The NPR Politics Podcast - Bernie Sanders Wins New Hampshire Democratic Primary

Episode Date: February 12, 2020

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has narrowly won the New Hampshire Democratic primary, as moderate voters split their voters between other candidates.Former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar both had strong showings in New Hampshire. The state's electorate is considerably older and whiter than that of the nearly all of the remaining contests. Despite this result, both candidates face an uphill climb to the nomination because of a dearth of support from voters of color.Former Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren both under-performed expectations. Neither secured any delegates in the state, with their vote totals falling below the necessary 15 percent threshold.This episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis and campaign correspondents Asma Khalid and Scott Detrow.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign. And I'm Scott Detrow, also covering the presidential campaign. And it is 11.47 p.m. on Tuesday, February 11th, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has won the New Hampshire primary. And let me say tonight that this victory here is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump. Sanders finished narrowly ahead of former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. So to win and to govern, we need to bring new voices to our Capitol.

We need to get Washington starting to work more like our best-run cities and towns rather than the other way around. And Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar placed a surprising third, stronger than expected. What we've done is steady, we've been strong, and we've never quit. I think that sounds pretty good for a president. So Scott, you're with the Bernie Sanders campaign, right? Yep, I am. The campaign staff just took a victory picture up on the stage, kind of like when teams win the Stanley Cup or another championship, all jumbled together. Definitely a good night for Sanders, but there does seem to be some debate over whether his win in New Hampshire was a really strong victory or not as strong as sort of his campaign was setting the expectations for.

Yeah, no, I think it was a strong victory. A win is a win. This is not a 20-point win like it was in 2016, but this is not 2016. That was a binary choice between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. This is an enormous field, even culled down from where it was at peak of two dozen at one point. His campaign had no expectations that this was going to be a big win along the lines of 2016. I'd say they were confident all along they would come in first. But I took them at word.

I don't think it was just spin when they said, no, we expect this to be tight. And Buttigieg, Asma, you're with the Buttigieg campaign? That's right. How did they explain their second place finish? I mean, people here were really happy happy and this felt like a victory party. A lot of folks I talked to before the results had come in said that they felt like a strong second place finish would be good. And again, I don't think that was spin on their behalf. I mean, they had said for a long time neighbors tend to do well in New Hampshire.

They've seen a history of that. And this election cycle, there were two neighbors, Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. And so they just felt like coming in this close was a really strong finish. Does it look like now coming out of Iowa, where Sanders and Buttigieg again were first and second place, although I know Iowa hasn't fully been declared yet, that that is what this race is sort of shaping up to be? So I am somewhat skeptical still that this is really a two person race. Actually, I'm largely very skeptical, but to be honest, and I say that in part because for a long time, Joe Biden's campaign has been criticizing the demographic nature of the first two states. They have suggested that Iowa and New Hampshire

are just far, far too white compared to what the Democratic Party's base looks like. And that's true. This evening in South Carolina, Joe Biden made the point that 99.9 percent of black voters haven't actually voted yet. And some 99.8 percent of Latino primary voters haven't voted yet either in the Democratic primary. You can't be the Democratic nominee and you can't win a general election as Democrat unless you have overwhelming support from black and brown voters. It's just really simple. No, it's a natural fact. It's true. We have not heard from large chunks of the electorate. And why I think that that matters is that Biden does seem to poll significantly better with communities of color. And if you're looking at Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, they don't yet seem to have a support base in a variety of communities of color. And Sue, that's why I think that even though Bernie Sanders has peaked around about 26%

in these first two contests, things look really good for him going forward. There is a traffic jam on the other ideological side of this race, and no one is really contending with Bernie Sanders on the progressive side. We're going to talk about Elizabeth Warren in a little bit, I bet. And going forward, the terrain looks really good for Bernie Sanders. He's got a lot of support in Nevada with Latino voters, especially with rank-and-file union members. And he is far ahead of any of the other candidates,

aside from Mike Bloomberg, in money spent in the Super Tuesday states, in time on the ground, time organizing the Super Tuesday states. And that matters because a third of the delegates will be handed out on March 3rd. There is not much time for A.B. Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg and the others to sort themselves out of who's going to rise to the top. And to echo Scott there, I mean, I think that in some ways, Bernie Sanders' strength with communities of color hasn't even fully been explored yet. I did some reporting on Nevada with Latino communities. And what is maybe sort of undervalued

at this point is this election cycle, because California and Texas are both going to be voting on Super Tuesday, which is right at the beginning of March. You have a situation where Latino voters could hold more clout than they've had in previous election cycles. It's not just about the strength of African-American voters and which candidate does best there. In some ways, you could say that Amy Klobuchar had a winning night, too, because no one really anticipated her having this surge in the close and proves that these debates really do matter when voters making up their minds. She did have a strong night. She beat out Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. You know, but I think the question sort of I have is that her strength,

you could argue, cost Pete Buttigieg a possible upset over Bernie Sanders because you do have this muddling, crowded path in the middle, and there hasn't been a clear moderate to overtake one another. And had she perhaps not seen that surge, maybe Pete Buttigieg would have had even a stronger night tonight. Though I do think it's important to qualify there that as much as we talk about the ideological lanes, voters are humans and they have gut instincts. And we saw a lot of evidence that Amy Klobuchar maybe took just as much from Elizabeth Warren as she did from Pete Buttigieg. Elizabeth Warren finishing in a disappointing fourth Buttigieg. Elizabeth Warren finishing

in a disappointing fourth place with 9%. And we heard from a lot of voters who were on the fence between the two of them especially and went to Klobuchar in the end, particularly because of her strong stretch of the last few days and feeling like, I want to go with someone who could be a viable candidate and who can go up against Donald Trump. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk about the underperformers in the primary tonight and say bye-bye-bye to a couple other candidates. Some of the greatest artists in music have played behind NPR Music's Tiny Desk. Could you be next? Enter the Tiny Desk contest by submitting a video of you playing an original song behind a desk. If you win, you'll get to

play a Tiny Desk concert. Learn more at npr.org slash tiny desk contest. And we're back. And let's talk about Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden. Neither reached a necessary 15 percent threshold to get any delegates coming out of New Hampshire. And for Warren, I think this is particularly surprising because she had a geographical advantage too. I mean, given the fact that these are the two candidates who dominated most of the conversation in 2019, it is just stunning to me that in the first primary,

neither of them hit that 15% mark. It's just a remarkable storyline of what's happened in both of their campaigns. I found Elizabeth Warren's finish perhaps even more shocking because as somebody who has spent a lot of time around Boston, New Hampshire is the Boston media market. I mean, she's a known figure here, and I would argue in some ways perhaps even a more known figure at times than Bernie Sanders because there's just so much media overflow between Boston and southern New Hampshire.

And so, you know, she spent a lot of time here, her campaign, a lot of resources here, and she had been getting really popular receptions at some of the larger cattle calls. So it's just a very quick sort of change of fortune to see her come in and not even capture any delegates. Is there a sense of where that war and support went? I think as Scott hinted earlier, some of it seems to have gone to Amy Klobuchar. In anecdotal conversations and interviews I've done with voters, some of it also seems to have gone to Pete Buttigieg. I heard from a voter here tonight at Pete Buttigieg's party that he had really liked Elizabeth Warren early on. He thought she was really smart, liked that she had a plan for everything. But over

time, he felt like Buttigieg's plans felt more pragmatic. And he said, just sort of realistic. And that's kind of the short-term story of what happened to her support. The long-term story is that there was an open question of who the progressive left would go with in a race with both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in it. And for a long time last year, it seemed like there might be a split or that Warren might get a lot of it. In the end, though, the progressive left really came home to Bernie Sanders. The campaign points to one moment as really speeding that up and solidifying them. And that is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsing Bernie Sanders in October,

right after he suffered that heart attack, raising lots of questions about what would happen next. She backs him. They have a massive rally with more than 20,000 people. And they feel like from that moment forward, they were gaining on Elizabeth Warren in that world of voters. There was also this moment tonight. She was one of the candidates who came out the earliest to speak. And there was this moment where I thought, wow, is she going to suspend her campaign? And she did the opposite. She made this very forceful speech in which she made it clear she's not planning on getting out of the race anytime soon. We're two states in with 55 states and territories to go. We still have 98 percent of our delegates for our nomination up

for grabs and Americans in every part of the country are going to make their voices heard. That's right. The question is how much longer can Warren stay in the race if she's coming in for third, fourth, fifth in these contests? The question when you have, you know, a third or fourth place finish is that sometimes your money dries up, right? Fundraising dries up, especially if you're not doing high dollar fundraisers, as she's not been doing. But, you know, I feel like maybe part of why she wants to stay in this race is when you look at some of the states further along, Warren has made a lot of outreach specifically to women of color. And this has kind of been an interesting underreported story of this cycle. And I would sort of conjecture and say that she looks around and sees someone like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar

who have an even more uphill battle in some of these more diverse states. And they feel like because they've had campaign operations in some of these other states that perhaps they could do better than what they did tonight. And Scott Joe Biden, it was such a bad night for him. He left New Hampshire early. I'm just looking at the results on one of the TV screens in front of me and thinking that Joe Biden finished closer to Andrew Yang

than he did to that top tier of candidates. And this is the candidate who based his entire pitch on electability. Now, twice in a row, he is fading. And yeah, the candidate who based his entire pitch on electability. Now, twice in a row, he is fading. And yeah, let's talk about that for a moment. His campaign announced early in the morning, like mid-morning, after the polls had only been open for two or three hours, that he was leaving New Hampshire and was going to hold a rally in South Carolina. And especially given what we know about how many voters were really weighing their decision up until the last minute, that just sends a signal, i'm not even competing here i expect to do poorly

and i wonder how much of the vote that cost him and then later in the day anita dunn one of his top advisors is on all things considered and she says oh no joe biden is still in the state of new hampshire well then why do you signal that you're going to leave the state and basically retreat that early in the day? I think that was an enormous mistake. That is a partial reason why he cannot break double digits tonight. It just puts so much more pressure on Biden to win in South Carolina, too, because if he can't win there, he seems to be putting all chips in on South Carolina. And that's risky because there is another contest in between now and South Carolina.

And in addition to that, you have Super Tuesday, where so many states will be voting very shortly after South Carolina. Tonight, we also saw two candidates suspend their campaigns. The Democratic field is now down to nine candidates. One of them, businessman Andrew Yang, dropped out of the race. Return of the Mac. This was his walk-on song, so we play it to honor him. And another exit from the race, Colorado Senator Michael Bennett,

who I will remember most for a tweet in which he said, if you elect me president, I promise you won't have to think about me for long stretches of time. A pitch that I thought might have had more resonance with voters than it actually did in the end. I personally am very drawn to that pitch. All right. Well, you guys need to get some sleep and we need to leave it there for tonight. As Asma noted, the Nevada caucus is next up. It's on Saturday, February 22nd. We'll be following it every step of the way. And of course, we'll be back in your feeds tomorrow night. Until then, I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign. And I'm Scott Detrow, also covering that presidential campaign. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.