Welcome to the final chapter of my U.S. Elections series. I decided to start this series of posts based on conversations I’ve had with people, who realise that U.S. elections are important, but can’t get their heads around what’s going on. They’re right to be confused, the U.S. election process is nothing like the British one, and so I thought I would help them out with a series of information pieces as the election process goes on.
With the news from the 8th April that Senator Bernie Sanders would be dropping out of the Democratic presidential primary contest, former Vice-President Joe Biden is now the party’s de-facto nominee to face President Trump, who has already won the Republican primary process, in the 2020 election.
As a result, it is unlikely that any other primaries in the future will be of real significance, as the populations of these states now know that only one candidate remains in the race. Even though they will probably still vote (it would be highly unfair for the primaries of these states to be cancelled, although they will be delayed because of COVID-19), it will take a miracle for Joe Biden not to formally win the Democratic nomination from here on.
Therefore, I will be stopping the presidential primary series I have been running to date. In its place, I will be starting a new series called The States, profiling each state on the general/national election level, to try and predict how they will vote in the presidential election. This series will look at, but not rely on polling data. It will also look at demographics, previous voting history, and polling data as a collective, to build up a picture of what the state really looks like and how it thinks.
Welcome to the tenth chapter of my U.S. Elections series. I decided to start this series of posts based on conversations I’ve had with people, who realise that U.S. elections are important, but can’t get their heads around what’s going on. They’re right to be confused, the U.S. election process is nothing like the British one, and so I thought I would help them out with a series of information pieces as the election process goes on. This piece is dedicated to explaining the Wisconsin primary.
Well these are strange and unchartered times we’re living in, aren’t they! Most states have had the good sense to cancel their primaries, and have begun looking at whether it will be possible to be able to host them entirely through postal vosting. Unfortunately for voters of Wisconsin, their primary will go ahead tonight. Hundreds of thousands of people will have to decide whether to brave long queues and large groups of people in order to cast their vote. Initially, the Governor of Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers had cancelled the primary, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the governor did not have the power to do so, and so the primary goes ahead!
Note: Full results will not be released until at least April 13th, in a part of the governor’s ruling that the Supreme Court did not overturn.
Key facts about the Wisconsin primary
Date: 7th April 2020
Location of the state
Democratic delegates up for grabs: 84 (plus 13 superdelegates)
Last weekend, as the U.S. overtook China to have the most cases of coronavirus in the world, President Donald Trump toyed with the idea of imposing a quarantine on three badly affected states in the U.S. New York, Connecticut and New Jersey were in the president’s crosshairs as the country tried to grapple with the disease. The reasoning behind the quarantine seemed sound enough, New York, unfortunately, has the most cases of coronavirus in the entire country, with around 58,000 people known to be infected at the last count. He then backed down from the idea just a day later, urging the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to impose “strong travel bans” instead.
Domestic Travel Advisory: Due to extensive community transmission of #COVID19 in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, CDC urges residents to refrain from non-essential domestic travel for 14 days effective immediately. Read more: https://t.co/RAaIpQn6cjpic.twitter.com/a0eIYGzOa1
On the recommendation of the White House CoronaVirus Task Force, and upon consultation with the Governor’s of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, I have asked the @CDCgov to issue a strong Travel Advisory, to be administered by the Governors, in consultation with the….
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo disagreed with the President, as you can see in the video below from The Guardian.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that the president just so happens to have suggested a quarantine around three of the United States’ most Democratic-leaning states in the entire country.
Take a look at this map, produced by the BBC using Johns Hopkins University data.
Image taken from the BBC
Now it’s true that New Jersey and New York are heavily infected states. Connecticut is marked on the map as the yellow state. A quarantine might have worked. The three states all border each other and it would have been simple enough to shut them off from other bordering states.
But Trump is famous for including a lack of detail in his thoughts and plans, so there was never any actual detail of what a Trump quarantine might look like or how it might work. Not that it mattered anyway, a day after proposing the idea, Trump changed his mind anyway.
The real problem is that the quarantine targets Democratic states. Trump has never shied away from brazenly attacking states run by Democrats or that vote Democratic in elections. He persistently attacked Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, and California Governor Gavin Newsom during the 2019 wildfires.
The map below shows the worst-affected (i.e. the named states) on the map above, and how they voted in the 2016 presidential election.
Connecticut is not named on the BBC map above, but it is marked as CT on this map
Four of the states voted Republican in 2016. Michigan and Florida pretty much won the election for President Trump. There is no mention of quarantining Texas and Louisiana, which share a border and could quite easily allow people to pass between the two states and transmit the virus further.
The tables below compare the top ten states for testing versus the top ten states for cases detected. The colour demonstrates which party the state voted for in 2016 – blue is Democratic, red is Republican.
Looking at those numbers, it’s perhaps no surprise that New York has the most confirmed cases in the United States; New York is the state that has been able to complete the most testing per 10,000 people. New Jersey is tenth, and not on the list (but interestingly, eleventh) is Connecticut.
Yet unfortunately, if Trump wants to do something about dealing with areas showing rapidly rising case numbers, he should look at the states that back him.
All ten of the states on the table on the right have seen the number of cases double in just three days (between March 23rd and March 26). Nine of those ten states voted for Trump in 2016.
Put simply, if a quarantine is going to be imposed anywhere, Trump should be looking at the states that support him. It is there, particularly in Texas, West Virginia and Oklahoma, where cases of coronavirus will likely rise exponentially over the next week or so given the already huge increases over the past few days.
It would also help if the President detailed what a quarantine would mean for the lives of everyday people. Simply saying “New York, Connecticut and New Jersey may be subject to a quarantine” is of no use to the millions of people who live in those states. Without actual detail regarding what the plans look like, all the President is doing is scaremongering.
Fourth place in Iowa. Fifth place finish in New Hampshire. A distant-second place in Nevada. Most candidates in a primary contest would see these first three results and conclude that they could not win their party’s nomination for President of the United States. In 2008, Joe Biden dropped out after performing badly in just the first state, Iowa. But not the Joe Biden of 2020. He admitted that his campaign was behind that of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, both in terms of polling and campaign donations.
And then came South Carolina.
A state that Joe Biden was, in fairness, expected to win.
But nobody expected the South Carolina primary to revive the Biden campaign in the way it did.
The chart below shows the breakdown of the South Carolina primary vote.
No candidate came close to even winning a county in South Carolina, never mind giving Biden a competitive race statewide. But why?
The answer lies in the state’s demographics.
South Carolina is a majority white state, that is true. But over a quarter (around 28% according to the 2010 U.S. Census) of the population is African-American, a voter base that gets incredibly excited whenever Joe Biden is mentioned or comes to visit.
Put simply, Joe Biden is the candidate of choice for a huge majority of African-Americans.
Compare the African-American population in the first three states with that in South Carolina shown on the graph below.
Figures taken from the 2010 U.S. Census
The demographics in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada overwhelmingly disadvantage Biden. It’s true that he does perform well in primaries with older white voters, but not with many other minorities like Latinos/Hispanics, who delivered a crushing victory for Bernie Sanders in Nevada – in much the same way that African-Americans did for Biden in South Carolina.
Then came Super Tuesday, where fourteen states voted all at once. Biden was back in the race, but Bernie Sanders was still expected to do, and probably win the night overall.
But that’s not how it went down. Anyone who knows anything about elections will tell you that you can’t just rely on mere expectations. The voting population doesn’t work to expectations.
Here’s how Super Tuesday actually ended up:
For context, Biden was outspent massively across the board on Super Tuesday.
Yet voters still turned out for him, and he won ten of the fourteen states up for grabs that night.
Joe Biden suddenly had the lead in terms of delegates and states.
It appeared that the South Carolina primary proved to Biden’s voter base that he was a viable candidate for the presidency, and that his supporters were probably hesitant initially after poor showings in the first three primaries.
But Biden played the long game.
He knew that the states after Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada would play to his strengths.
All he had to do was wait for them to arrive.
Take a look at the map below which shows the cities in the United States with a majority African-American population, according to the 2010 Census.
Then compare that map to this one, showing which states have been won by which candidate so far.
Blue states have been won by Bernie Sanders, red states have been won by Joe Biden, green states have been won by Pete Buttigieg and white states have not had their primary yet.
The correlation is clear. African Americans are not only turning out in huge numbers to support Joe Biden, but they are delivering the states that have pushed him way past Bernie Sanders in the delegate race.
The states that haven’t voted yet and are included on the interactive map are almost certain to vote in favour of Joe Biden. They include Pennsylvania, New York and Georgia. Three states with massive numbers of delegates that could tip the race almost past the point of a mathematical no return for Bernie Sanders.
So the next time you take a look at the polls and draw conclusions based from them, take a step back.
Voter demographics are becoming ever-more important in the United States, and Joe Biden knows it.
A similar version of this article also appeared on yorkshire-voice.com, where you can read other stuff I’ve written for my university news website!
Welcome to the ninth chapter of my U.S. Elections series. I decided to start this series of posts based on conversations I’ve had with people, who realise that U.S. elections are important, but can’t get their heads around what’s going on. They’re right to be confused, the U.S. election process is nothing like the British one, and so I thought I would help them out with a series of information pieces as the election process goes on. This piece is dedicated to explaining the third and final Super Tuesday, where once again, large numbers of delegates are awarded across multiple states.
Well it seems like every Tuesday is a Super Tuesday recently, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, this is the last one in terms of the Democratic primary, but the one that I think will be the most exciting to watch. For Bernie Sanders, he needs a morale boost now, and there is no better time than winning some critically important states. Joe Biden could all but kill off the contest with a third strong showing across the map.
The reason I say that this Super Tuesday is the most exciting is because it contains some vitally important states in terms of the general election. Voting tonight are Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. Three of these are what are called swingstates (or in over-the-top American lingo, battleground states); that is, states that have a very small margin of victory for the winner. Between them, at the general election in November, these four states will make up 78 of the Electoral College votes, which is just under a quarter of the entire Electoral College votes a candidate needs to win. In the primary process, they will make up It will be fascinating to see which side of the Democratic Party these states go for; the moderate in Joe Biden, or the progressive in Bernie Sanders.
UPDATE: The governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, has announced that the primary in his state will not go ahead on March 17th due to fears around COVID-19. Arizona, Florida and Illinois are still going ahead.
Key facts about Super Tuesday 3
Date: March 17th 2020
Location of the states
Democratic delegates up for grabs: 577 (plus 86 superdelegates)
Democratic winner: Joe Biden (at least 235 delegates; 3 out of 3 states)
Results please!
Another huge win for Joe Biden could spell the end of the Sanders campaign. There will no doubt have been hope within the Sanders campaign that he could have been competitive in Arizona, given its relatively similar ethnic make up to Nevada which he has already won, and the ultra-diverse make up of the Floridian population. But that didn’t happen. Sanders didn’t even win a county in Florida. Biden took over 60% of the popular vote to Sanders’ 22% (with the rest going to other candidates who have already dropped out – the one negative side to early voting rules!).
Biden would almost certainly always have been favourite for a crushing victory in Illinois given that President Obama was Senator for Illinois before becoming President. The Obama-Biden ticket has not been forgotten by Democrats, particularly in Illinois!
Questions are now being raised about Sanders’ viability as a candidate. Biden has now crossed the 1,000-pledged-delegate mark (remember a candidate needs 1,991 to win the contest outright). Sanders is back at around 800. Is Sanders damaging the Democrats’ chances of winning by continuing to provide opposition to the presumptive nominee? Time will tell, but ever so slightly, the pressure from Team Biden on Sanders to drop out and endorse the former Vice-President is increasing…
Welcome to the seventh chapter of my U.S. Elections series. I decided to start this series of posts based on conversations I’ve had with people, who realise that U.S. elections are important, but can’t get their heads around what’s going on. They’re right to be confused, the U.S. election process is nothing like the British one, and so I thought I would help them out with a series of information pieces as the election process goes on. This piece is dedicated to explaining the second Super Tuesday, where up six states vote at once.
Super Tuesday doesn’t feel like a week ago does it? Seven days ago, Joe Biden surprised everyone by winning states like Texas, Minnesota and Massachusetts. His campaign was almost dead and buried before South Carolina and Super Tuesday, and now Biden leads the delegate count and could deal Bernie Sanders’ campaign a fatal blow. Just a few weeks ago, Sanders was running away with polling in Michigan and Washington state, and now polls are suggesting that Joe Biden could win all of the states in play tonight.
Republicans are also having a second Super Tuesday in all the same states apart from North Dakota.
Key facts about Super Tuesday 2
Date: March 10th 2020
Location of the states
Democratic delegates up for grabs: 352 (plus 69 superdelegates)
Democratic winner: Joe Biden (201 delegates; 4 states)
Republican Super Tuesday 2 states
Republican delegates up for grabs: 242
Republican winner: Donald Trump (242 delegates)
What went down?
Unfortunately for one candidate, their chances of winning the primary process. Bernie Sanders took another huge hit tonight and its likely that this signals the beginning of the end of his campaign. Biden was expected to win in Mississippi, a state with an overwhelmingly large African-American voter base, but he was not meant to win Michigan, or push Sanders as close as he has done in Washington state (which has not been fully declared, but looks like it will be a tie in terms of delegates, probably with a 1-2% Biden popular vote victory). Biden’s campaign is well and truly revitalised. If he can begin to raise money at the levels Bernie Sanders is doing, he will pretty much secure the nomination in the next couple of months. For Sanders, it’s another case of trying to urge his voter base, the young and the Latino/Hispanic minorities, to come out in larger waves than Biden is getting the white and the African-American voters out.
Welcome to the seventh chapter of my U.S. Elections series. I decided to start this series of posts based on conversations I’ve had with people, who realise that U.S. elections are important, but can’t get their heads around what’s going on. They’re right to be confused, the U.S. election process is nothing like the British one, and so I thought I would help them out with a series of information pieces as the election process goes on. This piece is dedicated to explaining Super Tuesday, where up to fourteen states vote at once.
It’s here at last, the big prize that all the Democratic candidates are chasing. What makes this particular Tuesday so super I hear you ask? Well, whereas we’ve been seeing states one at a time over the past four weeks, March 3rd will see fourteen states voting at the same time, for a total prize of 1,344 pledged delegates. In context, only 150 or so delegates have been decided so far.
There are a couple of things to remember about Super Tuesday. As with the other states, Democratic delegates are won proportionally. There’s been a lot of talk that Bernie Sanders could run away with the nomination on Super Tuesday because he’s polling very well in California (494 delegates) and Texas (261 delegates). But these delegates are not winner-takes-all and will likely be divided between two or three candidates. Candidates will also need 15% of the vote in a Super Tuesday state to be able to win any delegates, as has always been the case, but it’s an important point to remember nonetheless.
Also, bear in mind that some of the Super Tuesday states, namely California and Texas, employed early voting for this election cycle. This means that a significant proportion of people will already have voted, and so the bump that Joe Biden expects to gain from South Carolina might be tempered by the fact that some of the population have already voted and missed that Biden victory. Following the huge news that Mayor Pete Buttigieg has now dropped out of the race, Joe Biden will be looking to solidify the centrist, moderate lane as his own, though he still faces competition from Mike Bloomberg. Amy Klobuchar has now also dropped out.
Republicans will also be hosting a Super Tuesday, in all the same states apart from Virginia.
Key facts about Super Tuesday
Date: March 3rd 2020
Location of the states
Democratic delegates up for grabs: 1,344 (plus 244 superdelegates)
Democratic winner by state
Democratic Super Tuesday results by state – California has been called since this graphic was produced and was won by Sanders (BBC)
Democratic winner overall: Joe Biden (573 of the 1,344 delegates available; 10 out of the 14 states)
Republican Super Tuesday
Republican delegates up for grabs: 785
Republican winners: Donald Trump (all 785 delegates)
Go on then, get those results into a couple of paragraphs!
That’s going to be a tough shot! Joe Biden was a surprise winner on Super Tuesday, having freely admitted that most thought his campaign was dead and buried before South Carolina last weekend. However, Biden was able to win over the voters who only made up their minds in the “last few days” according to most CNN exit polls, which to my mind shows that a lot more Democrats were waiting for Biden to prove himself before committing their vote to him. The South Carolina victory will be the perfect tonic to voters who were unsure about Biden before, especially having seen such poor performances in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Biden has now taken the lead in the running delegate total.
A disappointing night for Bernie Sanders though. He was polling very well in Texas, Minnesota, Maine and Massachusetts, all of which he came in second (well over the 15% threshold required to win delegates) but did not win in the end. There will inevitably be some questions about why Sanders did not win states such as Texas, with a high Latino population, and Minnesota and Massachusetts, both northern states that should have favoured him. It appears that Biden supporters are energised after South Carolina (and undoubtedly even more so not) and the only way for Bernie to continue to pick up states will be to see his voters energised to the same, or higher levels. Game on.
Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren both had very disappointing nights. Bloomberg spent well over $200m on Super Tuesday TV adverts, yet won no states at all. In fact, Bloomberg didn’t even finish second anywhere. He pretty quickly dropped out of the race after realising that money alone was not going to get him to the presidency. Elizabeth Warren suffered badly too, losing her own state of Massachusetts – not only losing, but finishing third behind Sanders and Biden – as well as performing badly across the rest of the map; she also didn’t pick up a single victory and dropped out two days after Super Tuesday.
Welcome to the sixth chapter of my U.S. Elections series. I decided to start this series of posts based on conversations I’ve had with people, who realise that U.S. elections are important, but can’t get their heads around what’s going on. They’re right to be confused, the U.S. election process is nothing like the British one, and so I thought I would help them out with a series of information pieces as the election process goes on. This piece is dedicated to explaining the South Carolina primary.
Well, there are no more caucuses any more! That’s something, right? From here on, all the votes in this campaign will be cast in the good old cross-in-a-box style. Attention turns to the south-east coast of the United States, to the crucially important state of South Carolina.
South Carolina is so important because almost a quarter of the state is made up of African-American voters. This group is a core Democratic base of voters, and will need to be won over by any Democratic candidate in their campaign against Donald Trump in a general election. Joe Biden, who so far has not had the kind of primary campaign he would have liked, needs to win South Carolina, and is well-backed to do so according to most polls.
If Bernie Sanders can do well (and by do well I mean restrict Joe Biden to a single-digit victory, or perhaps even win outright) in South Carolina, that will send a formidable message to the rest of the pack. He has already won a state with a significant amount of white voters, and he has already won a state with a significant amount of Latino voters. Add a state with a significant amount of black voters to that list and Sanders starts to look like a truly unstoppable candidate.
It will also be a big night for candidates Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar, all of whom are polling in the single digits in terms of African-American support. This would need to change significantly to make any of these candidates viable in a national general election.
Key facts about the South Carolina primary
Date: 29th February 2020
Location of the state
Democratic delegates up for grabs: 54 (plus 9 superdelegates)
Democratic winners: Joe Biden (36 of the 54 pledged delegates)
Only the Democrats are hosting a primary on 29th February in South Carolina. There are no Republican primaries on this day.
Results please!
A huge victory for Joe Biden, both in terms of the margin (48% vs 19% to Bernie Sanders) and its importance (Biden’s first win at a very important time). The former Vice-President took almost half the entire vote himself. American media likes to call this kind of victory a ‘blowout’, and in this instance they’re not wrong, take a look at the graphic below and you’ll see Biden won every single county in the state.
Bernie Sanders will be disappointed that he couldn’t push Joe Biden to a closer margin of victory, but I think Sanders would concede, perhaps only in private, that he was never likely to win this state while Joe Biden was still in the race – Biden has a special connection to African-American voters that Sanders (and indeed the other candidates) just don’t have. Sanders might be worried that he only took 17% of the African-American vote, however. That won’t be enough come general election time.
Tom Steyer also dropped out of the race last night.
Welcome to the fifth chapter of my U.S. Elections series. I decided to start this series of posts based on conversations I’ve had with people, who realise that U.S. elections are important, but can’t get their heads around what’s going on. They’re right to be confused, the U.S. election process is nothing like the British one, and so I thought I would help them out with a series of information pieces as the election process goes on. This piece is dedicated to explaining the Nevada caucus.
Oh, the joy of another caucus! Fortunately this is the last one, but Nevada has also stuck to the caucus method of choosing its nominee. Nevada is a critical state, arguably the most important state so far. This is because it is the first state where minority voters make up a sizeable portion of the electorate. Both Iowa and New Hampshire are heavily white states, whereas Nevada is home to a lot of Latino and African-American voters. These voters tend to back Democratic “establishment” candidates, and when you combine this with the fact that Joe Biden is already way back in the delegate totals, this could be make-or-break for the former Vice President. Bernie Sanders will need to win these kind of states to prove he can unify Democrats of all ethnicities and win wide party support.
Key facts about the Nevada caucuses
Date: 22nd February 2020
Location of the state:
Number of Democratic delegates up for grabs: 36 (plus 12 superdelegates)
Number of Republican delegates up for grabs: Caucus cancelled in support of President Trump’s re-election bid
Democratic winner: Although less than half of the results are in so far, Bernie Sanders has already been declared the winner by almost all media outlets. There are no delegate totals yet though.
Republican winner: N/A
So what happened?
This is a huge victory for Bernie Sanders. He lost Nevada 47-52 to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but with around 49% of the caucus results verified, Sanders is at almost half the entire vote. This will go a long way to demonstrate that Sanders is able to win over the kinds of voters that he will need to carry in the general election, should he become the nominee.
For Joe Biden, in second place with roughly 20% of the vote, there will be some relief, but not much. South Carolina now becomes a potentially campaign-ending state for Biden. If Sanders wins South Carolina on the 29th February, Biden’s campaign is almost certainly doomed.
Nevada caucus results (Washington Post)
Pete Buttigieg came third, having been extremely competitive in both Iowa and New Hampshire. This is not really a shock; Mayor Pete is really struggling with persuading minority voters to back him – several polls have shown that Buttigieg has around 1% of African-American support nationwide. This will need to change rapidly for Pete to stand any chance of significantly uniting the party if he is the nominee against President Trump.
Welcome to the fourth chapter of my U.S. Elections series. I decided to start this series of posts based on conversations I’ve had with people, who realise that U.S. elections are important, but can’t get their heads around what’s going on. They’re right to be confused, the U.S. election process is nothing like the British one, and so I thought I would help them out with a series of information pieces as the election process goes on. This piece is dedicated to explaining the New Hampshire primary.
After the debacle that was Iowa, you’ll be pleased to know that New Hampshire should be a much more straightforward process. We return to the simple, one-person, one-cross-in-a-box style of voting most of us are so used to. New Hampshire is always the first state to have its primary (Iowa being the first state to have the caucus), and is famously unpredictable. A Northeastern state with a sizeable moderate population, polls have suggested that Bernie Sanders is favourite here, but that’s what they predicated in Iowa too…
Who can vote in the New Hampshire primary is also different to Iowa. New Hampshire is home to a lot of independents, that is, people who are not registered to either main political party. Both the Democratic and Republican primaries in New Hampshire are semi-open, which means registered Democrats and independents can vote in the Democratic primary, and registered Republicans and independents can vote in the Republican primary. The only rule is that registered party members cannot vote in the opposite party’s primary.
Key facts about the New Hampshire primary
Date: 11th February 2020
Location of the state:
Number of Democratic delegates up for grabs: 24 (plus 9 superdelegates)
Number of Republican delegates up for grabs: 22
Democratic winner: Bernie Sanders by percentage of vote, tie between Sanders and Pete Buttigieg for delegates (Sanders: 25.6%, 9 delegrates, Buttigieg: 24.3%, 9 delegates)
Republican winner: Donald Trump (all 22 delegates)
Breaking down the Democratic results
The New Hampshire Democratic primary results by county (Washington Post)
This was a state that Bernie Sanders won convincingly in 2016, with 61% of the vote. This result was much, much closer, with a 1.6% margin for Sanders. However, in 2016, Bernie Sanders had only one serious opponent, and that opponent just happened to be the woman who went on to win the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton. This time around, Sanders still has, in my opinion, four viable opponents with another set to join at the Nevada caucuses.
Much has been made of the “surprising” margin of victory, but if you really scrutinise the current Democratic race, surprise is hardly the word I would use. Pete Buttigieg, who finished second, has seen a surge of support since his “victory” in Iowa (although a recanvass is underway in that state, which is why I still refuse to call that race yet). New Hampshire, as I said above, is a notoriously mixed state, favouring both moderates and progressives at the same time. In the end, it should not be a surprise that the leading moderate (Buttigieg) and the leading progressive (Sanders) both did very well in the state.
In Verbo Scriptum 