Category: New Hampshire

Has Joe Biden Finished Losing Yet?

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Michael Bloomberg hired enough write-in votes to win Dixville Notch, N.H., but the total of reported early votes from New Hampshire actually favor Amy Klobuchar, for whatever that’s worth. The one thing everybody knew before any votes were cast was who the big loser will be:

Joe Biden could finish as low as fifth place in tonight’s New Hampshire primary results. Certainly, if we can trust the most recent poll, the former vice president will do no better than third, behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Even a third-place finish in New Hampshire for Biden would be an improvement over his dismal showing in the Iowa caucus, in which he placed fourth behind Sanders, Buttigieg, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But as badly as Warren’s campaign has floundered, it’s unlikely Biden could beat her in her own backyard. What most troubles the dreams of establishment Democrats is the worst-case scenario for Biden in New Hampshire, namely that Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who finished fifth in Iowa, can gain enough momentum to claim fourth place tonight.
Such an outcome would probably be a fatal blow to Biden’s campaign, and the sense that the end is near for Biden has inspired panic in the ranks of Democrats and their media allies over the possibility that either (a) the socialist Sanders could win the party’s nomination, or (b) their coalition might come completely unraveled should the establishment Democrats cheat Sanders out of the nomination, as the Vermont senator’s left-wing loyalists believe happened in 2016. Either way, the odds of any Democrat beating Donald Trump in November have become increasingly bleak, and the Great Liberal Freakout of 2020 has now begun in earnest. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Democrats Begin 2020 Panic; Biden May Finish Fifth in New Hampshire

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After a week of disasters, with the New Hampshire primaries looming on Tuesday, Democrats have begun to read the writing on the wall:

This was the worst week for Democrats since Donald Trump’s election-night shocker of 2016. . . .
In less than 200 hours, Democrats botched Iowa, watched Trump hit an all-time popularity high, debated ousting the DNC chair, and watched a socialist soar and an ideological civil war intensify. . . .
[T]here’s an underlying unease about unifying the party enough to get the kind of turnout needed to win in November. . . .
There’s a new fatalism in my conversations with Democrats, with many telling me that what once seemed unthinkable — Trump’s re-election in November — is now starting to look more likely than ever.
In a CNN segment [Sunday] morning that included Friday’s rosy economic statistics, a graphic asked: “IS TRUMP’S RE-ELECTION PATH WIDENING?” . . .
Whoever is ultimately nominated [by Democrats] will start in a tremendous hole against a Trump campaign has been relentlessly organized and optimized over the past three years.

The latest New Hampshire poll shows Sen. Bernie Sanders leading at 24% followed by Mayor Pete Buttigieg (22%), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (13%) and former Vice President Joe Biden at 10%. However, Sen. Amy Klobuchar got a boost from her Friday debate performance; she’s now at 9% in the New Hampshire poll, which means that if her momentum continues, Biden could finish fifth on Tuesday. That would be an unmitigated disaster for his campaign, essentially ending his status as “establishment consensus” candidate. The prospect of Sanders as the nominee sent MSNBC’s Chris Matthews over the edge of the cliff:

Just this week, former Clinton adviser James Carville had a meltdown over the “AOC crazy” direction he says the Democratic party has taken, and former Obama adviser Van Jones hit the panic button for Democrats over Trump’s serious play for black voters.
Not to be outdone, after Friday night’s Democratic presidential candidate debate in New Hampshire, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews went on a tear against Sanders, bluntly stating that socialism “doesn’t frickin’ work” and wondering what Sanders thought about socialist dictators like Fidel Castro:

“[T]hose of us like me who grew up — who grew up in the Cold War and saw some aspects of it after visiting places like Vietnam like I have, seeing countries like Cuba, being there, I’ve seen what socialism is like. I don’t like it. Okay? It’s not only not free. It doesn’t freaking work. It just doesn’t work.” . . .
“When they go back to the early 1950s, I have attitude about them. I remember the Cold War. I have an attitude towards Castro. I believe if Castro and the — and the Reds had won the Cold War, there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have one of the ones getting executed and certain other people would be there cheering, okay? So, I have a problem with people who took the other side. I don’t know who Bernie supports over these years. I don’t know what he means by socialism.”

Where has Chris Matthews been the past 20 years? Did he think Obama was a moderate centrist? Did he not notice the rising tide of radicalism in the Democratic Party? Hillary Clinton had to cheat to deprive Sanders of the nomination in 2016, and the Antifa goon squads have been terrorizing Trump supporters for more than three years.

For years, Democrats were able to have their cake and eat it, too, promising the sun, the moon and the stars to their left-wing base, while soaking up millions in contributions from the corporate donor class. In the Trump Age, however, that formula isn’t working anymore, and the Democratic establishment is collapsing under the weight of its own corrupt hypocrisy. Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen . . .




 

Biden: Citizenship for 11 Million Illegal Aliens, Miners Should ‘Learn to Code’

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At a time when unemployment is at an all-time low, the Democrat front-runner offers a nostalgic return to Obama-era policies:

Democrat presidential contender Joe Biden said that coal miners can learn how to code, reviving a promotion of retraining blue-collar workers for positions in the technology industry.
On the campaign trail in Derry, New Hampshire, on Dec. 30, Biden said: “Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well.”
“But we don’t think of it that way. Even my liberal friends don’t think of it that way,” he added.
Biden was talking about the changing economy and the “jobs of the future,” telling the crowd that “six out of 10 jobs today, today, today, require more than a high school degree.”
“Does anybody think that you’re going to be able to stay in the middle class in the ’20s and ’30s of the 21st century without better education? Now brawn is no longer the measure. I come from a family, an area where it’s coal mining in Scranton,” he said, before making the comment about coal miners learning how to code.
Biden later touted the Obama administration helping Detroit recover, discussing how “anybody who had any talent in terms of technology left” when bankruptcy hit and claiming there was “no one who knew how to turn on the street lights” or “the sewer system.”

In the same appearance, Joe promised citizenship to illegal aliens:

[T]he candidate made it clear at a campaign rally in Derry, New Hampshire that not only will he work to establish a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, but that he will issue them driver’s licenses.
The issue came up during a Q&A session when an attendee said: “I wanted to ask you about getting driver’s licenses for our undocumented immigrants. Do you have a plan in the works for working on that, as I believe it would help them establish residency and the first step towards possible citizenship.”
“Actually, yes and yes,” Biden answered. “And, by the way, I’m going to fundamentally change the immigration policy we have.” . . .
“The first thing I will do is send — I mean within the first couple of weeks, we already have it written — a bill to the U.S. Congress providing a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people,” Biden said.

Don’t you just love that word “undocumented”? These are foreigners who have violated federal law, but Democrats want us to believe it’s just a paperwork error: “Oops! I forgot my documents!” And Joe’s reaction is, “Here you go — have a driver’s license and a ‘pathway’ to citizenship!”



 

N.H.: Hillary Will Lose, But What Difference, at This Point, Does It Make?

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Polls forecast a defeat for Clinton tonight:

Donald Trump continues to lead the Republican race in New Hampshire on the eve of the vote, the final CNN/WMUR tracking poll finds.
On the Democratic side of the race, it remains Bernie Sanders’ primary to lose, with the Vermont senator holding a 26-point lead over Hillary Clinton. . . .
In the Democratic race, Sanders tops Clinton 61% to 35%, an uptick for Sanders since the last update to the tracking poll . . .

The prospect of a double-digit defeat in New Hampshire for the former Secretary of State has sent a shock wave through the Democrat Party establishment. Clinton has “underperformed,” as one analyst said on CNN this morning, and it is clear that the youth vote for the  74-year-old Sanders reflects both a negative judgment of Hillary as well as support for Bernie’s far-left agenda. Because the Democrat establishment considers Sanders “unelectable,” the prospect of his winning the nomination has caused murmurs of a third-party campaign by liberal former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Team Clinton is trying to put the wheels back on the Hillary bandwagon:

Hillary and Bill Clinton are so dissatisfied with their campaign’s messaging and digital operations they are considering staffing and strategy changes after what’s expected to be a loss in Tuesday’s primary in New Hampshire, according to a half-dozen people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Clintons — stung by her narrow victory in Iowa and shocked by polls showing her losing by as much as 20 percent here — had been planning to reassess staffing at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters after the first four primaries, but the Clintons have become increasingly caustic in their criticism of aides and demanded the reassessment sooner, a source told POLITICO.
The talk of shake-up echoes what happened in 2008 — when Clinton was on the verge of sacking her campaign manager and several top communications officials — before her surprise win in New Hampshire bailed out her beleaguered staff. Over time, however she slowly layered over top officials, essentially hiring old hands — like Hillaryland stalwart Maggie Williams and pollster Geoff Garin — to run the campaign while the previous staffers were quietly relegated to subsidiary positions.
It’s not clear whether that will happen again, but several people close to the situation said Clinton would be loath to fire anyone outright and more inclined to add new staff.
“The Clintons are not happy and have been letting all of us know that,” said one Democratic official who speaks regularly to both. “The idea is that we need a more forward-looking message, for the primary — but also for the general election too. … There’s no sense of panic, but there is an urgency to fix these problems right now.”

Yeah, “no sense of panic,” but they’re losing to the 74-year-old Sanders, an extremist kook from the fringe. The Clintons are discovering that a Cult of Personality doesn’t work if voters don’t like the personality at its center. Meanwhile, one of the ghosts of Bill’s past is rattling her chains:

One of the women who has accused former U.S. President Bill Clinton of sexual assault says she has agreed to work for an anti-Clinton political group being formed by a former advisor to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Kathleen Willey, a former White House volunteer who says Bill Clinton groped her in an Oval Office hallway in 1993 when she came to him tearfully seeking a paid job, said she had agreed to become a paid national spokeswoman for a group being created by Roger Stone.
Stone, a Republican strategist, said the group would become active should Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton’s wife, win the Democratic nomination in the 2016 race for the White House. . . .
“This gives me more of an opportunity to get this message out to young voters who weren’t even born or don’t even remember what happened and to the women who have suffered,” Willey told Reuters.
Willey said she will give interviews and speeches and appear in political advertisements to ensure the accusations remain part of the political discourse during the election campaign.
“They’re going to be confronted every day, on radio, on television, on billboards,” Stone told Reuters, referring to the Clintons.

How can feminists be against “rape culture” and for Clinton?

 

On Da Campaign Trail

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After my extensive campaign travels during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, I’ve been more of a stay-at-home blogger the past couple of years. However, our old friend Pete Da Tech Guy has been on the scene in New Hampshire where he recently caught a campaign stop by Dr. Ben Carson at Mike Rogers’s house in Hollis:

In this small informal setting Dr. Ben Carson answered more spontaneous questions on issues from the public than Hillary Clinton has in her entire campaign.
Think about it.

Go see the whole thing with videos and please be sure to Hit Da Freaking Tip Jar. Pete is doing valuable work up there.

 

Cheryl Voted for Obama in 2008, But …

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. . . this time in New Hampshire? Not so much:

Governor Romney challenged each member of the crowd to speak to one Obama voter to convince them to change their minds this time around.
The visuals were excellent and it seemed hard work of the volunteers paid off. My interviews after the event suggested an energized crowd, but the most significant moment was an interview with a newly retired schoolteacher named Cheryl from Nashua New Hampshire.
Cheryl was an Obama voter, a former teacher who had never gone to a Romney event before. She left as a Romney voter. I asked her per, Gov Romney’s challenge, what she would say to a fellow 2008 Obama voter to persuade them to change their vote her answer was telling:
“All they have to do is listen carefully, there is so much negativity and there is no message in negativity.”
Her dissatisfaction, more than any successfully staged event is the greatest danger to the election prospects of this administration.

Read the rest of Da Tech Guy’s column at the Examiner.

Democrats Against Journalism?

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Michael Delaney is a Democrat who is attorney general of New Hampshire. James O’Keefe is a journalist who exposed the fact that it was possible for dead people to vote in New Hampshire.

In reaction to O’Keefe’s blockbuster investigative report, the New Hampshire legislature enacted a voter ID law.

Michael Delaney tried to serve a subpoena on O’Keefe.

We support James O’Keefe.

Republicans in New Hampshire demanded Delaney’s resignation last month. They now have a new reason to repeat their demands.

LIVE FREE OR DIE!

A Memeorandum thread with more commentary from Legal Insurrection and Power Line

Rick Santorum Adds Staff, Offices, Money and Key Endorsement in South Carolina

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Rick Santorum brought his surge to South Carolina yesterday:

Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign announced yesterday that it was opening “five new campaign offices to supplement its existing South Carolina headquarters in Mt. Pleasant, SC.” The new offices are in Greenville, Myrtle Beach, Spartanburg, Rock Hill and Columbia.
“We feel very confident … that the voters are going to end up coalescing around Rick Santorum, and I think that South Carolina is a good place to start that,” his campaign manager, Mike Biundo, told reporters Tuesday night in New Hampshire.
Biundo said Santorum’s campaign in the Palmetto State will benefit from the addition of the staff that helped the former Pennsylvania senator come within eight votes of beating Mitt Romney in Iowa.
“We took all our Iowa staff that wanted to go down,” Biundo told reporters. “We feel very good about our operation in South Carolina. I think we’re going to do very well there. … We’re already up with ads. We’ve gotten a mail piece out. … We’re gonna go everywhere on the ground. We’re obviously gonna put a lot more money into media than we did [in New Hampshire], certainly more than we did in Iowa, as well. … I think we have about a million dollars committed [to advertise in South Carolina] between what we’re putting in and what we’re gonna put in. So I feel pretty good about that now and we’ll be adding more and reassessing as things go along.”

Those quotes are based on a press “gaggle” with Biundo that I got on video Tuesday night but didn’t have time to post until now:


In other Santorum news, he announced 169 “county captains” in South Carolina and announced this morning that Santorum had won the endorsement of South Carolina state Rep. Greg Delleny, who was named the state’s “Pro-Life Legislator of the Year” in 2008, and recognized as “Legislator of the Year” in 2007 by the Palmetto Family Council.

Ed Morrissey is analyzing the latest Florida poll, but that’s getting way ahead of the game. The key point here is that while there was only a week between Iowa (Jan. 3) and New Hampshire (Jan. 10), there is an 11-day interval between New Hampshire the South Carolina primary Saturday, Jan. 21, then 10 days before the Florida primary on Tuesday, Jan. 31. We’ll have two debates in South Carolina (Monday on Fox and Thursday on CNN), and a lot more polls between now and Jan. 21.

So if Santorum can get his mojo working in South Carolina, he’ll have a chance to turn a good performance there into money and momentum in Florida. I strongly suspect that South Carolina will be the end for Rick Perry and I heard a rumor yesterday that if Santorum out-performs Gingrich in South Carolina, Newt might quit and endorse Santorum, with the hope of rallying conservatives in Florida to stop Romney.

Today I’m back home, quite literally blogging in my pajamas and trying to rest up before going back out on the campaign trail. My current plan is to leave early Sunday, although this plan is to a great degree dependent on tip-jar hitters. So if you’re feeling an urge to contribute $10 or $20 to the Shoe Leather Fund — hey, don’t fight the feeling!