The 2020 primary has gone off the rails. Joe Biden, the semi-anointed front-runner, placed fourth in Iowa and is poised to post another disappointing finish in New Hampshire. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., has outlasted more experienced, promising upstarts such as Kamala D. Harris, Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker. Bernie Sanders, a legitimate democratic socialist, is surging at a time when voters claim to care about electability more than anything else. The Iowa Democrats, who were supposed to run the first contest and winnow the field, took days to count the votes and forced precisely zero candidates out of the race. And don’t even get me started on Mike Bloomberg.
But, despite all this upheaval, voters in New Hampshire are treating their primary like a normal race: They’ve put Sanders, a good fit for the state, and Buttigieg, who surged in Iowa, ahead of the rest of the pack. Sanders and Buttigieg are far and away in the best position to win this primary, and a victory for either would count as a highly conventional result even amid all this chaos. CONT.
David Byler, Washington Post