Tag Archives: New Hampshire

New Hampshire Primary

By tmess2 | Published January 23, 2024

Today is round two for the Republicans with the New Hampshire Primary.  Because primary dates are set by state law, there will also be a non-binding primary (a/k/a “beauty contest”) on the Democratic side (more on that below).

While there will be other candidates on the ballot, there are only two major candidates on the Republican side — Donald Trump and Nikki Haley.  Given that New Hampshire has a semi-open primary in which independents can vote in either party’s primary, it is believed that there will be a significant number of “moderates” who opt to vote in the Republican primary.  If there is a chance for Nikki Haley to win nationally, she needs a win in New Hampshire.  Given Trump’s many issues (legal, physical, mental), the Republicans really do not need the chaos that would ensue if Trump “wins” the nomination but has to withdraw before the convention.  (And while it is hard to project what the Supreme Court intends to do, it is easier for them to do the legally correct thing if Trump is not the presumptive Republican nominee.)  New Hampshire is a proportional state, so unless Haley or Trump blows the other out of the water what really matters here is the perception that Haley can compete and beat Trump than the actual delegate count.)

On the Democratic side, the timing of the New Hampshire primary (set by state law) violates the national delegate selection rules.  As a result, the primary is a non-binding primary.  Because the New Hampshire Democratic Party has decided to resist the national rules and support the unenforceable state law mandating that other states let New Hampshire goes first, New Hampshire has had its delegate total reduced to ten delegates.  More importantly, we do not yet have an approved plan for how those delegates will be chosen. Continue Reading...

Posted in Joe Biden, NH Primary, Primary and Caucus Results, Primary Elections | Also tagged , , , , Comments Off on New Hampshire Primary

The 2024 Primary Process

By tmess2 | Published February 12, 2023

The advantage of being the party in power is that you can make changes to your rules about your presidential nomination process without worrying about which potential candidate will benefit.  Barring the unlikely event that President Biden does not seek the nomination, he will be the Democratic nominee regardless of the rules.  So these changes will not impact who will win the nomination in 2024, and 2028 is way too far away for anybody to guess who will be running in 2028 much less who benefits from the changes.

First, as always, the nomination process is a battle between state laws and national rules.  And, under the First Amendment, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, the national party rules for choosing the national presidential candidate prevails over state law.  Of course, while the states are unable to bind the national party, the states do set the rules for who appears on their general election ballots.  As of now, no state laws designate anybody other than the national nominees as the presidential candidate of that party (and no state party has refused to certify their national candidate).

Second, the two parties have different rules.  Both sets of rules involve potential penalties for states that violate the rules.  In the past, the two parties had similar rules on timing of primaries.  But this time, thanks to the Democrat’s changes to the list of states that can go before the first Tuesday in March, the list of potential February contests is not the same for the two parties.  And each party has potential penalties for states that violate their rules. Continue Reading...

Posted in 2024 Convention, Delegates | Also tagged , , , , , Comments Off on The 2024 Primary Process

The Midterms — Preview (Part 2)

By tmess2 | Published October 30, 2022

The first states with polls to close are mostly in the Eastern Time Zone.  In the early states, we have two governor’s races (Georgia and Florida), four Senate races (Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio), and seven House seats (1 in North Carolina, 3 in Ohio, and 3 in Virginia) that could be close.  There are also several seats that are likely to flip solely because of the new maps (4 flipping red in Florida, 1 flipping red in Georgia, and 2 flipping blue in North Carolina).

But the big closing time is 7 p.m. Central ST.  The remaining polls will close in Florida, and most of the polls will close in Kansas, Michigan, South Dakota, and Texas.  And all of the polls will close in Alabama (except for a very small portion that closed an hour earlier), Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.  In short, when added to the states that close before 7 p.m., the polls will be closed in roughly half of the country by 7:01 p.m. (Of course, polls closed merely means that individuals need to be in line to vote at 7 p.m.  Because there are typically people in line to vote, voting might actually continue in some urban precincts for a very long time after 7 p.m. which will delay counting in those areas.)

Starting with Alabama, there are no races that are likely to be close at the state or federal level.  If the Supreme Court follows the Voting Rights Act, Democrats will probably pick up an additional seat in 2024, but the current maps which a district court correctly held violated the Voting Rights Act is in place for the 2022 election, and the 6-1 Republican advantage will remain in place for the next Congress.  There are a lot of propositions on the ballot in Alabama, the most significant of which requires changes to election law to be adopted at least six months prior to a general election. Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, General Election Forecast, House of Representatives, Senate | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Midterms — Preview (Part 2)

The Fall Campaign

By tmess2 | Published September 4, 2022

Traditionally, Labor Day Weekend was seen as the start of the Fall campaign (at least by the media).  If that was ever true, it no longer is.  With cable and websites like Facebook and Youtube, there are a lot of relatively inexpensive way to get advertisements out during July and August.  If a campaign waits unti September to begin its ad campaign, the other side has already defined the race.

But, by this point in the cycle, we are down to the last handful of primaries, and the national committees and big PACS are already looking to decide where they are going to be spending the big bucks in late September and early October.  (As the change in the mechanism for advertising has obliterated Labor Day as the start of the fall campaign, the change in voting habits (with a significant percentage casting early votes or mail-in ballots) has also altered when the big final push begins.  While, in a close race, last minute news and ads can make a difference, it is just as important to get as many votes locked in as early as possible so that the last-minute spending can be focused on a tiny number of votes.

But that is the inside baseball stuff of campaigns.  The purpose of this post is to set the stage for the next eight weeks.  For the past two years, Democrats have had the frustration of a very narrow margin in the House of Representatives and a dead-even Senate.  Because Nancy Pelosi may be one of the all-time great Speakers, Democrats have been mostly able to pass things in the House.  The Senate, however, has been very, very difficult.  The filibuster rules has limited the Democrats to passing anything significant via the reconciliation process.  Even the reconciliation process requires keeping the entire Democratic caucus together which has proven difficult as a single member can insist on changes to any proposal.  And the  lack of a majority has also prevented any changes to the filibuster rule (again due to the ability a single Democrat to veto any proposed change). Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, General Election Forecast | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Fall Campaign

2022 Elections — A First Glance

By tmess2 | Published January 30, 2021

The 2020 elections left both the House and the Senate closely divided.  And two years is a long time in politics.  But experience has taught politicians two, somewhat contradictory, things that will impact what can get done during the next two years.

The first, especially for the House of Representatives, is that the President’s party typically loses seats.  But the reason for this normal rule is that a new President has typically helped members of his party to flip seats.  As such, this might be less true for 2022 than in the past.  In 2020, the Democrats only won three new seats, and two were the results of North Carolina having to fix its extreme gerrymander.  And only a handful of Democratic incumbents won close races.  And the rule is less consistent for the Senate, in large part because the Senators up for election are not the ones who ran with the President in the most recent election but the ones who ran with the prior president six years earlier.  In other words, the President’s party tends to be more vulnerable in the Senate in the midterms of the second term than in the midterms of the first term.  But the likelihood that the President’s party will lose seats is an incentive to do as much as possible during the first two years.

The second is that one cause of the swing may be overreach — that voters are trying to check a President who is going further than the voters actually wanted.  This theory assumes that there are enough swing voters who really want centrist policies and that they switch sides frequently to keep either party from passing more “extreme” policies.  Polls do not really support this theory and there is an argument that, at least part of the mid-term problem, could be the failure to follow through on all of the promises leading to less enthusiasm with the base.  But this theory is a reason for taking things slowly and focusing on immediate necessities first and putting the “wish list” on hold until after the mid-terms. Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, House of Representatives, Senate | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on 2022 Elections — A First Glance

Election Night Preview — Part 2 (8 PM to 9 PM EST)

By tmess2 | Published October 28, 2020

As noted in the previous post, by 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, we should have a significant amount of precincts being reported in the two earliest states (Kentucky and Indiana) and should be starting to get some counties reporting votes in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and Vermont.  During this hour, the counts in those states should be increasing.  By 9 p.m., we should be seeing either some projection in those states or an indication that the states are too close too call.  We may also be getting an indication in some of those states of how many absentee votes might remain to be counted (which could determine whether it will be possible to make any projection in those states on election night).

While it would be nice if we could get calls in a state like Virginia early in this hour, the bigger question as the hour goes will be the types of swings that we are seeing in these states.   Virginia in 2016 was a leading indicator as we were just not getting strong results compared to 2012.  So as this hour goes along and the networks start looking at the maps of the state, the key thing to pay attention to is how the numbers are comparing to 2016.  Even if the networks aren’t comfortable in calling a state yet, if the results are showing that Trump is underperforming in red parts of a state (i.e. rural counties) and Biden is overperforming in the suburbs, then that is a good sign for the rest of the evening as Trump only one by the slimmest of margins in 2016 and any erosion in his support could prove fatal.

This hour has the most states close.  You have partial closures in Florida (the rest of the state closed an hour earlier), Kansas, Michigan, South Dakota, and Texas.  While a significant part of South Dakota will close an hour later, the polls close for most of the population in Kansas, Michigan, and Texas at 8 p.m. Eastern.  In addition to these states, polls for the entire state close at 8 p.m. Eastern in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Illinois, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. Continue Reading...

Posted in 2020 General Election, General Election Forecast | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on Election Night Preview — Part 2 (8 PM to 9 PM EST)

Delegate Math 2020 — New Hampshire

By tmess2 | Published February 7, 2020

With Iowa’s vote earlier this week, the winnowing process has begun.  However, it is still early enough that there is a good chance that more than two candidates will reach the 15% needed to win delegates.  And that will complicate the delegate math with fractional delegates.

(Normally, the early states — starting with Iowa — perform a winnowing function.  Candidates who finish at the bottom of the pack in Iowa tend not to survive for much longer.  And candidates who do well in terms of finishing near the top of the pack tend to survive for several more rounds.  With the delay in reporting results, it is unclear if Iowa will have its usual impact this year.  But even if it does, it would not be unusual to have multiple candidates getting 10% or more of the vote in New Hampshire. Starting in 1976, five of nine primaries have had at least three candidates getting 10% of the vote, and three primaries have had three candidates getting over 15% of the vote.  Since three of the remaining six primaries occurred in races that were perceived — at least heading into Iowa — as only having two candidates who were viable, about half of the races that had more than two “viable” candidates resulted in three candidates winning delegates in New Hampshire.  In short, Iowa only starts the winnowing process.  And this year, that means that more than two candidates have a legitimate shot at winning delegates in New Hampshire.)

Now back to the basic rules that apply to all states.  A candidate needs to get 15% of the vote (either state-wide or in a district) to be eligible to win delegates. If there are enough delegates available, every eligible candidate gets a delegate even if that reduces the number of delegates that another candidate gets.  If there are more eligible candidates than delegates, delegates are awarded in the order of finish.  Generally speaking, the formula for calculating delegates is the share of qualified votes (i.e. only the votes cast for candidates who got 15%) times the number of delegate available.  Since that typically will result in a fraction (say 2.3 delegates for candidate X), you start by giving out the whole numbers and then the remaining delegates are assigned in fractional order (i.e. .7 is ahead of .6 for getting the next delegate).  Technically, the rules say round up and round down initially, but the ranking then comes into play if round up and rounding down results in the wrong number of total delegates. Continue Reading...

Posted in Delegates, NH Primary | Also tagged Comments Off on Delegate Math 2020 — New Hampshire

2018 Midterm Election Preview — New England

By tmess2 | Published October 21, 2018

Sixteen days left to take our country back from the heirs of the anti-federalists and give voice to the silent majority that the President loves to ridicule and marginalize — women, the children and grandchildren of immigrants, the Native Americans whose ancestors were here before any of ours, those who have worked hard to get a college or professional degree so that their children will have better lives than they did,  the LGBT community, those who believe in science, those working hard at a minimum wage job trying to make ends meet, the list goes on and on under a president who only values those with money to burn and believes that there is no solemn commitment that we have made as a country that we can’t break merely because it is inconvenient to his agenda.

Over the next week or so, I will have a series of posts breaking down the election by region.  Writing from the dead center of fly-over country, I am likely to miss (a lot of) the interesting local races and local color while trying to identify what seem to be the key races.  So I am hopeful that we will get some comments pointing out what has slipped under the national radar.

We start with New England  — home to the Patriots, the Red Sox, and a tradition of moderate Yankee Republicanism that is on the verge of needing Last Rites (represented primarily at the national level by the Cowardly Lioness of the Senate — Susan Collins — stumbling desperately in the last two years of her career between the conflicting tasks of keeping a majority of Maine Republicans primary voters happy and keeping the majority of Maine general election voters happy). Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, General Election Forecast | Also tagged , , , , , , Comments Off on 2018 Midterm Election Preview — New England

Election Night 2016 — What to Look For (Part Three)

By tmess2 | Published November 6, 2016

animated flag glitterAs evening turns into night in the Eastern and Central time zones, the pace picks up.  For whatever reason, 8:00 p.m. is a popular time for states in the Eastern time zone to close their polls as is 7:00 p.m. in the Central time zone.  As discussed in part two, lines at the polls means that the networks typically only have enough results to call races if the races are not close.  Most of the states that will be called by 8:00 p.m. are not the races that will decide the election.  Because most of the polls will have been closed for two hours, there is a good chance that the Indiana senate race may be called by 8:00 p.m.  There is some chance that Georgia (an at-risk state that Trump needs to win) or Virginia (an at-risk state that Clinton needs to win) will be called before 8:00 p.m.  Sixteen states will close their polls at 8:00 p.m. as will the polls in part of several other states.  While the results from the early states give some clues about the shape of the race, the shape of the race will become much clearer when the returns from these states start to come in.

8:00 p.m. (EST) — The remainder of the polls close in Florida.  The polls close in Alabama, Connecticut, D.C., Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.  The polls close in the eastern part of Michigan, Kansas, South Dakota, and Texas.  Several of these states should have quick calls for president, but several states are key states for the outcome of this election.  (Assuming that none of the “close” states from early are called by 8:15 p.m., the projected electoral vote should be approximately 76 for Trump and 55 for Clinton.)

Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, General Election Forecast | Also tagged , , , , Comments Off on Election Night 2016 — What to Look For (Part Three)

Iowa Post-mortem: The Good, the Bad, and the Gone

By tmess2 | Published February 4, 2016

While the parties did not have much choice about including Iowa and New Hampshire in the window of early states, the theory behind the early states is that all four are small enough and different enough to help narrow the field.   While winning is nice, the real goals of the campaigns are:  1) to seem viable enough that supporters (both voters and donors) don’t go looking elsewhere; and 2) to meet targets for delegates.  Candidates who are unable to show signs of life quickly find that their campaigns have no life.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Elections, Hillary Clinton, NH Primary, Primary and Caucus Results | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on Iowa Post-mortem: The Good, the Bad, and the Gone