Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday — with 90 percent of precincts counted, he had 26 percent of the vote, and networks declared him the victor. Sanders has won the popular vote in each of the first two contests in the Democratic primary and now has a lead in national polls. He is unquestionably the frontrunner for the nomination.

The win in New Hampshire, however, wasn't as big as many polls had predicted. Sen. Amy Klobuchar in particular drastically beat expectations, coming in at nearly 20 percent against a pre-election polling average of about 11 percent, while Pete Buttigieg also gained a couple points to 24 percent. Meanwhile, former Vice President Joe Biden got absolutely destroyed, just like in Iowa. He came in fifth with just 9 percent, compared to a polling average of 11 percent — and a total collapse from 23 percent just a month ago. It appears there is a significant population of voters who are just looking for any kind of moderate candidate who seems halfway plausible.

But the odd thing here is that a big number of these voters are almost certainly fine with Sanders — they have just talked themselves into thinking that he can't possibly win. Hey Democrats! You can just vote for Bernie Sanders if you want. It'll be okay.

It can be hard to see this if you watch too much of the hysterically anti-Sanders coverage on supposedly-liberal MSNBC — Chris Matthews recently spoke of his fear that Sanders is a secret communist who might execute him in Central Park — but the fact is most rank-and-file Democrats like Sanders just fine. Indeed, the Morning Consult poll found that his favorability rating among that group is 74 percent — the highest of any of the candidates, even better than Biden

A new Gallup survey showing most Americans would not be willing to vote for a socialist also revealed that an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters said they would back a candidate like Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is leading in national polls.

More than three-quarters of Democratic voters surveyed—76%—told Gallup they would support a presidential candidate who identified as a socialist.

A large chunk of independent voters said they would back such a candidate, with 45% saying so, while only 17% of Republicans reported the same. Overall, 45% of 1,033 respondents said they would back a socialist in the poll, which had a margin of error of four percentage points.

The poll was released Tuesday as voters in New Hampshire head to the polls, a day after Sanders and one of his most high-profile surrogates, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), rallied more than 7,500 voters in Durham, New Hampshire.

Both politicians identify as democratic socialists and promote a vision of the U.S. which would more closely resemble other wealthy countries such as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Residents of those Nordic nations benefit from government-run healthcare which is free at the point of delivery and which has been shown to have better health outcomes for the population; public college that is tuition-free or nearly free; and robust labor protections including guaranteed paid family leave, vacation time, and unions.

"We're moving forward," Ocasio-Cortez said. "We're moving forward to a multiracial democracy, forward to guaranteed healthcare, forward to a living wage, for fighting for our neighbors."

Headlines regarding the survey suggested it had dire implications for a socialist candidate in the 2020 election, despite the fact that the majority of respondents with negative feelings about socialism would be less likely to support any Democratic candidate than the Democratic respondents.

As Common Dreams reported last October, an annual poll regarding attitudes about socialism revealed why Democratic voters aren't fearful of the word, despite fear-mongering by the corporate media and President Donald Trump about socialist countries.

"When Americans—especially millennials—think of 'socialism,' they primarily think about Bernie Sanders, Western European democracies, income equality, and access to healthcare," acknowledged the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation of the poll, which showed that 70% of U.S. millennials would back a socialist for president. "They also do not associate socialism with communism and authoritarianism."

Senator Bernie Sanders leads all the Democratic presidential candidates in support from non-white voters and has gained 10 points among black voters, according to new polls released Tuesday.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has long touted his support from minority–and particularly black–voters to demonstrate his electability for the Democratic party's nomination. But the candidate's support has appeared to slide dramatically among all demographics since his fourth-place finish in Iowa last Monday. Meanwhile, Sanders appears to be surging.

The independent senator from Vermont is backed by 28 percent of black, non-white Hispanic and Asian voters, according to the latest polling data from Monmouth University. Biden came in second with support from 20 percent, or 8 points less than Sanders.

A separate by Morning Consult, Sanders has gained 10 points in support among black voters, with 27 percent saying they now back the senator, as opposed to the 17 percent who were before the Iowa caucuses. Meanwhile, Biden's support from the vital demographic has dropped to just 35 percent, which still puts him ahead of Sanders by 8 percent.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has plummeted in a new national poll out Monday that also shows Bernie Sanders with a clear lead among Democratic voters heading into Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.

The new Quinnipiac University poll, conducted after Sanders’ strong showing in the Iowa caucuses a week ago, has the Vermont senator boasting the support of 25 percent of Democratic voters, making an 8-point lead over Biden and a 4-point increase over the last national survey taken before the caucuses.

Biden dropped 9 points to 17 percent after his dismal performance in Iowa, followed close behind by former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who rose 7 points to 15 percent, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who dropped 1 point to 14 percent.


While former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg got a 4-point bump after appearing to narrowly edge Sanders out for first place in the Iowa state delegate count — results which Buttigieg and Sanders are both challenging — Buttigieg came in at 5th place nationally in the Quinnipiac poll, with 10 percent of the vote. Sen. Amy Klobuchar rounds out the top six with 4 percent, a drop of 3 points, while no other candidate broke 2 percent in the poll.

But now a video has surfaced of Bloomberg – a billionaire from New York City with a reputation for being patronizing and condescending to anyone who isn’t – responding to a question about Brexit by saying that people who live in the Midwest are too uneducated to understand transgender equality.

“I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the bathroom issue in the United States,” he said during a panel discussion at Oxford University, which is in the United Kingdom. Debates on transgender rights regularly appear in mainstream media in the U.K. and are perhaps more heated than in the U.S. “Anybody know what I’m talking about?”

“If you want to know if somebody is a good salesman, give them the job of going to the Midwest and picking a town and selling to that town the concept that some man wearing a dress should be in a locker room with their daughter,” he said. “If you can sell that, you can sell anything.”

The idea of transgender women using bathrooms and other facilities with underage girls – with the implication that trans women will molest children – has been one of the most consistently used attacks on transgender rights by the religious right.

The app used by the Iowa Democratic Party was built by Shadow Inc., a for-profit technology company that is also used by the Nevada Democratic Party, the next state to hold a caucus, as well as by multiple presidential campaigns. Shadow’s involvement was kept a secret by Democratic officials through the caucuses.

An official from Shadow did not respond to requests for comment, but one of the company’s investors, Acronym, a progressive nonprofit company, released a statement saying that Acronym was a separate entity from Shadow and that it was still waiting to hear from the Iowa Democratic Party “with respect to what happened.”

Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown, said that introducing apps in the midst of an election posed many problems. Any type of app or program that relies on using a cellphone network to deliver results is vulnerable to problems both on the app and on the phones being used to run it, he said.

“The consensus of all experts who have been thinking about this is unequivocal,” Mr. Blaze added. “Internet and mobile voting should not be used at this time in civil elections.”