The Right Orange: February 2016

New Hampshire Democratic Primary 2016 Predictions

Every single NH poll since before the Iowa caucuses has put Bernie Sanders ahead of Hillary Clinton by leads of 20 points or more. I predict that Bernie Sanders will beat Hillary Clinton tomorrow night, but I think it will only be by a 10 point margin or less. Polls tend to create stories of major leads that don't exist, and I feel like this race will have the same result. Despite critics saying Hillary Clinton should skip New Hampshire completely due to the major lead Sanders has in the state, she has stayed in the state and trying to eat away at his lead the best she can. I think that she will eat away at his lead, but not by too much because Bernie is extremely popular in the state that neighbors his home state of Vermont.

New Hampshire Republican Primary 2016 Predictions

For this contest, I will go by candidate since it is the easiest way to go.

Jeb Bush

Jeb Bush's entire campaign has put its trust on the voters of the Granite State. If he does not do well in the state, he might as well drop out of the race completely. Personally, I feel like he is slowly becoming an afterthought, and a poor performance in the state will all but finish his chances of becoming President. The famous "Please clap." meme isn't helping, either. My prediction for Bush #3 is that the establishment race will be won by Rubio and the remaining establishment candidates (Bush, Christie, and Kasich) will be really close in the rankings. Unless Marco Rubio completely blows the other candidates out of the water, expect Bush to stay in the race with the help of his SuperPAC, Right to Rise.

Ben Carson

Carson is an afterthought in this state. During my New Hampshire trip, he did not visit the state at all. He had spent all of his time in Iowa to protect the decent numbers that he would eventually get in the Hawkeye State. I expect Carson to do horribly in NH, but I expect him to wait until South Carolina before dropping out of the race completely to see if this primary can revive his flailing campaign.

Chris Christie

As said earlier, expect a fight between Christie, Bush, and Kasich behind Rubio. I expect the New Jersey governor to do better here than he did in Iowa, but if he does poorly in this state, he will drop out tomorrow night or soon after.

Ted Cruz

Again, I am not saying Ted Cruz will do decently well because I am a supporter of his, but I believe he will beat expectations in the state. Being a volunteer of Cruz's New Hampshire efforts, I believe that Cruz has one of the best ground games of the entire campaign; the campaign headquarters is always busy doing something to spread Ted Cruz's message. However, I am unsure if the Carson/Cruz controversy in Iowa will hurt his chances in the Granite State. I know for a fact that his NH staffers would never do what his campaign did in Iowa, but the damage might already be done. I expect Cruz to possibly get second or third place in New Hampshire. If he gets third place, I believe it will be because one of the establishment candidates other than Rubio broke through, not because of Donald Trump. I expect him to do better than what the polls are saying because I expect most of Rand Paul's voters to go to Cruz because he is the most like Paul when it comes to his message of liberty. This will definitely be enough to exceed expectations, but I doubt it will be enough to win the primary altogether because the rest of the electorate favors the establishment candidates such as Rubio, Kasich, Christie, and Bush.

Carly Fiorina

Sadly, I do not see a path for her to win the primary nor the nomination. ABC snubbed her out of the debate right before New Hampshire, and I believe this will have the same effects as Iowa when it came to Trump and him skipping the debate. She will most likely perform poorly in the state and I expect her to drop out tomorrow night or soon after.

Jim Gilmore

The achievement of 12 votes in Iowa was enough to get Jim Gilmore energized for New Hampshire, where he says his campaign will do very well despite not being known by most of the country. I am currently unsure if he will wait until Virginia's primary to drop out, but I fully expect him to get last place in Tuesday's primary. I would not be surprised at all if he decided to end his campaign tomorrow night or soon after, much like Fiorina.

John Kasich

See Christie and Bush. I believe John Kasich has the best chance of being the "breakout" establishment candidate; this is because while I was phone-banking, I got a lot of Kasich supporters, but this could have been by complete chance. I also believe his positive message will resonate with voters better than Christie's and Bush's less positive ones. Even if Kasich performs very poorly, I expect him to stay a little longer until the Ohio primary (March 15th) where he could get a boost in delegates due to his position as the current governor of the state.

Marco Rubio

I believe Marco Rubio has the best chance of winning this primary overall. His impressive third place finish in Iowa created a big boost of momentum. Throughout the past week, Rubio has received many endorsements, including those of Rick Santorum and Tim Scott. Also, Marco Rubio has been able to appeal to young voters who are not already with Ted Cruz or on the other side of the party line with Bernie Sanders. It is unclear if his mediocre debate performance on Saturday hurt his chances of winning, but nevertheless, if Marco Rubio can secure a big win here, it could possibly propel him far enough to win the nomination.

Donald Trump

Just like in Iowa, I do not believe a lot of Trump's voters will actually go out and vote for him. Even though most of the New Hampshire polls have him leading by double digits, I believe that he will end up getting second or third place because he has not done well in the state when it comes to ground game and voter turnout. His phone-banking system calls mostly Bernie supporters and those who do not have a history of voting, and while I was in the state, they did absolutely no door-knocking whatsoever, which is a very important part of a traditional campaign. It is possible that the Trump campaign fixed some of these problems after his horrible performance in Iowa, but I believe it is too late for those changes to make any major impact. If Trump does bad enough in New Hampshire, it could be possible that this could be the end of Trump being a viable candidate, but I don't think he'll drop out anytime soon.

In summation, I have the democratic-socialist winning on the left and the young and moderate conservative with momentum on the right. Because New Hampshire is full of independents that typically wait until the last couple of days to commit to a candidate, anything can change from the moment this post is uploaded to the moment the polls close tomorrow night. Here are my final rankings for New Hampshire's primaries.

Democratic Primary

1. Bernie Sanders

2. Hillary Clinton

Republican Primary

1. Marco Rubio

2. Ted Cruz

3. Donald Trump

4. John Kasich

5. Jeb Bush

6. Chris Christie

7. Ben Carson

8. Carly Fiorina

9. Jim Gilmore

May the best win!

In Liberty,

Jacob Stech '18

I decided to wait a week before I wrote my post-caucus analysis because I wanted to see what the prolonged effects of the Iowa caucuses would be. After the caucuses, four candidates dropped out of the race; while I correctly predicted two of them, the other two came as a complete surprise to me. Also, while I correctly predicted the winner of the Republican caucuses, I was not so lucky when it came to the Democratic caucuses though, which I expected. Here is my analysis below.

For the Republicans, I predicted that Ted Cruz would win Iowa, but I was surprised by how wrong the polls were leading up to the caucuses and how big of a lead Cruz won by. While I predicted that Donald Trump would not be able to rally his supporters to make them come to the caucuses, I was wrong when it came to how bad he would perform because of it; I predicted he would get fourth place while he actually got a very distant second. It is also important to note how well Marco Rubio did even though he finished in third; he outperformed in the state, beating expectation after expectation (including mine), and he almost beat out Trump for second place. Rand Paul under-performed in the state; he was expected to get at least 10,000 votes, but in the end, he only amassed 8,481 votes, which eventually caused him to make a shocking campaign suspension two days later. While I didn't get the order correct after Bush and Fiorina, I did predict correctly that it would be a jumble of non-Rubio establishment candidates and afterthoughts. When the caucuses ended, Mike Huckabee kept his "top three" promise and dropped out of the race. Rick Santorum took a couple days to reevaluate his campaign and decided to end his campaign altogether hours after Rand Paul ended his campaign.

Last Wednesday, Donald Trump started to tweet that Ted Cruz had cheated his way to win the Iowa caucuses because of a CNN report that said Ben Carson was going to take a break after Iowa. Ted Cruz campaign staffers assumed that this meant he was dropping out, so they told their precinct chairs to tell Carson supporters that their candidate was ending the race and to vote for Ted Cruz instead. While I'm sure a few voters switched from Carson to Cruz, I don't believe that this was the reason that he won. I also believe that this was a genuine mistake on both the Carson and Cruz campaigns; the Carson campaign should have waited until after Iowa to announce this unusual change in plans, and the Cruz campaign should have waited to hear more before they made such a big assumption. I do not believe that any of the campaigns will try to challenge the results because of this.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton barely edged out Bernie Sanders by a thin margin of 0.25 points. The race was always expected to be close between these two, but I was not expecting it to be within this close of a margin. I believe this happened because Martin O'Malley's supporters moved to Bernie Sanders after their candidate did not get the 15% to have the viability to keep his votes; this eventually forced O'Malley to suspend his campaign while the votes (delegates) were still being counted. One controversial thing that happened was the fact that a coin toss eventually decided the allocation of state delegates in six precincts because of a tie. I do not agree that this should have been the way to fix this issue, and Bernie Sanders is currently challenging the results because of this, but I do not expect any major changes.

In summation, Ted Cruz won even though he campaigned against ethanol subsidies, Hillary Clinton won by six coin tosses, and this race is still an unusual one. Nine Republicans and two Democrats remain. The New Hampshire primaries are tomorrow, and I will be posting my predictions for both parties' primaries later today.