With Primary 24 Hours Away, Sanders Extends Lead Over Buttigieg in New Hampshire Poll

With the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary just 24 hours away, a new Boston Globe/WBZ-TV/Suffolk University tracking poll released Monday showed Sen. Bernie Sanders extending his lead over former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the Granite State.

"We are now looking at a race with a leader. After the chaos surrounding the Iowa caucus, Bernie Sanders has emerged as the candidate to beat."
--Joshua Dyck, UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion

The survey showed Sanders leading the field with the support of 27% of likely Democratic primary voters, up from 24% on Saturday. Buttigieg polled in second place with 19% support, down from 22% Saturday.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) jumped five percentage points since Saturday's poll to take third place, leaving Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and former Vice President Joe Biden tied for fourth place.

The poll surveyed 500 likely Democratic primary voters and has a margin of error of +/- 4.4 percentage points.

A separate New Hampshire poll released Monday by the UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion also found Sanders leading Buttigieg in the state by eight percentage points--25% to 17%.

"We are now looking at a race with a leader," Joshua Dyck, director of the Center for Public Opinion, said in a statement. "After the chaos surrounding the Iowa caucus, Bernie Sanders has emerged as the candidate to beat in a state he won by more than 20 points in 2016. But Mayor Pete Buttigieg is on the rise and received the biggest post-Iowa bump."

"With Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren trending downward," Dyck added, "the question is, does Mayor Pete have enough time and can he woo enough of the soft support away from other candidates to catch Bernie?"

Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst with FiveThirtyEight, noted in a blog post Sunday that polls leading up to Tuesday's primary have shown Sanders maintaining a "pretty consistent" lead in New Hampshire, where the Vermont senator on Sunday held what his campaign described as the largest rally "of any candidate to date, hitting maximum capacity with 1,981 attendees."

"We are going to make sure that we really bring this thing home, that we work as hard as we can," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a top surrogate for the Sanders campaign, said in a call with Sanders' New Hampshire field team Sunday night. "And as you all know, we don't have to tell you, that the name of the game here is electorate expansion and bringing people out to vote that the normal political establishment counts on not turning out."

"The political establishment counts on young people not turning out, on working class people, poor people, people working two jobs--they rely and they predict that we don't turn out," said Ocasio-Cortez. "So that when we do, we completely upend politics as usual and change the game."