With just one day to go before New Hampshire votes, Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders remain the favorites to win their respective primaries. Some of their top competitors are already looking beyond Tuesday to the next phase of the campaign.
GOP candidates who poll badly in New Hampshire are likely to see funding dry up and staff members quit. Those who finish second, third, or even a strong fourth can still position themselves as rallying figures for Republican voters opposed to Trump.
Mark Jones is a fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute. He says these are the ones who will have a shot at staying in the race until Super Tuesday.
"The first four primaries and caucuses really are much more about momentum, perceptions, and expectations than they are about actual delegate allocation," Jones says. "That's not the case on March 1, when approximately one out of every four delegates to the Republican National Convention will be decided." That includes the delegates from Texas, where Senator Ted Cruz maintains a strong lead.
On the Democratic side, Jones says that once the competition moves south, demographics are in Hillary Clinton's favor.
"Sanders tends to do well when there's a high proportion of the Democratic primary electorate constituted by liberal Anglos," he says. "That's the case in Iowa. It's the case in New Hampshire. It's not the case in South Carolina. It's not the case in Nevada. And it's not the case in an overwhelming majority of the states that are going to be holding their primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday."
More than 1,000 Democratic delegates are at stake March 1. That's almost half of those needed to win the nomination.
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