After a weekend spent trading blows, leftist frontrunner Bernie Sanders and his youthful challenger Pete Buttigieg were barnstorming New Hampshire Monday in a frantic final push for Democratic votes in the state’s decisive White House primary.
Eager to upstage the Democrats, President Donald Trump has summoned his supporters to an election eve rally of his own in Manchester, New Hampshire, promising “big crowds.”
“Want to shake up the Dems a little bit – they have a really boring deal going on,” he tweeted.
Tuesday’s New Hampshire vote looms as a decisive test for Democrats hoping to challenge Trump in November, especially for former vice president Joe Biden and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren whose campaigns appear to have hit a wall.
Sanders, the 78-year-old senator from neighboring Vermont, appeared to have an unassailable lead in the state, whose primary he won by a landslide in 2016.
The RealClearPolitics polling average showed him at 28.8 percent on the eve of the vote.
His moderate rival Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was second with 22.3 percent. On Sunday, he was proclaimed the winner of last week’s Iowa caucuses, but an array of problems in that lead-off nominating contest undercut his narrow victory over Sanders.
As the frontrunners did battle, a late surge lifted Amy Klobuchar’s fortunes, with two new polls showing the senator from Minnesota vaulting past heavyweights Biden and Warren to notch up 14 percent support.
Recent history shows it is near-impossible for a Democrat to win the party’s nomination without placing in the top two in Iowa or New Hampshire — and in a sign of the high stakes the race has been growing more acrimonious by the day.
“Unlike other campaigns, we don’t have billionaires giving huge amounts of money,” Sanders told supporters in New Hampshire on Sunday night — in a jab at Buttigieg who he has branded the candidate of Wall Street.
His campaign, based heavily on small donors, says it raised $25 million last month.
Buttigieg pushed right back at Sanders on Sunday, quipping, “Well, Bernie’s pretty rich, and I would happily accept a contribution from him.”
Turning serious, he said he was “building the movement that is going to defeat Donald Trump,” boosted by donations from some two million people.
