OFF TO THE RACES: Granite State of Mind
We are live-blogging all the latest from New Hampshire here... tune in!
One of us(!) looks at the big takeaways from the exit polls from the past New Hampshire primaries.
Our latest NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll shows that Republicans still think that Trump will win the nomination -- but that opinion is held by fewer GOPers than it was before the Iowa caucuses.
The Union Leader A1 hed: "TODAY IS THE POLL THAT COUNTS."
And the winners from Dixville Notch are...
Towns to watch, from the Union Leader: "East Kingston, Lancaster, Newmarket, Pembroke, Rochester, Sanbornton and Washington have always voted for the Republican primary winner, every four years since 1952. Epping, Hudson, Kingston, Laconia, Merrimack and Rollinsford have picked the Democratic winner since 1952, when the state law was changed to allow for voters to cast a ballot for the candidate, not his or her delegates."
The Washington Post's lede: "Voters headed to the polls across New Hampshire early Tuesday following a frantic day when presidential candidates scurried across the state and leveled inflammatory attacks against one another while pleading with voters for their support in a primary election that appeared likely to settle much in the wild nominating contests."
And from the New York Times: "It is a state built for surprises: a famously independent-minded political battleground, where new voters can register to cast ballots on the day of the election and people unaffiliated with either party can vote in primaries. Winning New Hampshire, or at least doing well, is such a strategic prize that candidates and “super PACs” have plastered the state’s television screens with more than $80 million in ads and turned its rambling two-lane highways into an endless procession of caravans."
And the New York Times writes that New Hampshire should answer a lot of questions about the polls.
BUSH: The Wall Street Journal: "Will Jeb Bush do well enough to recharge his presidential effort and move on as a plausible contender, or will the remarkable Bush run in presidential politics begin to wind down? The situation in New Hampshire is sufficiently in flux that either is possible. A man named Bush has run for either president or vice president in seven of the last 10 national elections, five times successfully so far. The Bushes often have been favorites, and occasionally they have been underdogs."
CLINTON: Bill Clinton said yesterday of his wife: "Sometimes when I am on a stage like this, I wish that we weren't married, then I could say what I really think."
POLITICO reports on what Clinton said in those Goldman Sachs speeches: "It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director," said one person who watched the speech.
RUBIO: He was confronted by a proponent of same sex marriage.
He had another "glitch" moment, appearing to realize mid-sentence that he was repeating himself.
SANDERS: He's starting to look and sound like a frontrunner, writes NBC's Kasie Hunt.
Dana Milbank writes: "Bernie Sanders is no revolutionary."
TRUMP: He repeated a rally-goer's word for Ted Cruz that we can't print in this newsletter, Ali Vitali reports. Dante Chinni explains why a Trump win would be yuge. "To put it simply, New Hampshire should not be a good state for Trump. When you look at his supporters in polls, they tend to have more of a blue-collar look, with lower college education rates and lower incomes, going by data in the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll... But those numbers don't square well with the overall population of New Hampshire, which stands out for sitting well above the national average on those counts, according to Census data."
POLITICO writes that he "is disregarding his aides’ advice and yielding only slightly and ever so grudgingly to the typical demands of a White House bid."