New Hampshire Forecast

After a three month break from blogging about the Republican race I updated my forecast last night just as the GOP debate was getting underway.  Nothing in the debate has caused me to adjust that latest prediction.  Rubio had a bad night but I don't think it will do any long term damage to him. He remains the favorite to be nominated.

The New Hampshire dynamic is sort of odd. Everyone knows the winner will be Donald Trump. The most intriguing questions are what percentage of the vote he will get, who the other top candidates from Iowa will do and who will emerge as the establishment alternative to all three of them. The most likely outcome is that Trump will win, and the 2nd through 7th spot will be a jumbled mix of establishment types, Rubio and Cruz.  Probably four or five of those six candidates will be bunched within a few points of each other.  So I'm going to focus on a range of possibilities.

What we know:
1. Trump will finish first.  If he doesn't, then his campaign is in free fall and he will quit by Wednesday.
2. Gilmore will finish 9th.
3. Fiorina will finish 8th.  If she somehow sneaks up to 7th, then Ben Carson really crashed hard.
4. Carson will finish 7th.  It's more and more obvious that he's not serious about winning and he's not qualified and he's not always lucid.  He will stick around for SC, if only to spite Ted Cruz for his dirty Iowa tricks.

What I'm Pretty Sure of:
1. Rubio and Cruz will be in the middle of the pack. If either of them comes 2nd, they will rightly declare victory. Short of that, the goal is to beat the other one> I give Rubio the inside track there. I think he's good for 3rd place at least and Cruz will probably not do better than 4th.
2.  Kasich might finish 2nd, and that would change the race. If Kasich finishes second, there are definitely four viable candidates heading to South Carolina. If he narrowly beats out Rubio for 2nd, then the conventional wisdom will be that the debate put him over the top.
3. Jeb will be in the middle of the pack but won't drop out. He could finish as bad as sixth place so he can craft anything higher than that as a semi-victory.  I think he presses on to SC now matter what and take the triple bank shot of hoping that his family name, quasi-southern background and the support of Lindsey Graham are enough to make him a contender there.

What We'll Learn on Tuesday Night.
1. Christie is probably toast.  If he finishes 5th or 6th, he will probably drop out. He finished 8th in Iowa and doesn't seem likely to do well in SC. But if he's top four in NH, he will try to soldier on as the establishment alternative.
2. Will Carson benefit from a Cruz backlash?  If he finishes higher than 7th it probably means that Cruz cratered and a lot of that will be blamed on the stunt that Cruz pulled in Iowa.
3. How big will Trump's win be?  Anything over 30% is big news. It means there is a very really swath of the party that buys his message and that he can compete anywhere that's not too heavily evangelical.

So my official predictions are this: Trump wins with 31%. Kasich and Rubio in a virtual tie (but with slightly more votes for Kasich than Rubio) for second at 16% ahead of Cruz in 4th and Bush in 5th.  Christie gets about 7% for sixth place and he bows out by Thursday. Carson gets around 5% of dead enders, Fiorina 3% and Gilmore (rounding up) gets 1%.

Oh yeah, the Democrats.
Bernie will win.  I'll put my official prediction at 56-44.  If it's much bigger than that, there will be panic in Clintonville.

Scoreboard.
In some ways, vote share is a bigger deal tomorrow night than the order in which the candidates finish. Both winners are all but certain. Here are the numbers to watch for:

1. Can Trump get over 30%
2. Can Rubio get close to 20%
3. Can Bernie approach 60%

Whoever hits the number above with the most to spare will be the biggest story of the night.  Other important numbers:

1. Whoever finishes last among Kasich, Christie and Bush is toast. If that person is Christie, he'll drop out. Bush will stick around for SC and Kasich probably will try to hang on for Super Tuesday though.
2. Any candidate who fails to break double digits tomorrow night is in trouble.
3. Cruz can treat 4th as a victory if he gets there.
4. Hillary will need to spin her defeat someway.  I remember Carville's line from 1992 was that Clinton won the Primary if you didn't count the counties that share a border with Paul Tsongas' home state of Massachusetts. Someone is juking the expected stats to come up with a new version of that silver lining.