New Hampshire Primary 2016 Polls: Donald Trump And Bernie Sanders Could Be Headed To Big Wins, Final Polls Show


The final New Hampshire primary polls of 2016 show that Republican front runner Donald Trump and Democratic underdog Bernie Sanders could both be on their way to avenging Iowa losses.

Both Trump and Sanders went into last week’s Iowa caucus looking for wins, with Trump holding a small but significant lead in final polls and Sanders polling close to even with Hillary Clinton. A win was expected to push momentum for both candidates, giving Sanders the legitimacy among voters needed to take on Clinton and proving that Trump is fit to hold the mantle of front runner.

But instead both suffered defeats, with Sanders losing by a razor-edge margin to Clinton and Trump falling to Ted Cruz. They now both head into Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary in need of a statement, and both seem headed for one.

Final polls before the 2016 New Hampshire primary show both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump holding “substantial” leads over their opponents, CNN noted in a study of all the latest polls.

The report noted as follows.

“Sanders’ 54% to 40% advantage over Hillary Clinton is down slightly from a 55% to 37% lead in the previous Poll of Polls. No public polling has found Clinton in the lead in New Hampshire since November.

“Trump tops the GOP field with 31%, well ahead of Marco Rubio’s 15%. Rubio has picked up four points since the previous New Hampshire Poll of Polls, the biggest change in the averages in the last week. Ted Cruz follows with 13%, John Kasich at 11% and Jeb Bush at 10%. This pack of four — Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and Bush — has been jockeying for second place in the state for some time.”

But a lot can happen between the final 2016 New Hampshire primary polls and the actual voting. In 2008, Hillary Clinton went into the state’s primary trailing Barack Obama, who had just pulled off an upset in Iowa and seized all the momentum in the race. But Clinton pulled off the win on the strength of a robust ground game, including thousands of volunteers bused in from New York to bring voters to the polls.

Clinton once again has a strong ground game, meaning her deficit in the polls may not be as big as it seems.

“What we’re told is that if we knock on doors, we have a 6 percent increase in likelihood to vote, so there’s six new votes for Hillary every 100 doors knocked,” volunteer team leader Bernice Brody told WBUR. “So, that’s where we focused our efforts, but you know it all adds up.”

A lack of ground game was one of the factors contributing to Donald Trump’s loss in Iowa. Though he has undoubtedly been the best candidate in the race, Cruz has run the best campaign, political pundits note. That means that Cruz, though trailing in final 2016 New Hampshire primary polls, still has a good chance to beat Trump on the strength of his larger network of field offices and supporters.

There could still be a lot of voters left to win over, CNN noted.

“New Hampshire is also a notoriously late-deciding state, which means pollsters tend to want to be in the field as close to Election Day as possible rather than risk missing a late swing and look wrong,” the report noted. “In that same 2008 contest, a late, wide swing on the Democratic side that went undetected by nearly all public pollsters in the state prompted the polling industry to investigate what went wrong.”

Whatever the final 2016 New Hampshire polls show, it’s been proven that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump will have a lot of work to do in order to close out with victories.

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