1. Bernie Sanders. I put him here because he’s favored to win Iowa, which would put him in a very good position to win NH. He’s doing well in CA, which starts voting today. We’d see, in this scenario, how strong Black voters in SC feel about Biden.
2. Joe Biden. If Bernie doesn’t win IA, Biden doesn’t need to. If he can pick up a bunch of second-place caucusers, he could finish a strong second. If he wins IA outright, he’s going to be in a great position to run the tables.
3. Elizabeth Warren. She needs to fill an inside straight, winning here
decisively enough to carry her to a win in NH. That’s a tall order, but
it’s possible.
Drawing dead: everyone else. No one has a plausible path to both win IA and then build on that momentum beyond it. Mayor Pete’s only potential early state win is IA, and Klobuchar just hasn’t got the runway to get off the ground, even if she does win IA. The dark horse candidacy of Bloomberg is also doomed. Once he is forced to interact with the other candidates, his faults will emerge. The idea you can stay out of the primaries until parachuting into Super Tuesday with enough juice to make a difference is, to my mind, fairly absurd. Even if you are sitting on a pile of cash that reaches to the moon.
Note: IA’s super weird. Iowans gather and vote, and any candidate not getting 15% is thrown into another round of voting AB their votes are distributed among those above that threshold. It can produce unexpected results. It’s precinct by precinct, so in some places Bernie, for example, won’t reach the threshold even if he’s doing great in other places. So stay tuned.
Drawing dead: everyone else. No one has a plausible path to both win IA and then build on that momentum beyond it. Mayor Pete’s only potential early state win is IA, and Klobuchar just hasn’t got the runway to get off the ground, even if she does win IA. The dark horse candidacy of Bloomberg is also doomed. Once he is forced to interact with the other candidates, his faults will emerge. The idea you can stay out of the primaries until parachuting into Super Tuesday with enough juice to make a difference is, to my mind, fairly absurd. Even if you are sitting on a pile of cash that reaches to the moon.
Note: IA’s super weird. Iowans gather and vote, and any candidate not getting 15% is thrown into another round of voting AB their votes are distributed among those above that threshold. It can produce unexpected results. It’s precinct by precinct, so in some places Bernie, for example, won’t reach the threshold even if he’s doing great in other places. So stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment