The night of February 3 is still shaping up to be chaotic, just much less so now.

Along with several credible contenders departing the race in the past two months, a few more appear to be shifting their focus solely to New Hampshire. Other candidates remain despite their campaign’s full collapse.

Tulsi Gabbard has her contingent of anti-war, outsider-type voters everywhere in the country, including in Iowa. But she hasn’t appeared in Iowa since October, instead spending the vast majority of her time in New Hampshire, a place where the crossover independent vote could buoy her to a surprise showing.

Michael Bennet did a big push in Iowa back in the mid-fall, but he too has diverted his focus to New Hampshire. He’s in the middle of a 50-town hall journey in the state, they’re fundraising specifically for New Hampshire advertising, and at least some of their Iowa staff have moved there. While Gabbard never built up a sizable Iowa operation, Bennet had over 20 people here at one point and was putting together some notable endorsement groups.

Meanwhile, Deval Patrick didn’t come back after his initial trip here, and Michael Bloomberg is skipping the first four states altogether.

There’s good reason to focus on New Hampshire at this point if you’re struggling with money or attention. The 15% viability threshold in most Iowa precincts could wipe out any underperforming candidate. In New Hampshire, a surprise 7% showing could get you some new media attention. It’s much harder to get that in Iowa.

Iranian officials said the plane’s engine had caught fire, causing the pilot to lose control. A statement initially posted on the website of the Ukrainian embassy in Iran ruled out an act of terror and said the crash had been caused by an engine malfunction. However, this was later redacted, with the embassy stating that all information would be provided by an official commission.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/08/iran-plane-crash-ukraine-boeing-180-tehran

“Reports of the end of my campaign have been drastically exaggerated today,” Marianne Williamson tweeted after laying off her entire campaign staff—as one does when one is ending one’s campaign. But not Marianne—Marianne insists that she is not ending her campaign just because she’s fired all her staff.

And maybe you don’t need staff for “a moral and spiritual awakening in the country.” I mean, that sounds a little bit like something one might need staff for, but let’s not forget that Marianne occupies a spiritual plane, a place where one does not need the normal human accoutrements that weigh down regular mortal candidates.

And for someone who is running to “fundamentally change the patterns of our political dysfunction,” her campaign had contained a fair amount of dysfunction, not including the time she direct-messaged my mom on Twitter to complain about me. “I understand your daughter is young and doesn't know better,” Marianne wrote, “but given your own career and the fact that we've met, I would have thought you'd at least be open to a non-corporate political voice in the mix.”

But I am not here to dredge up residual bitterness. I am not using my platform to say that even though I know she was complaining about me, I sort of liked being called young, because let’s be honest, I’m 41, which is not young.

To illustrate his point, Bloomberg will visit the city’s South Side, home to large swaths of neighborhoods that have eroded for decades under a lack of public investment, little economic development, high unemployment, frequent bouts with high crime and, most recently, an ever-growing population loss. Many of those struggles stem from the city’s history of segregation and redlining on the predominantly African American South Side, but Bloomberg’s plan doesn’t address removing racial barriers that stand in the way of creating jobs and businesses. His campaign says that separate effort will be announced at a later date.

Instead, the philanthropic politician will highlight his plan to create an “All-In Economy,“ a proposal that lists a series of goals and initiatives aimed at better preparing an American workforce for an economy of the future, but does not ascribe a cost to any of the initiatives or identify how they would be funded.

“The reason I’m releasing this plan is one of the reasons I’m in the race: I know that our economy is working fine for people like me and people like Donald Trump, but it is badly broken for the vast majority of Americans,” Bloomberg said. “Too much wealth is in too few hands, and it’s concentrated in too few places. There are a handful of cities that have boomed, but a lot of the country is stagnating. Our middle class is getting smaller and smaller."

A major focus of Bloomberg’s plan is on job training and retraining, an initiative he considers so important that his campaign says the former mayor would place his vice president in charge of the initiative on his first day in office. Bloomberg will focus on that plank of his plan in Chicago at Olive-Harvey community college in Pullman on the Far South Side.