The most important fact is that every winning president in the last 40 years – with the exception of Bill Clinton – has won either Iowa or New Hampshire, so the losers from last week feel a particularly acute sense of urgency to be victorious. The campaign did not, for example, have cellphones and call lists ready, so volunteers could reach out to voters.
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That reality is thickening the blizzard of attacks blanketing the Granite State because some candidates know that the primary could set the contours of the race for those who move on and snuff out the White House dreams of some Republicans who falter on Tuesday.
In total, Republican candidates and super PACs ran at least 16 different television ads attacking Trump that aired almost 2,500 times. Like all the flash-in-the pan candidates who we have seen over the past few years, his campaign would come and go as soon as the media lost interest. “It’s a lie. Don’t believe it”, he said.
But Trump defied the conventional wisdom. The most important questions have centered on the weakness of his grass-roots operation.
While Rubio recovered later in the debate, the timing of his performance was awful, coming three days before New Hampshire Republicans register their choices on Tuesday in the nation’s second nominating contest.
“I know I’m behind”, Clinton, who trails Sanders in New Hampshire, said on CNN’s “State of the Union”. At the same event in Plymouth, he reaffirmed his support for reviving the waterboarding of terrorism suspects and, if necessary, doing “much worse”. I’ve dismissed the complaints from journalists: Most voters will never listen to Rubio’s stump speech a couple of times, and they don’t care that he has given those answers before. The non-Truz (Trump + Cruz) pack of candidates remains sizable and many of them could still be formidable competitors, with serious fundraising abilities and extensive campaign skills.
Responding to a volley of critical tweets and comments from Jeb Bush, Donald Trump on Monday called his rival – the son of one president and brother of another – an “embarrassment to his family”.
On stage Saturday night with Carson and the other candidates, Cruz qualified his onstage apology, blaming CNN for the initial report.
Nonetheless, the debate haunted Rubio on Sunday.
In Christie’s desperate last days in New Hampshire, he’s tried a kind of whiplash strategy, playing two seemingly opposite things at once. In many respects, it might be their last chance.
For Egan, the standouts of the night were Kasich, Christie and Bush.
John Kasich, the governor of OH, who has invested his time in this state, gladly grabbed the share of the spotlight he had after the debate.
He also noted that in New Hampshire, some of his opponents “have invested all of their resources in one place”, and acknowledged, “that’s a challenge”.
All of them filled their calendars with campaign events in SC, the next state to vote, signaling they had no intention of dropping out no matter the verdict in New Hampshire.
No sooner had Ted Cruz’s long-winded Iowa caucus acceptance speech ended when headlines began to appear about the Cruz campaign’s many dirty tricks against the Ben Carson campaign and to a lesser extent the Donald Trump campaign.
With former candidate Sen.
Democrats are just as interested in that independent vote.
Trump’s $750,000 of broadcast advertising in SC buys to date leaves him the eighth biggest spender among the candidates and conservative PACs.
When he accused Christie of having to be shamed into going back to New Jersey to deal with the recent snowstorm, Christie came roaring back.
He also said his youth was an asset in the race, and declared: “I haven’t lived as long as some of the people running for president, but I’ve done more than majority”, he told Holt. That’s a shift in Sanders’ favor since the start of the poll, when the split was 61% Sanders to 25% Clinton.
But because of a quirk in how the state party allocates delegates, and how fractured the “establishment” field is, it could mean that an anti-Trump vote will actually be a vote for the NY billionaire.
“There’s a difference between campaign rhetoric and when you govern”.
Over the weekend, a pair of prominent Clinton supporters criticized female voters who support Sanders despite the prospect of electing the first female president.
“My weakest support is with very rich people”. Sanders faces another challenge in that New Hampshire has very low poverty rates and the economy is pretty strong, counteracting his emphasis on inequality and the economic woes of the 99%.
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“Well, that’s the reason why this campaign is so important”.
