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Bernie Sanders Faces Tougher Road, Bigger Expectations in New Hampshire

Making anything less than a victory in the 2020 contest in the Granite State will be a serious blow to Sanders’ nomination.

Bernie Sanders Faces Tougher Road, Bigger Expectations in New Hampshire
Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont and 2020 presidential candidate, speaks during a campaign rally in Los Angeles, California, U.S., on Saturday, March 23. (Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- New Hampshire helped make Bernie Sanders a force to be reckoned with in Democratic presidential politics. Now as his 2020 campaign rolls across the state, he’s facing fiercer competition and great expectations that could prove tough to fulfill.

Sanders is counting on a repeat of his dominating victory in the 2016 New Hampshire primary to propel him through the rest of the contests leading to the party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump next year.

Yet he’s running a distant second in most recent polls and facing a vastly bigger field of competitors, all of whom are staking a claim to be best equipped to defeat Trump – one of the main attributes voters are looking for. That raises the stakes for Sanders, making anything less than a victory in the 2020 contest in the Granite State a serious blow to his second bid for the party’s nomination.

“It would be devastating,” said Neil Levesque, executive director at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. “He won last time and those expectations are there that he has to really win it again.”

The 2016 race was much on Sanders’ mind at several stops he made during a two-day swing through New Hampshire this week.

“You made the whole country wake up,” he told about 550 people at an ice cream social Monday in Warner, a small town in the south central part of the state.

He reminded his audiences that the state’s Democratic voters embraced his agenda and helped make ideas once dismissed as radical so mainstream that they are embraced by most of his competitors for the nomination. That includes, he said, turning Medicare from a program that chiefly serves the elderly into a national health insurance system; taking more aggressive action on climate change; increasing the minimum wage; and lowering prescription drug prices.

First Victory

“It was a great victory that we won in the 2016 Democratic primary,” the Vermont senator said in Laconia. “The victory in New Hampshire was the first victory to be followed by 21 other victories, which was to be followed by some 13 million votes, it was to be followed by over 1,700 delegates at the Democratic National Convention.”

Bernie Sanders Faces Tougher Road, Bigger Expectations in New Hampshire

Still, that wasn’t enough to defeat Hillary Clinton in the nomination race, and in 2020 Sanders has more competition.

Several of his rivals, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of neighboring Massachusetts, are pitching the sort of progressive policies that helped Sanders make a strong challenge to Clinton.

Other candidates, such as Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke, are making appeals to young voters who were a crucial constituency for Sanders.

Bernie Sanders Faces Tougher Road, Bigger Expectations in New Hampshire

Then there’s Joe Biden, who’s attempting to win over voters across the Democratic Party’s ideological spectrum on the argument he has the best chance of getting the support of some Trump voters and ousting the president in the general election.

A University of New Hampshire poll in early April had Sanders at the head of the pack and leading Biden by 12 points, but polls taken since Biden’s April 25 entry into the race have the former vice president as the clear leader among nearly two dozen contenders.

Defeating Trump

More than two-thirds of primary voters surveyed in a May 2-7 Monmouth University poll said choosing a nominee who can defeat Trump is more important to them than agreement on the issues.

“I’m looking for electability, someone who can reach the independents and not just the Bernie supporters from 2016,” said Carol Schapira, a 70-year-old from Hopkinton, said at the ice cream social. She backed Clinton in 2016 but hasn’t decided on a 2020 candidate. “The most important thing is to expand the base.”

At a town hall Tuesday in Concord, Sanders addressed the question of who has the best chance against Trump. He told a crowd of about 250 people that when weighing whether to make a second presidential run, he concluded he could mount “the strongest campaign to defeat the worst president in the history of the United States.”

The state’s first-in-the-nation primary is still nine months away and Sanders said in an interview that he’s sure he’ll be victorious in New Hampshire again. He discounted polls in the state that “are up and down” so far this year. He insisted some didn’t fully capture the edge he has with younger voters.

“I think we’re doing very well in New Hampshire,” he said. “We’ve got a good organization. I feel very confident that we’re going to win it.”

Unexpected Endings

The New Hampshire primary is known for unexpected endings. At this point in the race four years ago, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush led for the Democratic and Republican primaries that ultimately were won by Sanders and Trump.

So far in the 2020 contest, Sanders has visited the Granite State three other times, with a March event in Concord one of his campaign’s first stops. Warren, who is a top potential lure for Sanders’s past backers, has been intensely focused on New Hampshire, with 14 visits to the state so far. That’s more than any of the other Democratic hopefuls.

Bernie Sanders Faces Tougher Road, Bigger Expectations in New Hampshire

Daniel Delcaro, who lives in Warner, said he backed Sanders in 2016 and thinks he can win the New Hampshire primary again in 2020.

“I think the people who truly follow his track record will continue to support him. It will bring them along,’’ Delcaro, 63, said at the Sanders event in Warner. “I don’t have a second choice, to be frank, even though Elizabeth Warren is tempting because she’s so close to Bernie.”

Early States

Sanders has put more emphasis on Iowa and South Carolina, two other early voting states that he lost to Clinton in 2016. He’s visited Iowa eight times and has paid the Palmetto State seven visits. He will follow his New Hampshire trip with a campaign swing through Nevada late next week for his second trip there, and unlike most of his rivals has pushed through a series of later primary states including Indiana, Georgia and Alabama.

He’s also campaigned in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania -- all states that Trump narrowly won in 2016 that will be crucial again in 2020

Sanders insisted that he has a good chance to win Iowa and New Hampshire in 2020 and said he is “stronger” in South Carolina than in 2016 and “quite strong” in Nevada.

“If we do well in all of those states, we have a direct path toward victory.”

In New Hampshire on Monday and Tuesday, Sanders largely stuck to small events rather than crowded rallies. New Hampshire has about half the population of Iowa, which will kick off the election season with its Feb. 3 caucuses, and much smaller in size. That means Granite State voters, who cast their ballots the following week, are accustomed to direct encounters with the candidates. Sanders is already a familiar face.

“New Hampshire is the king of retail politics,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who worked for Clinton in 2016 but isn’t affiliated with any current candidates. “You win or lose New Hampshire not with the best TV ad buy or with the biggest rally, but with the best sales pitch at the table of every diner in the state.”

--With assistance from Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou.

To contact the reporter on this story: Laura Litvan in Concord, New Hampshire at llitvan@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, John Harney

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