KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— There are mixed signals from Bernie Sanders’ narrow victory in New Hampshire, but for now he’s supplanted Joe Biden as a weak frontrunner for the nomination.

— Overall, though, the race remains very uncertain as the scene shifts to the more diverse states of Nevada and South Carolina.

— Center-left candidates got substantially more support than progressive ones in New Hampshire, but the center-left vote split in such a way that Sanders was able to win. Pete Buttigieg has slightly more delegates so far, though.

Sanders now a weak frontrunner

In the wake of his victory in the New Hampshire primary, Bernie Sanders seemed to some like an unstoppable frontrunner. To others, he seemed like a spent force. That there is evidence backing up both arguments is a testament to the uncertainty of the Democratic race following the first-in-the-nation primary.

The argument for Sanders is not only that he won New Hampshire, but also that the person who seemed throughout 2019 like the biggest obstacle to him winning the nomination — Joe Biden — sputtered to a pitiful fifth-place finish, failing to crack double digits. Sanders’ other seeming top rival, Elizabeth Warren, is arguably in even worse shape than Biden: At least Biden can try to make last stands in more diverse Nevada and particularly South Carolina, where he hopes that the state’s majority African-American electorate can resuscitate his flagging campaign. Warren has no such redoubt: Iowa and New Hampshire could or should have been good states for her; she did OK in the former, and terribly in the latter.

Meanwhile, Pete Buttigieg probably would have won both Iowa — which he narrowly carried in terms of delegates over Sanders despite Sanders receiving more votes — and New Hampshire had Amy Klobuchar thrown in the towel after her mediocre fifth-place finish in the Hawkeye State. Instead, Klobuchar used a strong debate performance Friday night as a springboard into a solid third place in New Hampshire, finishing closer to Sanders and Buttigieg in first and second than to Warren and Biden in fourth and fifth.

Here again, Sanders benefits from this alignment of rivals: While Sanders has not demonstrated widespread appeal to African Americans — a backbone demographic of the Democratic Party that has not really been heard from yet — Buttigieg and Klobuchar are significantly weaker among black voters than Sanders is, at least right now. Sanders was threatened by a candidate who could dominate the black vote against him. Biden might’ve been that candidate, and hypothetically still could be, but it seems likelier now that the black vote might splinter, which probably helps Sanders.

As Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossmann argued Tuesday night, “Bernie won & both his main national competitor (Biden) & his ideological faction competitor (Warren) lost badly. But field remains too muddled for him to see full assault. All good for Bernie.”

Note, though, that the pro-Sanders argument we just made above largely focuses on the challenges of his rivals, as opposed to his own performance.

While it’s unfair to Sanders to measure him by his 60% vote share in a head-to-head race in New Hampshire against Hillary Clinton, his 26% plurality in a much larger field put him a few points behind his pre-election polling average in New Hampshire, and this was less than half his share from four years ago. He turned in this weak performance even as Warren sank, meaning that Warren’s former support probably split among several other candidates as opposed to flowing mainly to her colleague, Sanders, on the leftward edge of the Democratic Senate caucus. So if Warren were to drop out, we can’t assume Sanders would disproportionately benefit. Sanders did great among younger voters and liberals, but not necessarily with other kinds of voters.

While turnout was up from 2016, the demographics of the turnout were not really favorable to Sanders, calling into question his claims that he can expand the electorate in his favor in both a primary and general election setting. And, as Grossmann added at the end of the tweet quoted above, “media coverage does not seem likely to help him bounce or expand his coalition.”

It makes some sense to compare this race to the 2016 GOP contest, at least in the sense that both featured large fields and a New Hampshire primary winner who party elites didn’t really like (Donald Trump and now Sanders).

Trump got 35% in New Hampshire four years ago, finishing about 20 points ahead of second-place finisher John Kasich. Sanders’ win was much more of a nail-biter, and he only got 26% of the vote, a historically weak showing for a Granite State primary winner. Trump benefited from GOP nominating rules in 2016 that made it easier for plurality winners to accumulate delegates earlier in the process. For instance, Trump followed up his New Hampshire win by taking 32% in South Carolina, but he won 100% of the state’s delegates while doing so.

The uniform Democratic rules, which require at least 15% support to be included in a proportional allocation, can distribute the delegates much more evenly. Sanders tied with Buttigieg in delegates in New Hampshire, and the upstart former South Bend, Indiana mayor actually leads the veteran senator by two in the overall delegate count (granted, there is a long time to go — the two lead-off states, combined, awarded only about 1.5% of the total pledged delegates available). There is more below as we update our UVA Center for Politics/Decision Desk HQ delegate tracker.

Biden clearly took a hit in Iowa, and New Hampshire only exacerbated his problems. National polling, where Biden has almost always led, has moved against him, and Sanders has taken the top spot. Michael Bloomberg, powered by his eye-popping television advertising, has seemed to benefit more from Biden’s fall.

Friend of the Crystal Ball Chaz Nuttycombe noted Wednesday morning that, over the last month, Bloomberg is up 7.5 points in the FiveThirtyEight national polling average, while Biden is down that same exact total, 7.5 points. The field is so fractured and fluid that it would be wrong to suggest Bloomberg is siphoning all his newfound support from former Biden supporters, but it’s also not a total coincidence, particularly as one notes the growth of Bloomberg among black voters in polling crosstabs while Biden slips among that same demographic. Honestly, it may be that the current numbers are catching Biden only in the midst of an ongoing freefall.

Politico’s Natasha Korecki, Marc Caputo, and Maya King reported a telling quote from Quentin James, who runs a PAC that backs black candidates: “Black voters are starting to leave him now. … A big reason lots of black voters were with Biden is they thought he was the best person to beat Trump. And they thought one reason for that is that he had the support of white voters. Now they see he has done so poorly with white voters and he no longer looks like the electability candidate.” Or, as Theodore Johnson, an expert on black voting patterns, put it, “For a bloc whose top priority is defeating the president, electoral pragmatism necessarily rules the day.”

Black voters may have been attracted to Biden out of pragmatism; could they move in sizable numbers to Bloomberg, Buttigieg, or Klobuchar out of that same kind of pragmatism, rooted in a belief held by at least some Democrats that Sanders is too left-wing to win a national general election? Potentially. The possibility of a single candidate winning a significant share of the black vote against Sanders has always seemed like a major threat to his nomination, and it remains a threat — just a diminished one thanks to the diminished standing of Biden.

How does one sort this out? Sanders has replaced Biden as the race’s weak frontrunner, and certainly Biden is nowhere near being a frontrunner. Sanders can bolster his case with a strong showing in the next contest, Nevada, nine days from now. We are flying blind into Nevada, a caucus state where there is no fresh polling as of this writing. Our best guess is that Sanders would win it if the caucus were held today but, as we’ve seen, this is a fluid race.

There will be another debate, next Wednesday, and Bloomberg may be on the stage. He probably would prefer not to be given his strategy of carpet-bombing the airwaves while fending off increasingly negative coverage, including widespread reporting of comments he made defending the New York City police’s “stop and frisk” policy that struck many as racist. Given how Klobuchar surged following last Friday’s New Hampshire debate, the other candidates perhaps can hold out hope that they can benefit from the next encounter. New Hampshire winnowed the field a little — Andrew Yang, Deval Patrick, and Michael Bennet ended their campaigns — but not substantially (only Yang, who acquitted himself well as a newcomer candidate, had any measurable level of support). We’ll also have to see whether Tom Steyer enters the mix now; he hardly registered in either Iowa or New Hampshire, but he has polled decently in Nevada and South Carolina.

For Sanders, the more viable candidates remain, the better his position. New Hampshire did not demonstrate his ability to win a wide breadth of support, but no one else can demonstrate such support either. In a race where everyone seems to have a ceiling, it helps to have a high floor, which Sanders does appear to possess.

Before the voting started, Biden appeared to benefit from split opposition. That description now fits Sanders. He seems better-positioned than the others, but not overwhelmingly so.

New Hampshire: A closer look

Throughout much of the night, Sanders retained a slim lead, which Buttigieg came tantalizingly close to surmounting. Perhaps not surprisingly, Sanders tended to run best in the rural counties that touch his home state of Vermont; he carried all but a handful of towns bordering Vermont. His best county in 2016, Cheshire — the southwestern corner of the state — again gave him the highest share of any county.

Despite New Hampshire’s proximity to her own home state, Warren didn’t perform especially well with the voters that would presumably be most familiar with her. In fact, the opposite was true — across the 18 Granite State towns that border Massachusetts, she took just 8%, a tick under her statewide share. Instead, much of the Greater Boston towns acted as a base for Buttigieg (Map 1).

Map 1: 2020 New Hampshire Democratic primary by town

Map 2: 2020 New Hampshire Democratic primary, second place

Political distinctions among voters who do and do not have a degree have become highly salient. White voters without a degree powered Donald Trump in both the 2016 Republican primary and general election, although he pushed away some white degree-holders in the process. On the Democratic side, the non-college vs. college distinction has also been salient, particularly because the electorates in both Iowa and New Hampshire have both been roughly evenly divided between voters who do have degrees and those who do not. That’s according to the Associated Press/Fox News VoteCast, which is essentially an alternative to the exit polls that other news agencies conduct in conjunction with each other. Table 1 shows the Iowa and New Hampshire VoteCast results based on whether respondents did or did not have a degree. As polling throughout 2019 suggested, Bernie Sanders was stronger with voters who don’t have a degree. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar are stronger with those who do. That seemed to be the case with Pete Buttigieg too, but his level of support among these two groups was basically the same in New Hampshire.

Table 1: IA/NH college vs. non-college preferences among top five candidates

The results in the 20 most highly-educated towns bears this out. Note that Buttigieg ran just a tiny bit ahead of his statewide share in these locales, while Klobuchar ran a little ahead and Sanders a little behind. This is based on the most recent U.S. American Community Survey estimates of four-year college attainment. Statewide, 36% had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 63% in this group.

Table 2: New Hampshire primary results in 20 best-educated towns

Hanover, which houses Dartmouth College, is the most highly-educated municipality in the state — 81% of its residents over 25 years old hold a college degree. Buttigieg carried this Ivy League area but Sanders tended to dominate in towns that house public universities. As the youth vote is a valuable demographic to Democratic candidates, the contrast — or, perhaps, accord — between public and private colleges could be a persistent hallmark in other state primaries this season.

Strong turnout on both sides

After a disappointing turnout in Iowa, Democrats beat the high-turnout 2008 Democratic primary in terms of raw votes cast (about 300,000), although that might not be quite as impressive as it seems once one takes population growth into account. Still, those looking at turnout as a sign of overall Democratic engagement — we’re honestly not sure whether it has any predictive value for November — had to be more heartened by voter participation in this contest than in Iowa.

By the way, Donald Trump was also running in the New Hampshire Republican primary. He got 84% of the vote, which is a pretty good showing even for a shoo-in nominee (his performance was on the higher end of the range enjoyed by the last four reelected presidents: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama). Polling has consistently shown Trump with very solid support from his own party, and the results from Iowa and New Hampshire reinforce the polling. Additionally, Trump got significantly more than double the vote of Bush in 2004 or Obama in 2012 (about 130,000 votes). So Republicans could point to strong engagement on Trump’s behalf as well.

Split opposition facilitates Sanders plurality

Going into the primary, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Biden were competing for supremacy of the “moderate” lane while Sanders and Warren tailored their campaigns to more progressive-minded voters. Though Sanders ultimately prevailed, with 26%, in this very fractured field, 53% of Tuesday’s vote went to more center-left candidates, compared to 35% for the main progressive candidates (Map 3). If establishment elements within the Democratic Party are hoping to preclude Sanders’ potential pathway to the nomination, this is a sharp reminder that they must better unify their efforts behind a single candidate.

Map 3: Aggregate center-left vs. progressive vote share in New Hampshire

The delegate math

For nearly a week after the conclusion of the Iowa caucuses, we held off on counting IA national delegates due to the slow tabulation and identified errors. The Iowa Democratic Party put out final numbers — pending a partial recanvass — for the caucuses, including official national delegate counts. As a result, we updated our 2020 delegate count for the first time, confirming those numbers barring changes to the underlying SDEs in a recanvass. We also have a delegate count for New Hampshire, and full New Hampshire results can be found at results.decisiondeskhq.com.

While Bernie Sanders won the most first and final alignment votes in Iowa, national delegates are awarded based off of state delegate-equivalents, which does not necessarily align with the former two vote measures. Pending recanvassing, Pete Buttigieg has narrowly beaten Bernie Sanders in SDEs, 364.3 to 361.5. As a result, he gains a small edge in statewide delegates. Buttigieg did especially well in CD3, while CD2 was Sanders’ best district. Klobuchar gained one delegate as a result of her performance in CD4, the only location where she cracked the 15% threshold.

Table 3: Current Iowa delegate allocation

Table 4: New Hampshire delegate allocation

Of parties, presidential politics, and the quadrennial orgy

Imagine that a convention of clowns met to design an amusing, crazy-quilt schedule to nominate presidential candidates. The resulting system would probably look much as ours does today. The incoherent organization of primaries and caucuses, and the candidates’ mad-dash attempts to move around the map, would be funny if the goal — electing the leader of the free world — weren’t so serious.

Few want to go back to the bad old days when party “bosses” chose presidential candidates in smoke-filled rooms. Primaries and caucuses are now fundamental to our conception of popular democracy in presidential selection. But there is such a thing as ineffective popular democracy, especially when it is hopelessly disorganized.

A good-size piece of the problem can be labeled “Iowa and New Hampshire.” These two states seem to assume that the Constitution guarantees that they should go first, but a close reading of the text finds no such clause. The New Hampshire lead-off primary was initiated in 1920, and it has arguably been very influential since 1952, when it played a role in both the decision of President Truman not to seek reelection and Dwight Eisenhower’s successful quest for the GOP nomination. New Hampshire reprised its 1952 incumbent-toppling when Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy came within a few percentage points of President Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primary, leading in part to LBJ’s decision shortly thereafter not to seek another term. The Iowa caucus has only played a role since 1968, and its true national debut came in 1972, when George McGovern scored well there on his way to a surprise, ill-fated Democratic nomination. Just four years later, the Iowa caucus propelled a little-known former Georgia governor, Jimmy Carter, to the Democratic nomination and the presidency, assisted also by Carter’s subsequent narrow victory in New Hampshire. In both the Hawkeye and Granite states, Carter received less than 30% of the votes, but in a crowded Democratic field of candidates, this low percentage was enough to prevail.

Why should two small, heavily white, disproportionately rural states have a hammerlock on the making of the president? The truth is that Iowa and New Hampshire have a franchise they are determined to keep at all costs. New Hampshire even has a law that requires its secretary of state to do whatever is necessary to keep its primary first.

Without a constitutional requirement, there is simply no solution to a situation that deteriorates every four years. Try as they might, the national party committees cannot orchestrate a fix. In the end, they can only punish a recalcitrant Iowa and New Hampshire in minor ways, by cutting the size of their convention delegations or giving the delegates bad hotels and seating at the party conclaves. The candidates who campaign in states holding contests earlier than permitted can also be penalized by having the national parties deny them any delegates they may win in those states. But a handful of lost delegates is trivial compared to the whirlwind of positive publicity secured by victory in early states. These penalties, light as they are, may not even materialize. By the time of the national conventions, the parties are unlikely to want to alienate swing states such as Iowa and New Hampshire as the general election campaign begins. Nor will the parties want to aggravate their candidates by penalizing them at a time when they are attempting to fully unify their forces at the convention.

Congress has some power to intervene in the state-based, party-centered nominating process, yet the federal legislature would be highly unlikely to step into that briar patch. Presidential nominating reform has never been a priority for Congress, in part because of the traditional rights of the states and the parties to organize this sector of politics. It is highly doubtful that Congress will generate the will to clean up the nomination mess anytime soon. For one thing, the senators and representatives from Iowa and New Hampshire would be willing to do anything to stop congressionally sponsored reform, quite possibly with assistance from colleagues who would see their own presidential ambitions at stake. A senator who becomes a hero in Iowa and New Hampshire for saving the caucus and primary would be halfway to a presidential nomination! And realizing this, most or all of the senators with presidential aspirations would jump to back the Iowa/New Hampshire status quo. (It’s a rare ambitious senator who doesn’t get up in the morning and see a president in the mirror.)

Thus, the only possible, comprehensive answer is likely to be a constitutional one. In the 21st century we the people need to do what the founders didn’t even perceive as necessary in their pre-party, pre-popular-democracy age. The guiding principle should be one that all citizens, in theory, can readily embrace: Every state and region ought to have essentially an equal chance, over time, to influence the outcome of the parties’ presidential nominations, and thus the selection of presidents. We are one nation, and simple equity demands that all of us, regardless of our state of residence, should have the opportunity at some point to influence the selection of presidential nominees by filling one of the precious, early voting slots.

The nominating process ought also to be moved back into the four months leading up to the party conventions. Presidential politics now takes fully one fourth of a president’s four-year term — whether he is running for reelection or not — and with front-loading accelerating, it soon may consume even more of it. Not only is this bad for the presidency as an institution, but it causes the electorate to tire of the never-ending political campaign. It should be possible to create a system that flows from the first primaries and caucuses beginning in March or April directly into August party conventions, and then into the Labor Day kickoff for the autumn general election. Not only is this not rocket science; it doesn’t even qualify as elementary mathematics. It is easy, if the will and the means are present. The electorate must supply the will, and the Constitution should outline the means.

There have been dozens of proposals to revamp the primary scheme, though none has been offered as a constitutional fix. Clearly, that is both because the Constitution currently ignores the politics of the system almost entirely and because a constitutional insertion — virtually written in stone — would have to be as fair and foolproof as possible. The following plan, the product of much discussion and thought, is proposed in that spirit.

The regional lottery plan for the new Constitution

The Congress should be constitutionally required to designate four regions of contiguous states (with contiguity waived for Alaska and Hawaii, and any other stray territories that may one day become states). The regions would surely look something like the ones in Map 1, with natural boundaries denoting the Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. All of the states in each region would hold their nominating events in successive months, beginning in April and ending in July. The two major-party conventions would follow in August. This schedule, all by itself, would cut a couple of months off the too-long process currently prevailing in presidential years.

Map 1: National regions for hypothetical primary system

But how would the order of the regions be determined? In many cases, there would still be a bonus in going first. The establishment of a U.S. Election Lottery, to be held on New Year’s Day of the presidential election year, would yield fairness and also add an element of drama to the beginning of a presidential year. One of the nation’s famous lottery machines with the popup ping-pong balls would finally find a purpose beyond bestowing untold riches on people who can’t handle it. Four color-coded balls, each representing one of the regions, would be loaded into the machine, and in short order — the length of a 10-second lottery TV drawing — the regional primary order would be set. Since none of the candidates would know in advance where the political season would begin, part of the permanent presidential campaign would be dismantled. After all, even a very wealthy candidate wouldn’t waste the money necessary to organize all 50 states in advance, and the four-year-long homesteading in Iowa and New Hampshire would be gone forever (a note from the perspective of 2020 — OK, maybe Michael Bloomberg would or could). Much more important, the “law” of averages would give every state and each region, over time, the precious opportunity of going first. Clearly, there is no guarantee that a particularly lucky region would not be repeatedly chosen to start the process, but the equal-access principle is key to the fairness in this plan. These new constitutional provisions would “repeal” the nonexistent constitutional right to go first that Iowa and New Hampshire have appropriated for themselves.

Another benefit of the Regional Lottery Plan would be the reasonable spacing between contests, allowing candidates potentially to recover from setbacks in one region and to regroup prior to the next set of contests. The news media and voters in each region would certainly be on the same page on this critical matter, demanding their fair share of attention.

One additional facet should be added to the plan in order to enhance its effectiveness. The best argument made for Iowa and New Hampshire is that their small populations allow for highly personalized campaigning. The candidates are able to meet individual citizens for lengthy and sometimes repeated conversations about the issues, and these voters are able to size up potential presidents at eye level, without the candidates having the protection of the usual large retinue of image makers and staffers. In that sense, lightly populated states can serve as a useful screening committee for the rest of us. The United States is a continental country, after all, and each large region is still enormous in size.

There is a way to combine the advantages of small-state scrutiny of candidates with the inherent fairness of round-robin regional primaries. We can achieve the best of both worlds by adding a second lottery on Jan. 1. The names of all states with four or fewer members in the U.S. House of Representatives (at present, 21 states) would be placed in a lottery machine, and two balls would be selected. This plan excludes the island territories, which are far-flung and don’t influence the November presidential outcome because they have no electoral votes. The District of Columbia should be included, however, and this would mean 22 jurisdictions would have a chance to be selected in the second lottery. With a larger population than Wyoming, and with three electoral votes assigned in November, the District’s citizens — currently and shamefully without full voting representation in either house of Congress — would no doubt relish and deserve this opportunity, should Lady Luck in the lottery deliver it to them.

The two small states (or D.C.) with relatively low populations would lead off the regional contests, and they would be held on or about March 15 — at least two full weeks before the initial contests would begin in the first region. These two states would be free to stage a primary or a caucus, and the candidates would be free to participate in none, one, or both. As a practical matter, most candidates would choose both, unless a prominent candidate hailed from one of the lead-off states. Traditionally, a home candidate gets deference and is sometimes unopposed for the state’s delegate votes. Of course, the other party can still have a full-fledged fight in the state’s primary or caucus.

No doubt, all the candidates would rush to these lead-off states right after the lottery on January 1, and they would have two and a half months to campaign. But there would be no permanent, four-year campaigns there, and personalized, one-to-one campaigning would be a large part of the effort. In other words, the two states would offer all the advantages of Iowa and New Hampshire, without having to always be Iowa and New Hampshire. Additionally, the guarantee of at least two weeks of decompression after the leadoff states make their choices gives voters in the first region a chance to evaluate the results and reevaluate the winners — and possibly to make different choices.

In sum, the Regional Lottery Plan would achieve many good things simultaneously for a selection process that currently makes little sense. The election campaign would be shortened and focused, a relief to both candidates and voters. All regions and states would get an opportunity to have a substantial impact on the making of the presidential nominees. A rational, nicely arranged schedule would build excitement and citizen involvement in every corner of the country, without sacrificing the personalized scrutiny of candidates for which Iowa and New Hampshire have become justly known. And all of this can only come about by putting the politics of nominations and elections in its proper place — the United States Constitution.

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