        Amy Klobuchar is seeking to pass Biden, which would be crushing for him, and turn the centrist lane into an Amy/Pete battle with Biden in the rear view mirror.

·        Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer are not focusing their efforts in New Hampshire per se, but the more bunched up it is at the top, the better it is for them.  Steyer’s real playgrounds are in Nevada and South Carolina, where he has been polling well, while Bloomberg is focused on Super Tuesday.  All they want out of New Hampshire is for Bernie to stay close to the pack, or at least to Buttigieg.

·        It’s hard to imagine any of Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Bennet or Deval Patrick doing well here, and poor results here should signal their departure, at long last.

There have been a ton of polls since Iowa (the Boston Globe and Suffolk University have been running a daily poll, and there have been others from CNN, the Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University, CBS News/You Gov and Emerson/WHDH, a total of 12), and they have been telling the same story.  Bernie Sanders still leads, but his lead over Pete Buttigieg has been cut in half since Iowa.  Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden are barely into double digits, and Amy Klobuchar is not too far behind them.  Yang, Gabbard and Steyer are below 5% and the others are negligible.

Only Buttigieg has jumped since Iowa; only Biden has fallen.  The others have all remained in the same place.   There does not appear to be any “late breaking” changes in the most recent polls, based on the debate or anything happening on the hustings.

New Hampshire	Jan	Feb pre-  Iowa	Feb post- Iowa
Sanders	24	27	27
Buttigieg	14	15	22
Warren	15	12	12
Biden	19	16	11
Klobuchar	6	9	9
Gabbard	4	5	4
Yang	4	4	3
Steyer	3	4	2

Our BTRTN prediction is that Bernie Sanders will win New Hampshire by a material margin (~ +5 points) over Pete Buttigieg, with Biden, Warren and Klobuchar bunched up well behind Buttigieg.  It’s very hard to determine the order of 3-4-5, but the polls are showing Warren, Biden and then Klobuchar so we will stick with that.

New Hampshire	BTRTN Prediction
Sanders	29
Buttigieg	24
Warren	14
Biden	13
Klobuchar	10
Gabbard	5
Yang	3
Steyer	2

This outcome would be very good for Bernie, perfectly acceptable for Pete, barely passable for Warren and a problem for Biden – two fourth place finishes.  Biden and Klobuchar both would be showing weaker results than Iowa, by a few percentage points -- but Klobuchar might still hang in on the theory that Biden is more clearly in decline, given his long frontrunner status, whereas she is arguably on the rise from a month ago.  With no absolutely clear leader after the first two contests, Bloomberg and Steyer remain in the hunt.  The rest should be gone.

If Biden finishes in fifth, that would be disastrous.  He is already strapped for cash and cannot count on Nevada and South Carolina as the firewalls he has hoped they would be.  It would be shocking, but a fifth place finish would put the Biden campaign in a full-blown existential crisis.