Looking at vote totals in NH, Sanders was the top vote-getter by far, racking up a tally of 138,716 votes with 92 percent of the returns in, compared to Trump’s 2nd place finish of 92,417 votes. Clinton received 88,827, followed by Kasich’s 41,813 votes.
Of the more than half of a million ballots cast and 92 percent of the ballots counted, all of the Republican candidates together received more than 30 thousand more votes than the two Democratic candidates together.
Trump did well with white working class voters, while Sanders did even better. As Patrick Healey notes in his NYT article, “New Hampshire Takeaways: Trust, Experience and Message Count“:

In the 2008 Democratic primaries, Mrs. Clinton beat Mr. Obama in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other states partly because of solid support from working-class white voters. But Mr. Sanders prevailed with these voters in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Sixty-eight percent of white noncollege graduates supported him, as did 65 percent of people from families earning less than $50,000. On the Republican side, the same groups of voters broke strongly for Mr. Trump.

That would be 68 percent of white non college Democratic voters supporting Sanders. CNN Exit polling indicates Clinton received 30 percent of white Democratic voters with no college degree. Clearly, Sanders received more white working class votes than did any other candidate of either party.
Trump won with 41 percent of white Republican voters with no college degree, while Kasich received 12 percent of non college white Republican votes, as did Cruz. The rest of the GOP presidential candidates split the remaining 34 percent of the white working class Republican vote in NH.
Sen. Sanders clearly has traction with this often pivotal demographic group. It appears that he has struck a potent concern of white workers with his emphasis on reforms to rectify economic injustice and curb corporate political power. It will be interesting to see if his message resonates as the primary campaign heads south. It looks like the Clinton campaign needs stronger messaging to address these concerns.

The latest NH polls (here and here, for example) indicate possible double-digit victory margins for Sanders and Trump, with all of the caveats that apply for small survey samples and NH voters’ notorious proclivity for confounding pollsters.
For Republicans, the value of the late polls are also limited by the timing, which didn’t reflect the full effects of media buzz about the Rubio meltdown, nor the Christie or Kasich media/poll boomlets.
Looking at the worst-case scenario for the Clinton campaign, even a blowout in NH won’t diminish her prospects much in the longer run, since she still runs well in recent national polls. At most the NH results may serve as a flag for what may need to be tweaked in messaging, ground game, tone, policy and other strategic considerations. That’s likely the most useful function of the early primaries for all candidates.
That said, there will be contributions bumps for NH primary winners, with amounts depending on the margin of victory. Also, even a few delegates can swing a party nomination in a close one-on-one race.
But The media will soon be focusing on the coming month of party primaries in megastates that have large numbers of delegates, and the NH results will fade into anecdotal obscurity. These primaries will include four of the twelve most populous states, Texas, Virginia and Georgia, all on March 1st, ‘Super Tuesday’ and Michigan on March 8. There will also be closed caucuses in interesting purple states, like Nevada (Feb. 20), and Colorado on March 1.
Here’s the full primary calendar over the next month, with number of delegates, at-large delegates (in parenthesis) and type of primary/caucus for each state (More details here):

February 20, 2016

Nevada 35 (8) Closed caucus

February 27, 2016

South Carolina 53 (6) Open primary

March 1, 2016

Alabama 53 (7) Open primary;
American Samoa 6 (4) Closed caucus;
Arkansas 32 (5) Open primary;
Colorado 66 (13) Closed caucus;
March 1-8, 2016 Democrats Abroad 13 (4) Closed primary;
Georgia 102 (14) Open primary;
Massachusetts 91 (25) Semi-closed primary;
Minnesota 77 (16) Open caucus;
Oklahoma 38 (4) Semi-closed primary;
Tennessee 67 (9) Open primary;
Texas 222 (30) Open primary;
Vermont 16 (8) Open primary;
Virginia 95 (15) Open primary;

March 5, 2016

Louisiana 51 (7) Closed primary;
Nebraska 25 (5) Closed caucus;
Kansas 33 (4) Closed caucus

March 6, 2016

Maine 25 (5) Closed caucus

March 8, 2016

Mississippi 36 (5) Open primary; Michigan 130 (19) Open primary

Three or four days from now, after most of the post-primary analysis has been exhausted, the NH primary results will seem largely inconsequential — especially compared to Super Tuesday.

The pundit consensus regarding the final Republican presidential candidate debate before the NH primary is that poll front-runners Trump and Cruz did OK, despite the booing of The Donald, which had the unsavory whiff of a GOP establishment set-up. As Ed Kilgore noted, “Trump’s joke about the audience being heavily composed of Bush’s famously numerous donors rang pretty true.” Perhaps the Trump team’s shoddy advance work made it possible for the Bush campaign to dominate the audience. Still, adds Kilgore, Trump “did well in no small part by failing to be the center of attention,” and it’s likely that the debate didn’t entirely eradicate Trump’s formidable lead in the late NH polls.
NYT’s Alan Rappeport has a round-up of quick takes on the GOP candidate debate, including this nugget from Jessica Mackler, president of Democratic Super PAC American Bridge: “The Rubiobot got stuck on repeat, offering nothing but canned talking points, and still had no answer when challenged on his lack of accomplishments and failure to show up for work. He needed a big night tonight, but a system glitch had him short-circuiting.” You can find scathing reviews of Rubio’s performance pretty much everywhere. “Once Impervious, Marco Rubio Is Diminished by a Caustic Chris Christie,” read the Sunday Times above-the-fold headline. At Rubio’s expense, Christie showed he has the chops to go for the adversary’s jugular, if not the adequate likability needed to be an effective running mate.
The Democratic debate, on the other hand, was more substantial than the GOP’s demolition derby. From Michael Tomasky’s Daily Beast Post on the final Democratic debate in NH “Finally, a Debate That Voters Deserve“: “That was one of the best debates I’ve ever watched. The questions were (mostly) good and tough and not stupid, and Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow did a really good job of steering it without getting in the way. Both candidates were good. Very good. There were a few tough moments, a few tender moments. It was real. I don’t know if it changed the dynamic in New Hampshire, but it did suggest one possible path for Hillary Clinton to narrow Bernie Sanders’s huge lead so that we might see some drama next Tuesday after all.”
Despite some heated exchanges in the Democratic debate, The Guardian’s Richard Wolfe commended both candidates on their civility: “Bernie’s best moment – once again – was his mensch-like refusal to attack Clinton on the email saga. In fact, he stated publicly that he rejects repeated media requests to do just that…The moderators tried to lure Clinton into a similar attack on Sanders, about the number of apparent ethical questions surrounding Sanders staffers. She politely declines the opportunity to jump in, before the debate breaks for yet another ad break…After a debate in which both candidates have taken their gloves off, this was easily their most dignified moment.”
At PoliticusUSA RMuse shares a sobering thought on health care reform: “It is worth reminding Americans that if private insurance companies were not part of “Obamacare,” like they are part of Medicare and Medicaid, there would be no healthcare reform whatsoever. In fact, what seems lost on the “EmoProg” movement is that even with private insurance company involvement in “Obamacare,” Medicare, and Medicaid, Republicans have spent the past nearly six years doing everything in their considerable power to get rid of not only Obamacare, but Medicare as well. One is just baffled beyond comprehension why anyone in America would think for a second that any Republican will ever support raising trillions in taxes to fund a “Medicare for all” system; arguably a government socialized system when they want any healthcare system eviscerated.”
At The Washington Post Mike Debonis reports that “Flint water crisis emerges as a key piece of Democrats’ election-year message.” Dems should also project the crisis as ‘exhibit A’ evidence for the urgent need for infrastructure upgrades in stark contrast to the Republicans policy of infrastructure neglect and abandonment.
NYT columnist Charles M. Blow probes the Clinton campaign’s inadequate traction with younger voters and observes “Clinton is running an I-Have-Half-A-Dream campaign. That simply doesn’t inspire young people brimming with the biggest of dreams. Clinton’s message says: Aim lower, think smaller, move slower. It says, I have more modest ambitions, but they are more realistic.”
Sen. Sanders open embrace of ‘democratic socialism’ may resonate positively with younger voters, though it is likely more of a liability with older voters. Catherine Rampell notes in her Washington Post column that “respondents younger than 30 were the only group that rated socialism more favorably than capitalism (43 percent vs. 32 percent, respectively)” in a recent Yougov poll conducted January 25-27, while a Gallup poll conducted June 2-7 last year found that “34 percent of respondents age 65 and older said they would be willing to vote for a socialist, compared with about twice that level among respondents younger than 30.”
Every candidate should try to get a healthy share of young voters. But the significant lag in youth voter turnout even in presidential elections revealed in this chart from the U.S. Elections Project, may help explain why some candidates are more focused on older voters:

As the Democratic presidential nominating contest gets tense after the photo-finish in Iowa, it brings back memories of past post-Iowa “moments” that turned out to be dramatic and consequential. I wrote about one of them–the so-called “Dean Scream” of 2004–at New York, with some warnings for the 2016 candidates:

One of the fruits of ESPN’s acquisition of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight is the capacity to produce films, and so the wonky “data journalism” site has produced for our post-Iowa enjoyment a brief video look back at the “Dean Scream” — the iconic moment on the night of the Iowa caucuses when the soon-to-be-former Democratic presidential front-runner appeared to be losing it.
With footage featuring Dean himself, well-known figures from his 2004 campaign like Joe Trippi and Tricia Enright, and even John Kerry staffers like Stephanie Cutter and Mary Beth Cahill, the film doesn’t break new ground, but it might be a revelation to those who weren’t around or paying close attention to politics 12 years ago. In short, “the Scream” (a litany of states Dean promised to go into and win, followed by a fist-pumping “Ahhhhh” or “Yeeehaahhh!” depending on your interpretation of inarticulate noises) was largely an illusion created by TV mics that picked up Dean’s voice but not the incredibly noisy crowd in the Val Air Ballroom in Des Moines. Rather than reflecting some unhinged aspect of the candidate’s personality, his speech was actually a direct reflection of what he was told to say by his most important Iowa backer, then-senator Tom Harkin. And far from killing Dean’s campaign, it simply placed an exclamation point on the disaster of a third-place Iowa finish for the man who had become a national front-runner not too many weeks earlier. Questionable campaign-resource allocations, momentarily positive news from Iraq, and some shrewd moves by Dean’s opponents had a lot more to do with the demise of his candidacy that the debatable effect of a single speech.
But as Silver & Co. note in a chat about the film, what “the Scream” actually did was reinforce a powerful media narrative that was already emerging about Dean as an “angry man” leading an emotional but not terribly responsible antiwar movement. And so it was probably one of the earliest videos to go viral, inspiring countless comedy routines, music videos, and even weather reports (“And then the storm’s going to hit South Dakota, and then Minnesota, and then Wisconsin! Yeeehaahhh!”). And eventually the narrative completely overwhelmed the facts, and people “remember” “the Scream” as having devastated a presidential candidacy.
The lesson of “the Scream” seems to be that strong media narratives about a candidacy don’t need much fuel to burn brightly, and evocative moments that reinforce them can quickly become iconic and hard to shake. Silver guesses Donald Trump could be the victim of something similar if, like Dean, he continues to underperform expectations and confirm the original suspicion that he’s not a viable candidate. But I dunno: Trump’s already overcome so many supposedly fatal “moments” in debates and speeches that it’s hard to imagine him being felled by such a blunt object as a video. Looking back at Dean’s campaign, it’s hard to avoid the similarities between his kiddie crusade and Bernie Sanders’s; Bernie’s youth brigades in Iowa could be the youngest brothers and sisters (or nieces and nephews) of the orange-hat hordes that flooded the state for Dean in 2004. Lucky for Sanders, his young supporters don’t seem to have freaked out older Iowans quite the way Dean’s did. And on caucus night, Sanders more or less gave his stock speech rather than a pep talk (it helps distinguish him from Dean that he was not conceding defeat).
But there’s no question elements of the media and political opponents alike would love to depict Bernie as an aging, strident ideologue serving as a pied piper to uninhibited and “idealistic” youth. And he already has a tendency to speak loudly (I’ve been advised by one acquaintance that drawing attention to Sanders’s volume as a speaker is an anti-Semitic dog whistle, but having grown up around some very loud southern Baptists, I just don’t buy it). A “Scream” moment is always a possibility.
Howard Dean might warn his fellow Vermonter about his experience, but the irony is that Dean (and for that matter, the instigator of “the Scream,” Tom Harkin) is supporting Clinton; in FiveThirtyEight’s film he returns to Iowa for the first time since “the Scream” to thump the tubs for Hillary. So maybe Dean and Harkin can advise their candidate that she, too, should beware of images and utterances that reinforce negative media narratives. Someone on her team should be assigned a full-time job watching for and heading off “gotcha” moments that suggest she’s dishonest.

Media narratives are always restlessly in search of validation, And nothing does that quite like video. Candidates beware,

Last night’s debate between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders suggests that the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination could go the distance. No matter who wins the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, the readiness of both candidates for the long haul is striking. I would be surprised if either candidate put it away before the summer.
A couple of interesting observations from Alan Rapport’s New York Times round up, “Who Won the Debate? Critics Are as Split as the Candidates“:

“Powerful ending by Sanders. There’s an undeniable decency to him that you don’t often see at this level of American politics.” — Ezra Klein, founder of Vox.com
“Crucial distinction between Bernie and Hillary on Flint: She suggests solutions, he demands punishments.” — Charlotte Alter, writer for Time.
“Both made strong attacks, and both defended effectively. This was the most intense debate of the entire cycle, possibly foreshadowing an epic, long-running series of face-to-face contests alternating with primaries and caucuses well into the spring.” —Mark Halperin, managing editor of Bloomberg Politics

Sanders scored on his emphasis on getting corporate money out of politics, regulating Wall Street and calling for fair trade policies to protect jobs. Clinton showed impressive acumen on foreign policy, was confident and eloquent on a range of issues and zinged Sanders for his five votes against the Brady bill.
Recent polling indicates that Sanders holds a strong lead in New Hampshire. But, as he noted during the debate, the early primary states don’t contribute a lot of delegates to the number needed to clinch the nomination, though they could be pivotal in a close race.
The early primary wins do impact fund-raising in a favorable way. Phillip Bump observes at The Washington Post, that following the debate, “The fourth-most-Googled question about Bernie Sanders is how can I give him money…Getting a voter to try and figure out how to give is a dream come true for any campaign. Having it trend on Google? Insane.”
The Politico Caucus, “a panel of top operatives and activists in the early nominating states,” gave Sanders the edge in the debate. But 65 percent of them said that Sanders would “lose in a landslide “to the Republican nominee.
Who “won” the debate is certainly less important than winning the election next week. But rest assured that this contest will intensify in the months ahead, regardless. By affirming their mutual respect for each other in every debate and their willingness to support their Democratic adversary against any Republican, both candidates can serve the cause of party unity, even as they define their differences.

With so much attention paid to determining “who won” the Iowa Caucuses, and how irregularities may have affected the outcome, it’s important not to forget about what we did learn about the striking and entirely complementary strengths and weaknesses of the two Democratic candidates. I looked at some of the numbers and their implications yesterday at New York:

As Eric Levitz noted in the wee hours of Caucus Night, Sanders won the under-30 portion of caucus participants by an astonishing 70 points, 84 to 14. That’s unprecedented, best we can tell. Barack Obama, the model for Bernie’s campus-based youth-mobilization effort in Iowa, won only 57 percent of the under-30 crowd in Iowa, albeit against more opponents.
Unfortunately for Sanders, his overwhelming strength in this one demographic was fully offset by his weaknesses elsewhere. There was, in fact, a direct correlation of age to likelihood to caucus for Hillary Clinton, who lost those aged 30 to 44 by a 37/58 margin, but then won the 45 to 64 cohort 58/35 and those 65 and over by 69/26. And as Ron Brownstein observes, older folks tend to show up:

[W]hen it comes to piling up votes, one of these demographic advantages is much more useful than the other. Across all of the 2008 contests, according to [Gary] Langer’s calculations, voters older than 45 cast fully 61 percent of Democratic votes, while those younger than 45 cast 39 percent. That’s an advantage for Clinton. And it’s a slightly worrisome note for Sanders — a cloud passing on an otherwise sunny day — that young voters cast a slightly smaller share of the total Iowa Democratic vote in 2016 than 2008.
And Sanders’s potential weakness in post-New Hampshire primaries was evidenced by his nearly two-to-one loss in the small segment of Iowa caucus participants who were not white.

What Brownstein calls the “Grand Canyon-sized” generation gap in the Democratic nomination contest is likely to significantly erode Hillary Clinton’s advantage among women, much as Barack Obama’s appeal to African-Americans did in 2008. But in the later primaries, in both the South and big states like New York, California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, minority voter support for Clinton will, unless something changes, significantly erode Bernie’s advantage among younger voters as well.
The question in the long run is whether these disparate intraparty bases of support will hang together in a general election on behalf of the eventual nominee. Certainly similar cleavages in 2008 did not keep Barack Obama from assembling what we now know as the Obama Coalition of young and minority voters and certain categories of women. Since young voters are the most marginal electoral participants of them all, Team Clinton should be especially worried that under-30 voters won’t turn out for her in a general election. Indeed, some Republicans fantasize about stealing the youth vote behind a candidate like Marco Rubio, with his whole new-generation, aspirational message (offset, to be sure, by a Reagan-era economic outlook and a Cold War zest for militarism). This is another reason Hillary should be careful about letting her competition with Bernie Sanders become too savage.

It later occurred to me that Sanders and Clinton were like two people holding ends of a wishbone representing the Obama Coalition. Where exactly they divide it may well determine the nomination. But putting it back together in the fall will matter most.

Now that the Democratic presidential nomination contest is winnowed down to two candidates, both of whom have strong appeal to different constituencies, it is useful to consider strategies for each of them. At Vox David Roberts has a post, “Give a little thought to what a GOP campaign against Bernie Sanders might look like,” that merits a sober reading and discussion.
If Sanders wins the nomination, Democrats will be challenged by a range of strategic considerations. As Roberts explains:

… The left insurgent candidate, Bernie Sanders, has also had a mostly free ride…If you say something like this on social media, you’ll be beset by furious Sanders supporters. (If there’s one thing it’s easy to do on social media, it’s get yourself beset by furious Sanders supporters.) But it remains true that Sanders has faced very few serious attacks.

Sanders supporters will respond by noting the criticism by Clinton and other moderates has been pretty tough. Yet he has had a pretty easy ride compared to what is coming, should he win the nomination. “But c’mon,” says Roberts. “This stuff is patty-cakes compared with the brutalization he would face at the hands of the right in a general election…His supporters would need to recalibrate their umbrage-o-meters in a serious way.”
Roberts reminds Dems that the Republicans are highly-skilled at criticizing Democrats. That’s why they continue to hold their House majority and dominate a healthy majority of governorships and state legislatures. They have been relatively easy on Sanders so far because they hope he wins, believing, wrongly or rightly, that he will be easier for them to defeat. Further, says Roberts,

But if he wins, they will rain down fire.
And the organs of the right will feel absolutely no obligation to be fair. They’re not going to be saying, like Sanders’s Democratic critics, “Aw, Bernie, you dreamer.”
They’re going to be digging through his trash, investigating known associates, rifling through legal records…They’re going to ask struggling middle-class workers how they feel about a trillion dollars in new taxes to fund a grand socialist scheme to take away everyone’s health care insurance and hand them over to government doctors.
They’re going to ask when he stopped being a communist, and when he objects that he was never a communist they’re going to ask why he’s so defensive about his communist past, why he’s so eager to avoid the questions that have been raised, the questions that people are talking about.
And when Sanders and his supporters splutter that it’s inaccurate and unjust and outrageous, the right will not give a single fuck.

Roberts reviews Sanders’ vulnerabilities, including his age. The Republicans will relentlessly characterize him as a tax-loving Socialist Boogeyman, because they believe, not without some evidence, that meme repetition eventually sinks in, regardless of the validity, especially when it is not well-challenged. Dems need to be ready for this.
“…Based on my experience,” adds Roberts, “the Bernie legions are not prepared. They seem convinced that the white working class would rally to the flag of democratic socialism. And they are in a state of perpetual umbrage that Sanders isn’t receiving the respect he’s due, that he’s facing even mild attacks from Clinton’s camp…More vicious attacks are inevitable, and that no one knows how Sanders might perform with a giant political machine working to define him as an unhinged leftist…His followers should not yet feel sanguine about his ability to endure conservative attacks. Also they should get a thicker skin, quick.”
If Roberts is overstating the naiveté of the Sanders campaign, he is surely right about the viciousness of attacks yet to come. The viciousness will also be amplified if Clinton wins the nomination. But Clinton is battle-tested and she has amassed a very tough and experienced team of political operatives, who could help Sanders, should he win the Democratic nomination.
Sanders is a smart, tough guy and he didn’t get this far by being a pussycat. But he’s going to need all of his personal strengths to overcome the Republicans’ disciplined messaging and bottomless economic resources, if he is nominated. Equally important, argues Roberts, he will have to make sure his staff is not too thin-skinned nor unprepared for the tsunami of vitriol, onslaught of distractions and dirty tricks that would be headed their way.
Properly prepared, Sanders can beat any of the Republicans, all of whom all have glaring weaknesses begging to be exploited. No matter which Democratic candidate wins the nomination, the talents, manpower and economic resources of the Democratic adversary in the coming primaries will be essential for victory in November.

Facebook may be rife with bickering between the supporters of Sanders and Clinton, but the candidates displayed impressive civility at last night’s Democratic forum, even as they put the heat on each other. Eric Bradner’s “6 takeaways from CNN’s Democratic town hall” at CNN Politics provides a good synopsis.
Looking forward to tonight’s Democratic debate in NH, Trip Gabriel, among other NYT political reporters, observes: “After Mrs. Clinton overwhelmingly — even shockingly — lost millennial voters in Iowa by 70 points to Mr. Sanders, I’ll be watching to see if she turns the focus from her résumé — a misty past beyond the recall of voters under 30 — toward the future, offering an optimistic vision of what she hopes to accomplish. Conversely, because Mr. Sanders lost seniors in Iowa by 43 points, I want to see if he tailors his message to try to bridge some of the gap.”
The Republican presidential candidate field just shrunk by two more candidates, with Sen. Rand Paul and former Sen. Rick Santorum bailing out, eliminating the need for a “kiddie table” going forward.
Trump and Rubio crank up the shameless Muslim-bashing in NH, blasting the President for daring to affirm religious tolerance and freedom at a Baltimore Mosque.
At U.S. News Matthew Dickinson writes, “In the pivotal state of New Hampshire, which holds its first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 9, roughly 44 percent of voters are not affiliated with either major party. This makes them eligible to vote in either party’s primary – but not in both. In contrast, Democrats make up about 26 percent of registered voters, and Republicans 30 percent. While Sanders’ core constituency is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, New Hampshire polls indicate that he runs particularly strong there among younger voters, those who did not vote in the 2008 or 2012 New Hampshire primaries and among independents. Trump tends to do better among lower-educated blue collar workers, but like Sanders polls indicate he also does slightly better among undeclared voters and among those who did not vote in the two previous New Hampshire presidential primaries. In short, both candidates are positioning themselves as political outsiders running against the party establishment, and as a consequence, they are partly trying to appeal to the same group of independent voters.”
WaPo’s Phillip Bump addresses an interesting question, “Should Bernie Sanders get credit for making the Democratic party more liberal?” I agree with Bump that the trend was well underway before Sanders’s candidacy, but credit him with driving the party’s policies a notch or two to the left.
Hats off to one of the greatest Democratic House members, Rep. Elijah Cummings, for putting the cause of safe, affordable medicine before advancing his political career. His continued service in the House insures that Democrats will have a uniquely strong and eloquent voice challenging Republican extremism on all major issues.
Scott Keyes has an important read at ThinkProgress, “Study Finds Republican Voter Suppression Is Even More Effective Than You Think.” As Keyes expliains, “In a new paper entitled “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes”, researchers at the University of California, San Diego — Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi — and Bucknell University — Lindsay Nielson — used data from the annual Cooperative Congressional Election Study to compare states with strict voter ID laws to those that allow voters without photo ID to cast a ballot. They found a clear and significant dampening effect on minority turnout in strict voter ID states…the researchers found that in primary elections, “a strict ID law could be expected to depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, Black turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian American turnout by 12.5 points.” And that’s just one of their voter suppression techniques.
His campaign has $100 million, and this is the best he can do?

Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, explains “How Ted Cruz Engineered His Iowa Triumph” at Bloomberg.com. Issenberg discusses how Chris Wilson, the Cruz campaign pollster and director of analytics, targeted the pivotal group needed to win, following the Palin fiasco and Gov. Terry Branstad’s dismissal of Cruz as a worthy candidate:

Wilson swiftly recalibrated the challenge as a matter of numbers. On his phone, he summoned a report that counted 9,131 individual Iowans whom Wilson’s statistical models had identified as choosing between the two leading candidates. Those people existed at the overlap of likely caucus-goers who were seen as considering both Cruz and Trump; anyone who also ranked Marco Rubio highly was pushed out of the group. “These aren’t people you want to contrast with Trump and push to Rubio,” explained Wilson. (There were, separately, 6,309 voters then choosing between Cruz and Rubio but not Trump.) Those who remained were a remarkably homogeneous group: 91 percent male, two-thirds of them likely to self-associate as evangelical Christians.
For the closing days of the Iowa campaign, Cruz’s campaign had defined such pools for each of his major opponents as part of what was known internally as the Oorlog Project, named by a Cruz data scientist who searched online for “war” translated into different languages and thought the Afrikaner word looked coolest. It was just the latest way that Cruz’s analytics department had tried to slice the Iowa caucus electorate in search of an advantage for its candidate. They had divided voters by faction, self-identified ideology, religious belief, personality type–creating 150 different clusters of Iowa caucus-goers–down to sixty Iowa Republicans its statistical models showed as likely to share Cruz’s desire to end a state ban on fireworks sales.
Unlike most of his opponents, Cruz has put a voter-contact specialist in charge of his operation, and it shows in nearly every aspect of the campaign he has run thus far and intends to sustain through a long primary season. Cruz, it should be noted, had no public position on Iowa’s fireworks law until his analysts identified sixty votes that could potentially be swayed because of it.

Wilson, notes Issenberg, has “the most expansive brief of any pollster in either party’s 2016 field: his surveys not only guide Cruz’s strategy and define his message, but drive targeting decisions both online and off, including digital fundraising appeals.”
All targeting technology wizardry aside, Cruz, had a lot of assets going for him as the shiny new kid on the block, including a clear strategic sense about how to win the tea party’s ultra-right conservative evangelicals. More than any other GOP candidate, he really is one of them, and the authenticity surely shows. No doubt, he will move toward the center, if nominated. But it’s hard to see how he can shake some of his right-wing bonafides enough to make a credible pitch to political moderates. For the Democratic nominee, he may be more beatable than Trump.
The Cruz campaign developed a sophisticated method for shaping messaging to different sub-groups. Issenberg notes that the campaign “brainstorming sessions generated a master list of 77 local issues for Iowans,” with micro targeting exercises including Facebook trial balloons. The campaign also deployed Cambridge Analytica, which set out “to profile every American voter along each of the five dominant personality factors: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.” Further, adds issenberg,

Yet the 32 different personality types into which Cambridge Analytica segregated voters would be unmanageable if layered onto other divisions in the electorate. Wilson pushed the company to simplify its framework by pushing voters into just five clusters, including Timid Traditionalist, Relaxed Leader, and Temperamental. At the same time, he deployed the two full-time analysts that Cambridge had embedded in Cruz’s headquarters to work on building statistical models more directly relevant to political attributes…
…More than 300,000 Iowans were potential targets, having participated previously in at least one Republican primary, though Wilson spent 2015 expecting fewer than half that number to actually attend the caucus in February. Based on that turnout, Wilson had set a vote goal of 39,585, a number he expected to reach by both persuading likely caucus-goers and mobilizing new ones predicted to support Cruz. When he took those different behavioral buckets, split them by issue preference, and then again by personality groups, Wilson ended up with more than 150 segments in Iowa alone.

It’s hard to imagine Trump utilizing such micro targeting and message development, given his shoot-from-the-lip approach. In this sense the Iowa GOP Caucuses were, for the GOP, a telling contest between charisma and hard-headed political science, and charisma was decisively out-played. It paid off at crunch time, as issenbereg explains:

A few hours before the caucuses began, Wilson sat in the hotel lobby and looked at his final projections and all the different ways Cruz could exceed his vote goal of 35,178. As of that day, 39,541 Iowans had directly confirmed their intention to caucus for Cruz, with nearly 4,000 of them doing so over the web site. At the same time, the campaign had 29,830 turnout targets, infrequent voters whom statistical models predicted were likely to support Cruz if they did end up choosing to caucus. It was a slice of that group deemed the least likely to turn out–with less than one-in-four odds of doing so–who received a controversial get-out-the-vote mailer that essentially shamed voters into turning out in the closing weekend of the race. Rubio, Trump, and Iowa’s secretary of state slammed the move as “not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.”
About three thousand of Cruz’s turnout targets were selected to receive the mail, an aggressive version of a common technique refined through dozens, possibly hundreds, of different social-science experiments confirming that the “social pressure” of shaming non-voters can in fact serve to motivate them. The “Voting Violation” design evoked an official government document, and the inclusion of neighbors’ supposed voting records had been shown to be far more potent than merely letting voters know their own records were public. Cruz’s campaign had to send the mail out under its own name–as opposed to that of a super-PAC or other outside group, as is preferred with such tactics liable to incite blowback–because it was the one with the most current list of the people Cruz needed to mobilize. (Some other campaigns, notably John Kasich’s, have effectively outsourced all their highly targeted voter contact to allied super-PACs.)

In his concluding paragraph Issenberg adds “Cruz advisers anticipated the cynical media response, but accepted the risk.” If Democratic micro targeting provided an edge in 2008 and 2012, the safe assumption is that it will not be the case in 2016. The respected Des Moines register poll was right that the Democratic Caucuses result would be close, but they were significantly off about the GOP tally, which is a credit to the Cruz campaign.
Whether Cruz wins or loses his party’s nomination, it’s likely that his targeting and message teams will be on board with the GOP presidential nominee. Dems need to make sure their team is at least as sharp.

Hillary Clinton has narrowly edged Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Iowa caucuses. But her razor-close margin of victory is being called a “virtual tie” in media post-mortems, as well the Sanders campaign. It’s really a win-win for both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns, and their respective teams are brimming with excitement, going into New Hampshire.
For former Maryand Governor Martin O’Malley, it was the end of the trail, and he “suspended” his campaign. Credit O’Malley with running an upbeat, issue-oriented campaign and setting an example of admirable civility. In another year, he might have done better and the seriousness of his policies probably deserved better media coverage.
The close race between Clinton and Sanders helps both of them, and perhaps more importantly, the Democratic Party. An overwhelming Clinton victory would likely have revived the potentially-toxic “coronation” meme. The close margin insures that both campaigns will get more attention from voters as we move into the primary season. Up till now the Republicans, energized by Trump’s outrage du jour, have hogged media coverage. We’ll see more balance now, especially since he has been whipped pretty bad by Ted Cruz.
The same goes for the dignified tone of civility set by both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns. If they can sustain this spirit of mutual respect and a refusal to mud-wrestle, Democrats will be the adult party in the eyes of thoughtful swing voters in November.
Sen. Ted Cruz’s impressive upset, contrary to the findings of even the respected Des Moines register poll, holds a couple of instructive lessons about him for Democrats. First, his team has a solid ground game, and he is evidently a capable hands-on strategist and organizer. His successful campaign turn-out techniques merit some attention.
Second, Cruz apparently has little hesitancy about playing dirty, as the controversy about his late-campaign “report card” mailer indicates. Trump and Paul complained about it, as did the Iowa Secretary of State. The Cruz campaign also allegedly implied that Carson had dropped out of the race. It is noteworthy that none of the other Republican campaigns tried anything quite so sleazy.
Third, offending the ethanol industry, as did Cruz, is not political suicide in farming states in 2016. It may not even be risky.
Going forward, expect Trump to roll like a wounded whale. As for the rest of the Republican field, they are coming for front-runners Cruz, Trump and Rubio in a big way, and their field has only been winnowed by one drop-out, Huckabee, as of this writing.
The Clinton and Sanders campaigns will have to sharpen their offense, now that it is clear that theirs is a close race. But surely both campaigns “get it” that maintaining a high tone — and a unified party — will serve them well in November