Iowa caucus mess leaves Democrats relying on New Hampshire. Does it predict winners?
Any hopes that Iowa’s caucuses would clarify the Democratic 2020 presidential primary race were dashed Monday when results were delayed, leaving the winner unclear days later.
So can the New Hampshire primary — the first primary in the nation, set for Tuesday, Feb. 11 — predict the party’s nominee where Iowa’s contest seems to have failed?
Some political operatives are banking on New Hampshire, with Politico reporting that an oft-repeated adage resurfaced this week: “Iowans pick corn, New Hampshire picks presidents.”
Here’s what history shows about New Hampshire’s track record at picking presidential nomination winners, and how the northeastern state’s electorate and demographics stack up to the United States as a whole.
The candidate who wins over most New Hampshire primary voters has gone on to win his or her party nomination more than half the time, according to a WalletHub analysis released Thursday — with 60 percent of Democrats who won New Hampshire since 1976 clinching the nomination and 80 percent of Republicans who won the state becoming the nominee. This is despite the fact that the Granite State looks vastly different than much of the U.S.
“The mystery that baffles most about the impressive predictive abilities of the New Hampshire primary is grounded in the fact that the state is largely rural with a relatively tiny and demographically homogeneous population,” WalletHub’s Andrew McCann writes. “New Hampshire’s roughly 1.36 million residents are 93.2 percent white, compared with the nation’s 76.5 percent.”
New Hampshire also has less than half as many foreign-born residents than the rest of the U.S., according to U.S. Census data. Its population skews older as well, with a higher percentage of residents over 65 and fewer under 18, census data shows.
There are a few ways in which New Hampshire mirrors the country well: In economic indicators — such as unemployment rate, poverty rate and food stamp entitlement — WalletHub calculates that the state has a nearly 89 percent resemblance to the U.S.
In terms of education — which includes school enrollment and educational attainment — the state has a 92 percent resemblance to the country writ large, WalletHub finds.
Still, New Hampshire’s predictive abilities appear less strong than Iowa’s in recent history: Five of the last seven Democrats to win Iowa in years the party’s nomination was contested ended up as the Democratic nominee, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Those five recent Iowa winners who nabbed the nomination were Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore and Walter Mondale. Bernie Sanders — an independent senator representing neighboring Vermont — won New Hampshire’s primary in 2016, though he ultimately lost the nomination to Clinton.
This year New Hampshire could be even more closely watched than usual.
“New Hampshire becomes, I think, more important because we don’t know what Iowa’s going to come out with,” said Bill Shaheen, a local Democratic National Committeeman and supporter of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to the Associated Press.
538’s aggregate of polling from New Hampshire shows Sanders in the lead with around 27 percent of the vote, followed by former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Buttigieg with 17 percent, former Vice President Joe Biden with just less than 14 percent and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts at 12 percent. No other candidate reached double digits in predicted votes.
Some material in this story appeared in a previous article by the author
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 12:42 PM with the headline "Iowa caucus mess leaves Democrats relying on New Hampshire. Does it predict winners?."
