Some in the political media have gone batshit crazy over Bernie Sanders unimpressive win in New Hampshire yesterday…
Some of us have NOT….
Sanders WAS expected to win…
His win was NOT much more than Pete Buttigieg’s numbers….
While the media has fallen all over itself to annoit Bernie Sanders the front runner?
Pete Buttigieg actually is in the delegate race right now if you count the Iowa delegate number’s….
A sober look at what the happened and the playing field away from the media noise…
he biggest stories from New Hampshire are, in rough order, the Biden-Warren collapse, Sanders’ underwhelming performance, Klobuchar’s surge into third, and Buttigieg’s compelling second place finish.
First, the sad state of the former frontrunners.
The history of Massachusetts statewide elected officials in New Hampshire is storied: John Kennedy, Mike Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, John Kerry, Mitt Romney all won New Hampshire (Romney lost in 2008 and won in 2012). And you could not have designed a better electorate for Elizabeth Warren.
New Hampshire voters have seen her advertising, through the Boston media market, for almost a decade. She had a large and well-funded operation in the state that was frequently described as the best organized of all the Democratic presidential candidates. The New Hampshire electorate is famously friendly to female candidates. The state’s two senators and one of its two House members are female.
According to exit polls, 57 percent of voters on Tuesday were female, up two points from 2016. A majority of voters were college graduates (53 percent), liberal or somewhat liberal (60 percent), and their three big issues were health care, climate change and income inequality. A big majority supported single-payer (61 percent). In short, these were Warren voters.
In that sense, the Warren collapse is even worse than the Biden collapse. Joe Biden was always fighting a two-front war against regional favorites, while much of Warren’s purported strength as a potential victor rested on her favorite daughter — cousin? — status in New Hampshire.
What overwhelmed both Warren and Biden were the monumental effects of Iowa and the debate on Friday. In this sense, it’s a cruel and arbitrary way for them to have been treated. After a year of vigorous campaigning in the state, half of New Hampshire voters decided their choice in the final few days of the race, and 53 percent of those voters overwhelmingly supported the two candidates who dominated the headlines at the end: Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
Warren and Biden, two of the Democratic Party’s most experienced and compelling officials, were shunted aside at the very end because they had a bad week. Neither candidate is projected to win a single New Hampshire delegate.
But if this was an enormously disappointing night for the two people who once seemed like they would be fighting a one-on-one fight for the nomination through the spring, it was hardly an overwhelming thumping by Bernie Sanders. Even counting for the fact that in 2016 he was in a two-person race, the comparison with his smashing victory over Hillary Clinton (22 points and 60 percent of the vote) and, as of late Tuesday night, his less-than-2-point squeaker over Buttigieg, is notable. Sanders dominated the state in 2016, winning every county. Buttigieg and Klobuchar ripped holes through that map everywhere, turning color-coded maps from 2016 that showed a Sanders rout into a patchwork of colors….
Note…
The Sanders campaign has claimed victory in Iowa , when the came in second in the delegate count…
They have jumped all over social media in the las 12 hours…
And the media has followed in the same way they have followed every breath of Donald Trump…
image…metroweekly.com
I don’t think Sanders win was impressive.
More than half the voters chose one of the supposed “moderate” candidates(Buttigieg Klobuchar or Biden).
Still,a win is a win.
Calling him the “frontrunner” isn’t unreasonable.
No – the victory was not impressive, but of course, not humiliating either.
Agreed Z….