New Hampshire Primary Musings

I don't really have any predictions.

The polling is pretty fuzzy and the stuff I see without digging deeply (which I don't care enough to do) doesn't really go much into the consequences of New Hampshire allowing "unaffiliated" voters to vote in whichever primary they feel like voting in.

So we may see a bunch of "unaffiliated" voters hitting the GOP primary. I would expect that voter bloc to weigh heavily against Trump.

But even if that happens, and even if it's enough to produce an upset victory for Nikki Haley, her campaign looks to be pretty much over (Ron DeSantis's campaign is over, and I expect he'll admit that soon). Next after New Hampshire comes South Carolina. Although she served two terms as governor there, Trump's polling way ahead and has the endorsement of the state's current governor and both of its US Senators. If she can't carry her own state in her own party's primary, it's hard to argue that she has any kind of "path to victory" nationally.

On the Democratic side, Joe Biden isn't on the primary ballot. Because New Hampshire ignored the Democratic National Committee's demand that it hold its primary later instead of sooner, he's boycotting that primary, so all of his votes will be write-ins. And as a consequence of violating the DNC edict, New Hampshire's delegates to the party's national convention won't be bound to any candidate regardless of who wins.

That may result in embarrassingly high vote totals for Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson. If an incumbent president can't knock down 80-90% of the vote in a primary, it strengthens the case for him stepping aside -- and with Biden, that's already a very strong case.

Both "major" parties seem to be trying as hard as they can to lose the general election in November. Unfortunately, only one of them is likely to succeed.