Delayed Iowa Caucus Results Raise The Stakes In New Hampshire

Jim Smith steps out of a voting booth after marking his ballot at a polling site for the New Hampshire primary, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016, in Nashua, N.H.

Joe Mathieu is the anchor and executive editor of WGBH's Morning Edition. Before joining WGBH Radio, Joe worked for six years as morning anchor on WBZ NewsRadio in Boston, where he was part of the team that received a Peabody Award for coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings. Joe also received the Edward R. Murrow Award for best newscast in a major market.

February 05, 2020

Updated August 07, 2023

A new poll from Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire released on Tuesday shows former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders leading the pack of Democratic presidential candidate at 19 percent each. The numbers come, however, as results from the Iowa caucus continue to trickle in, putting candidates in an unprecedented position heading into the New Hampshire primary. WGBH Morning Edition host Joe Mathieu spoke with Saint Anselm associate professor of politics Chris Galdieri about how the results from Iowa might affect the first in the nation primary next week. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.

Joe Mathieu: These numbers are pretty consistent with other recent polls showing Bernie Sanders at the top in the New Hampshire primary. But how about Joe Biden? This would suggest that New Hampshire could be very important for him.

Chris Galdieri: It could. I think the Biden campaign cannot be pleased with how it did in Iowa earlier this week, so I think they're looking for New Hampshire as a place where they can, if not win, at least show to donors [and] supporters in later states that Biden is still viable and still in this thing. So it's a really crucial state for him going forward, I think.

Mathieu: A lot of talk about electability surrounding the Biden campaign. Is that the conversation in New Hampshire — to find a middle-of-the-road candidate who can beat Donald Trump in a general election?

Galdieri: Yeah, I think Democrats in New Hampshire, like Democrats in the rest of the country, are mainly focused on beating Trump in the fall. And I think there are an awful lot of Democrats who are willing to put everything else aside for a candidate they think can do that. So far, Biden has made a case that he's able to do that because he'll run strong in the industrial Midwest, in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that went for Trump in 2016 after being Democratic for many cycles. But I think a bad loss in Iowa calls that into question.

So I think their goal is to try to show that they're still in this, that they can still win the nomination and they're not just trying to hold on until South Carolina when the electorate gets much more diverse, where a lot of Biden's support seems to be.

Mathieu: Elizabeth Warren [is] in fourth place here. How does that compare to recent showings in this poll, Chris? What do you make of her fade in New Hampshire? Why isn't she doing better in her backyard?

Galdieri: Well, I think her campaign has generally been struggling to do well since about mid-September or so. She had that rise to the top of the polls early in the fall, and then for whatever reason that seemed to taper off, whether it was because she started talking about funding for health care in a way that made voters uncomfortable, whether it was because attention shifted back to Bernie Sanders after his heart attack or something else. So I think for Warren, New Hampshire becomes a really crucial state. I don't want to say that it's a do or die state for her, but if she does if she does place a distant fourth or worse in New Hampshire, I think she's really going to struggle to explain why she should continue her campaign on to later states when there are other candidates who are succeeding.

Mathieu: Chris, every four years we look to Iowa for some indicators. Of course, that's been confused by the results there. Is it making this year feel different in New Hampshire as a result?

Galdieri: It does. I think one of the things Iowa tends to do is give you a sense of in which candidates really are leading. Very often it leads candidates to drop out. You know, if you think back to four years ago or eight years ago or 12 years ago, there were candidates who seemed like they might have had a shot and ended really poorly in Iowa and ended their campaigns often by press release. This year, that didn't happen. So you had a candidate like Amy Klobuchar coming in fifth still acting like a winner on election night, giving the first speech of the night and taking an overnight flight into New Hampshire, just like the candidates who would place first and second did.