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New Hampshire primary to offer clarity in race for Democratic presidential nominee

Posted at 7:54 AM, Feb 11, 2020
and last updated 2020-02-11 07:54:50-05

With the results of Iowa's caucuses still not finalized, voters in New Hampshire on Tuesday will try and offer some clarity in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in a primary vote.

Twenty-four delegates will be up for grabs in Tuesday's primary, and 9 superdelegates will be awarded later.

According to Real Clear Politics, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, has a leg up in the polls heading into Tuesday's vote. Sanders' status as a longtime senator in a neighboring state, as well as the high number of independent voters in New Hampshire, would seem to give him a boost in Tuesday's vote.

Sanders won the New Hampshire primary easily in 2016 when he won about 60 percent of the vote over the eventual nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

According to Real Clear Politics, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg sits comfortably in second place in the polls heading into Tuesday's vote.

Initial tallies indicated that Buttigieg had won the most state delegate equivalents in the Iowa caucuses, which would have given him the win. However, Iowa's results remain unofficial as Democratic party leaders have called for a recanvass of the vote after a coding error with an app caused a significant delay in reporting .

According to those initial results, Sanders finished in a close second to Buttigieg and won the highest percentage of first-choice votes.

Per Real Clear Politics, former Vice President Joe Biden is polling tied for fourth place with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts. Last week, initial results from the Iowa caucuses showed Biden finishing in a disappointing fourth place. At Friday's Democratic debate in New Hampshire, Biden called the results a "gut-punch."

Biden hopes to make up ground later on in the primary process, and Real Clear Politics polls show him polling well in the next two states — Nevada and South Carolina.

Though he isn't officially on the ballot, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg took the slightest of leads early Tuesday morning when the tiny town of Dixville Notch went to the polls. Bloomberg received three write-in votes from the town's five residents.

Dixville Notch, a small town on the Canadian border, has held the tradition of being the first to vote in New Hampshire's primary for several election cycles.

Bloomberg, who didn't officially enter the race until late 2019, is eschewing the early primaries and caucuses and is instead hoping for a large Super Tuesday push.

All polls in New Hampshire will close by 8 p.m. ET, according to Vox.