This was always the problem with her campaign. The first two states were the least friendly to her.
I despise Hillary as a person but aside from Bloomberg and Kasich she's the candidate I'd feel most comfortable with as president. The main thing getting me down is these insane margins Sanders has with voters my age. 88-90% margins. Is this generation really that insane? I would say I hope they get wiser when they get into the real world and start having to understand how things actually work outside of fantasy-imaginationland, but I can't because voters in their 30s are also heavily favoring Sanders.
New Hampshire was always a terrible state for her though, it's a tiny retail politics state that prides itself on making up its mind late. Hillary has always been bad at retail politics, its small size let Sanders and his rabid college supporters hit nearly everyone, and Hillary had to endure a brutal media cycle going into it:
- Bill attacks Sanders: "The big dog's getting nasty, remember when he blew it for her eight years ago?"
- The press demanding she release the Goldman Sachs transcripts so they can take things out of context and make her look corrupt
- More emailgate nonsense
- Iowa coin flip conspiracy theories being propagated in pop culture, such as Colbert's show and everyone making the joke that Hillary should do the Superbowl coin toss
- Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem's idiotic comments. This absolutely dominated Clinton's media coverage going into the primaries
- General stories about "WOW Bernie has a huge lead what does this mean for Hillary?"
So for those 40-50% of people who claimed they didn't make up their mind until the last few days, this was their impression of Hillary. I listened to political radio and it was all "is it ok for Hillary to get $675K from Goldman Sachs?" and "were Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem out of line and what does this mean for Hillary's support among women?" Meanwhile Bernie was on SNL and getting articles written about his appeal to young voters.
The premise is wrong. If anything, the localized atmosphere over the past week
helped Clinton:
