Another video of the moment when Chris Christie maybe ended Marco Rubio’s campaign. After the jump …
8:28 PM: Admittedly, the title of this post is aspirational. But Christie is now within two percentage points of Marco Rubio. If Christie could move ahead, that would push Rubio into 6th place.
8:37 PM: It would be a key learning experience for American elites, center-right and center-left to watch the progress of a Bloomberg presidential campaign. CNNers talking about how amazing it would be now.
8:40 PM: Marco Rubio holding on in 5th place.
Basically all the networks just called the races for Trump and Sanders.
Now, though, we see the critical order of the also-rans on the Republican side.
8:09 PM: Cruz and Rubio currently battling for 4th and 5th place.
8:13 PM: Rubio now in 5th place at 10% – just behind Cruz and just ahead of Chris Christie.
8:19 PM: It seems likely that Ohio Gov John Kasich will come in second place tonight. It’s enough to make you wonder, could Republicans wake up to the fact that Kasich is a fairly presentable guy from a critical swing state who has a decent amount of cross party appeal? I doubt it because this is basically an anger election on the GOP side. And that is not John Kasich.
We currently have a largely meaningless 4% of the vote in on the GOP side. The one thing that seems pretty clear, both from the early results and the exit polls, is that Donald Trump is winning. Basically in line with all the polls. Kasich is currently in second. But there’s a knockdown drag out for the next three spots – Bush, Cruz and Rubio. So it’s conceivable that Rubio could end up with a very disappointing result – possibly 4th or even 5th place.
While we’re waiting for tonight’s results here is some incredibly important and pretty depressing information. Now that voter ID laws have been passed in the majority of US states since 2008, we now have the first study looking at a large sample of validated voting data to see whether these laws actually reduce minority voter turnout. Logic and some historical studies have made this a pretty strong assumption. But this study basically proves it. And the “success” of these laws at reducing the level of African-American and Latino voting is bigger than I imagined.
One nugget …
In general elections, states with strict photo ID laws show a Latino turnout 10.3 points lower than in states without them. The law also affected turnout in primary elections, where Latino turnout decreased by 6.3 points and Black turnout by 1.6 points.
Here are the highlights from the study.
We are here for your live New Hampshire primary results. You can see the actual results over to the right of the page. We’re getting the first trickle of results in now. The early (and routinely unreliable) exit polls suggest a solid first place for Donald Trump and the remaining four candidates bunched between 10 and 15 percent. The same suggest a substantial double digit lead for Bernie Sanders, basically in line with the polls. Again, put very little stock in those numbers. But we’ll be getting real counts pretty soon. Full county by county results here.
Meanwhile, in a chilling incident earlier today, Marco Rubio’ New Hampshire Campaign Chairman attacked a protestor dressed as a robot. Here’s the video.
High Court doesn’t even wait for the case to go through the lower courts before calling a dramatic halt to President Obama’s Climate Change program.
Bizarre. Man who attacks anti-Rubio protestor dressed as a robot at Rubio event turns out to be Rubio’s New Hampshire campaign chairman.
Video after the jump …
So prominent GOP campaign surrogate and one-time rock star Ted Nugent just went on a wild anti-Semitic Facebook rant blaming Jews for gun control.