Monday Musings on 2016 – What Will New Hampshire Bring?
Trump, Sanders lead the polls – Both Sanders and Trump seem to be in good shape in New Hampshire as of today. But as Iowa showed us last week, anything is possible in this volatile race. Iowa could have given us two nominees if Trump and Clinton had decisive victories. But it didn’t, and as I wrote last week, the entire election changed. What surprise will NH produce? What order will 2-4 be on the GOP side? We will find out tomorrow night. But here are a few things we know:
- Rubio had a campaign altering meltdown on Saturday, and so far his reaction to it seems to be digging the hole deeper.
- Cruz isn’t wearing well. His exchange with Carson on Saturday, and his incredible lie about what actually happened was a bad sign for his campaign. He is still very much in this thing but there are all sorts of warning signs emerging.
- That Rubio and Cruz have had a rough week means that the Donald has had a good one.
- Sanders outraised Clinton last month by a third ($20 to $15m). Remarkably, Sanders will likely be able to match Clinton’s money as the map gets bigger. No one could have imagined that even a few weeks ago.
No predictions, but my sense is that Trump may re-emerge as the frontrunner this week; Clinton will close and make NH tight but not win; Sanders will close everywhere else, including the next Dem contest, Nevada.
What’s next for the Democrats? The two Democrats will debate this Thursday on PBS/CNN, and then have Nevada on 2/20, South Carolina on 2/27, and on 3/1 AL, AR, CO, GA, MA, MN, OK, TN, TX, VT, VA. It is going to get big, fast.
Still can’t understand why Clinton is embracing more of a reform agenda – I’ve covered this issue in the last few weekly memos but it remains the great mystery of the race to me. Sanders, Trump, Cruz and Rubio have all made challenging the broken system central to their campaigns. The resistance by Clinton to do so, given that she has a very strong set of campaign and voting rights proposals, seems at this point – at best – tone deaf. Something to watch in the days ahead, and be sure to review Ari Berman's smart piece "Hillary Clinton's Bold Plan for Voting Rights."
Bad Week for Dems and debates – The much and appropriately maligned DNC approach to the debates is perhaps best understood by the audiences garnered by the recent New Hampshire debates. The first DNC NH debate was the on the Saturday before Christmas. The second was hastily thrown together by candidates needing greater exposure than the inadequate DNC schedule had given them. The first debate, on ABC, received 8m viewers. The second, on MSNBC in weekday primetime, received 4.5m viewers. The GOP NH debate which aired this past Saturday also on ABC received 13.2m viewers. The GOP weekend debate outperformed the weeknight DNC debate three fold this week; the GOP ABC debate on a far better Saturday night had a 65% higher audience than the Dem ABC debate; and the single GOP NH debate this week had more viewers than both Dem NH debates combined.
The inferior and flawed debate DNC approach has let the Democrats down this cycle, giving their candidates and their arguments far less exposure than what Republicans have received. So while we are pleased that the two campaigns decided to add four more debates to the original six, it is tragic that these campaigns, in the middle of the most intense period of the election so far, had to take so much time to improve what was a terribly inadequate approach crafted by the DNC.
For more on the debate debate see our memo which compares the audiences received by both parties in the 2008 and 2016 cycles.
Enthusiasm/Interest – Watch tomorrow night for turn out numbers. As we wrote last week, in Iowa Democrats experienced a 40% drop from their 2008 Caucus vote, while the GOP saw a 50% increase. We know GOP debates are on average getting more than 60% more viewership than the Dems. Are numbers like this predictive of the outcome in the fall? Of course not. But they are instructive as where the two parties stand today; and I want to go on the record now saying I believe this is a problem for the Democrats in 2016, exacerbated by a horribly misguided approach to their debates.
"Monday Musings" is a new column which looks at the national political landscape and is published most Mondays here on the NDN site. You can find previous columns here. Full disclosure: I will vote for Hillary Clinton in the DC Democratic primary, and have given the maximum contribution to her campaign.
