His handlers say they don’t HAVE to…..
The two small population states don’t have many minorities who are Joe Biden’s base…
My view is Biden gets a roll going after the two that could net him the n nomination by the end of the Super Tuesday night March 3rd…
Here’s the view from FiveThirtyEight….
Joe Biden’s campaign has claimed he doesn’t need to win Iowa and New Hampshire to become the Democratic presidential nominee. Instead, the former vice president has his eyes on states No. 3 and 4 on the primary calendar — Nevada and South Carolina — plus the 14 states that will vote on Super Tuesday, just three days after the South Carolina primary.
The logic makes a certain amount of sense, too. Biden polls better than other candidates among black and Hispanic voters, so the states after nearly-all-white Iowa and New Hampshire definitely play to his strengths, as they’re far more diverse and representative of the Democratic Party. There’s just one problem: Since 1976, when the Iowa caucuses first became an influential part of the nomination process, the eventual Democratic nominee has almost always won either Iowa or New Hampshire (or both). In fact, there’s only one time this didn’t happen — Bill Clinton in 1992, and the circumstances were unusual.1
But maybe there’s a case to be made that Iowa and New Hampshire don’t matter as much for the Democrats as they once did. The states have never offered that many delegates, and their electorates don’t look much like the modern Democratic Party. Arguably, winning South Carolina’s black votersor clinching California on Super Tuesday could matter a lot more. Of course, it’s hard to argue that losing the first two states in the primary is a good strategy — and to be clear, the Biden campaign hasn’t argued they don’t want to win Iowa and New Hampshire, just that it’s not essential. So does the Biden camp have a point? Let’s go over the case for Iowa and New Hampshire mattering as much as they always have in the Democratic primary — and the case for their declining importance….
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Having now looked at the cases for and against Iowa and New Hampshire’s continued importance in the Democratic presidential primary, I do think it’s possible that these two states won’t matter as much. But I can’t help but suspect they’ll be as influential as ever….
image…thehill.com
More on Iowa 100 days out…..
A CNN POLL FROM Wednesday showed Joe Biden easily leading the Democratic primary field by his largest margin in six months. The next day, a national poll from Quinnipiac University poll found Elizabeth Warren edging out the former vice president by 7 percentage points in the first survey giving her a lead bigger than the margin of error.
Biden and Warren, along with Bernie Sanders, have pretty consistently rounded out the top three over the past several months of the 2020 campaign. But with 100 days to go until the Iowa caucus, the Democratic primary remains largely in flux with no clear front-runner and lower-tier candidates scrambling for a late surge that can help them break into the top of the pack.
“There’s chaos underneath the stability,” says Mack Shelley, a political science professor at Iowa State University. “It’s still kind of the big three, but that keeps getting reshuffled depending on what poll you look at.”…
More…
I will repeat,if Biden loses both Iowa and New Hampshire,he will have trouble in South Carolina.
His support here is not as deep as you seem to believe.
A poll this week showed some significant slippage particularly among Black females.
You seem to believe that everything simply remains static in a presidential primary race and that since Biden has been doing well here ,Iowa and New Hampshire don’t matter.Thats simply not correct.These things always have certain bandwagon effect.Momentum from a victory in one often translates into increased support in later contests.
If Biden loses both Iowa and New Hampshire is he toast in S.C. ?No but it sure doesn’t help and it will have an effect.How great is the question,
Even though they were sitting (if unelected) Presidents, both Harry S Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson abandoned their campaigns after losing New Hampshire.
Julián Castro on Thursday doubled down on the notion that the first nominating states on the primary calendar should reflect the nation’s diversity, firing back at the state party chairs who defended Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status….
More…