Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary while former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumed frontrunner in the race, finished fifth.
Sanders is projected to win with roughly 26% of the vote, trailed closely by former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 24% and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar at 20%.
Biden, however, finished behind Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren with just 8% of the vote.
Biden fled the state before the results started to roll in and gave his primary night speech from South Carolina, which doesn’t vote for another two weeks, from a room that had no TVs to show the disappointing results.
“It ain’t over, man,” Biden said, after also coming in fourth in Iowa. “We just heard from the first two of 50 states. Two of them. Not all the nation, not half the nation, not a quarter of the nation, not 10 percent. Two. Two. Now, where I come from, that’s the opening bell, not the closing bell.”
“I want you all to think of a number: 99.9 percent,” Biden said. “That’s the percentage of African American voters who have not yet had a chance to vote in America. One more number: 99.8. That’s the number of percentage of Latino voters who haven’t had the chance to vote. So when you hear all these pundits and experts, cable TV talkers talking about the race, tell them, it ain’t over, man. We’re just getting started.”
But campaign worried:
“This is horrendous. We’re all scared,” an unnamed Biden adviser told Politico. “I think we’re going to make it to South Carolina. I know we’re supposed to say we’re going to and we’re going to win. But I just don’t know.”
“There’s blood in the water,” Quentin James, who runs a political committee that backs African-American candidates called The Collective, told the outlet. “Black voters are starting to leave him now … A big reason lots of black voters were with Biden is they thought he was the best person to beat Trump. And they thought one reason for that is that he had the support of white voters. Now they see he has done so poorly with white voters and he no longer looks like the electability candidate.”
Bloomberg rises as Biden sags:
While it was Buttigieg and Klobuchar sweeping up the moderate vote in New Hampshire, Mike Bloomberg has spent hundreds of millions to flood the airwaves with ads across the nation -- and it appears to be working.
A Quinnipiac poll published this week shows Bloomberg surging to 15% nationally while a Morning Consult poll similarly puts him in third place with 17%.
Though Biden still leads black voters with 27% in the Quinnipiac poll, Bloomberg is up to 22% support among black voters despite his stop-and-frisk scandal.
