Gods only know what's happening. Sanders is now the front runner, but with a small overall base, having won NH and (arguably) Iowa. Klobuchar did well enough in NH to not drop out, Warren is still in there though without much of an obvious path (although she's arguably the best compromise option at a contested convention), Biden is still hoping to kick start his campaign again in South Carolina, Buttigeig has as many delegates as Sanders but his base isn't diverse enough to compete in the upcoming states, and Bloomberg is trying to buy the entire race and has basically purchased fifteen percent of the Democrat primary electorate which is a staggering figure. Tom Steyer is sticking around for, uh, some reason, too. The "UBI Guy" Andrew Yang is out, as are Michael Bennet and Deval Patrick.
This is all pretty perfect for Sanders, who could win pretty big against split opposition since Warren appears not to be a big threat to him thus far (though she is running third in delegate total). But also, it's big time contested convention fuel. Let's see how much of a mess things get as they go on...
On the GOP side, Joe Walsh, the more right wing of the president's challengers, unurprisingly dropped out and more surprisingly endorsed literally any Democrat to beat Trump. So far Bill Weld has one delegate, from Iowa, and none from New Hampshire. Trump has over 100 delegates already, both from dominating the two primaries so far and from states cancelling their primaries in order to just bind their delegates directly to him.
On the Libertarian front, as well as New Hampshire's Vermin Supreme win, Iowa's caucuses put Jacob Hornberger as the winner with 47% of the votes. Hornberger is president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, a conservative-libertarian think tank that suggests it want to return the US to a 19th century state of rejecting, "income taxation, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, public schooling, economic regulations, immigration controls, drug laws, gun control, paper money, the Federal Reserve, overseas empire, militarism, entangling alliances, and foreign wars". Note that Libertarian primaries are indicative - they do not select delegates, and so the convention can AIUI just ignore them. Nonetheless, Hornberger's strong win may suggest his campaign for the Libertarian nomination actually has some legs. He previously ran in the rather odd US senate election in Virginia in 2002, the last in that state to be won by the GOP - in which the Democrats failed to field a candidate, and the Republican got 80% of the vote. Hornberger came third and last with 7% in that race, running as an independent.
On Feb 22 the Green primaries kick off in Georgia, so we'll see how things go there. My USGP contact suggests that there's a real split/no love lost between the seemingly dominant Hawkins campaign and those of the other candidates, so we'll see how that goes.
