New Hampshire Primary Thread (polls close at 6-7 CT)

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Merged per request.

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Merged per request.

Can we not have "predict" threads merged with the main thread for results?  I think if there are numbers posted in this thread, they should be results.

Tender requested that he merge his old thread with this one right at the last moment so I complied. I'll re-split of the relevant prediction posts though.

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Can the Van Jones discussion move to another thread, please?

I'll just hide relevant posts since I don't think it was derailed on purpose just gradually over time.

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Sanders's lead is astoundingly stable so far.

Yet his odds are also dropping on the NYT needle.

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Even if Buttigieg does somehow come back and win (not looking likely), how is he going to win the nomination with 0% of black voters and with Sanders dominating among Latinos?

He isn't at least not outright. If Buttigeg pulls this off, this sends the race to pure chaos rather than having Sanders as a solid frontrunner.

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Will Bernie have a Dean moment tonight if he loses?

There's no way in the era of social media for something like that to happen again.

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Culinary Union ready to go HAM against Sanders:

https://twitter.com/meganmesserly/status/1227442725110403077?s=20

Is this the same story from Friday? Haven't looked at it yet.

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I'm glad his victory margin is so underwhelming.

He doesn't have the suburban appeal to beat Trump.

This was the same argument made by Orange County Republicans in why Katie Porter couldn't win.

At the end of the day....people will vote their identity regardless of the nominee or their ideology

I wouldn't say Philly Romney-Clinton voters would safely identify themselves as Democrats though.

Sanders probably would keep most Romney-Clinton voters.  He'd have a huge problem keeping any Trump-2018 Dem voters, though, and he needs them to win the EC. 

I want to expand Democratic gains in the suburbs... the candidates who are best equipped for that, in my opinion, are Klobuchar and Bloomberg.

I don't think candidate quality matters much with how polarizing Trump is. Our politics today are strictly along cultural lines. The same reason why Dems are fading in working class areas are the same reason why Romney-Clinton areas are likely to vote against Trump again.

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So if we divide the current vote into factions...

Joe + Pete + Amy (Moderates): 53%

Bernie + Warren (Progressives): 35%

If it wasn't for the split in the moderate vote, Bernie wouldn't even be competitive.

This is a ridiculous & nonsensical analysis given that a majority of voters in exit polls expressed support for Medicare for all & free college.

I agree that the analysis isn’t a great one, however many people can express support for M4A without actually agreeing with Bernies path to getting there. That explains the drop in support that happens in polling when you mention M4A eliminating private health insurance. Additionally, even if one may support Bernie’s approach to M4A, it does not mean that they support him. My mother, for example, supports Bernie’s M4A, but not his plan for the Green New Deal, Federal jobs guarantee, student loan cancellation, or  free college. She supports the concepts behind all these policies, but not the extreme amount of spending that they require. That’s why she supports Biden. She’s not a super informed voter either, but the “free everything” approach is a big turn off for her.

Yeah, my biggest issue with Bernie's healthcare plan has nothing that he supports universal healthcare (something I've supported for about 15 years or so).  Instead, it's that it completely eliminates private health insurance without giving folks who can afford it and prefer it to public healthcare the option to choose for themselves.  I think everyone (especially the wealthy) should have to pay higher taxes to fund a public option regardless of whether they choose private or public healthcare.  

However, the idea of depriving folks who can afford a higher quality private healthcare plan of the right to choose that over a government plan is a non-starter for me and the only reason it doesn't make me a diehard #NeverBernie voter in the primary season is because there's no way he'd ever be able to get such a thing through Congress.  If a hypothetical President Sanders tried to do so, I'd certainly call and write every Democratic representative from my state to express my opposition to the proposal, as well as seriously consider donating to anyone with a real shot at successfully primarying any congressional Democrat who voted for it.  

Side note: Pete's line about how the meaning of M4A has changed is actually pretty spot on.  It used to be that people used it as a stand in for universal healthcare and recognized that there were tons of ways to potentially achieve that goal.  However, now many folks thing M4A means "eliminate all private healthcare and replace it with a mandatory government program" (i.e. the average person's perception of Bernie's healthcare plan).  As such, there's nothing inconsistent about having supported M4A four years ago and opposing what it has come to mean.  In fact, many Democrats have done just that.

My views on M4A almost verbatim.

Ditto under the condition that enrolling in a government run health plan would have little out of pocket costs. I don't want a two tiered health care system with a government plan becoming more of a high risk pool than it already is.

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So, so far, out of two states Sanders was supposed to win, he's come second in one, but sort of, but not really, but actually; and won the other with an underwhelming margin to say the least. Even if being the only candidate to compete for every state (Biden hasn't yet, Klobuchar and Buttigieg almost certainly won't) means he ends up with a plurality of delegates, surely his path to the nomination is incredibly narrow, if it even still exists?

The takeaway right now is that 538's model has 'Nobody getting 50%+1 delegates' at 33% outcome right now. I tend to think that vastly understating the potential. If this was the GOP side with WTA, then Sanders would 100% be the prospective nominee. Things however are proportional over here. The rules can easily sustain 3-4 serious candidates going all the way, especially if 2 of those are Bloomberg and Bernie.

Already I'm seeing some Bernie people saying that he who gets the most delegates should be the nominee. People are waking up and recognizing that we could go forward with most states getting cut 35-30-25 or 30-25-20-20 depending on the number of survivors.

Who actually wants a contested convention though? Could that lead to a rally behind Bernie affect at a certain point in the primary, probably somewhere between the end of March and late April?

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This is getting OT, but let's just make it clear: there is no point in a voluntary "Medicare 4 Some" proposal, because as long as private insurance exists, the public health insurance market will be negotiating from a position of weakness, and will likely still comprise a minority of insured. Healthcare is also the only industry where competition is a bad thing: king/intermoderate some years ago made a very good argument about how "competition" increases healthcare costs due to the pools of insured exploiting one another's bad years cost-wise, raising their prices each year to be just below the worst-performing pool's price point even when they've individually had good years.

You need aggressive price controls as part of any reform package - if you don't have that, then not only would a voluntary system flop due to no tangible reduction in aggregate costs, but the percentage of income we spend as a country will only continue to increase. You can only have aggressive price controls if we're the sole (or at least, the overwhelming) insurer. Remember that the sacred ACA only managed to reduce the annual increase in healthcare costs from 3x the rate of inflation to 2x, and has largely just shifted costs from private to public (subsidies); from premium to deductible. Without a plan to reduce aggregate healthcare costs from 18% of GDP to 11-12% of GDP over a 10-year period, you might as well just continue to let people die in the streets (because that's what will keep happening regardless under any alternative).

Offering somebody a chance to buy into Medicare for $10,000 per year is not a deal that any sane person will take, and no amount of tax credits or dumb workaround subsidies is going to change that.

This is basically why the “public option” sucks.

The trick is to find a middle ground between that and full on M4A that Sanders has proposed that is costing support among unions and for political purposes, avoid the talking point about choice and subtraction. The goal is to severely curtail private insurance to the point where we have more or less de fecto single payer.