I’m trying not to weigh in too heavily on the polls this early out, but this is ridiculous. Not to mention, a provocation. And, for some odd reason, not easy to embed.

Stephen Green sums up my position perfectly:

Yeah, that’s the big takeaway from the New Hampshire poll. https://t.co/i9RWAF1xxc

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) September 14, 2015

For those without the right kind of plug-ins: the story here probably should be that in New Hampshire Bernie Sanders polled at 52%, not that Joe Biden polled at 9%. Although Joe Biden getting 9% in a state poll for a race that he’s not even running in  – yet – is probably in itself not the best news for the Hillary Clinton campaign, which is probably not enthralled about the fact that she’s polling at 30% in a state that she expected to win. Of course, she expected to win all of them in a pro-forma triumphal process; I’m not really seeing that happen, right now.

Again, polls this far out don’t tell you who is going to win in the actual election. But they do tell you who has captured the public eye; and in this particular case that New Hampshire poll is telling us that the public eye is busily looking around to find a candidate that’s at least more interesting than Hillary Clinton. The ironic thing? If Sanders did get the nomination, New Hampshire probably shifts over to at least Lean R*. It certainly won’t hurt [mc_name name=’Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’A000368′ ]’s campaign, or whoever we nominate to run for Governor.

All of which makes you wonder why CBS isn’t reporting things that way. Well, for a very esoteric value of ‘you.’ I mean, pretty much everybody who is likely to read this understands already that there’s a particular narrative going on out there, and that narrative has no place for upstart Socialist Senators, cheeky Vice Presidents – or an ignominious Democratic defeat in November 2016. And I don’t know how the people who don’t understand all of this will ever read this piece anyway. Maybe it’ll get forwarded to them, or something?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*An important point to consider: no matter how bad the 2012 map was for us, it’s still better than the 2008 map – and we’re not particularly in danger of losing states from either to whatever candidate the Democrats eventually throw up (phrase absolutely intended). In fact, it’s hard to think of a state where the Democrat will do better than Obama did in 2012. The results are unlikely to be dramatic, but then we’ve been fighting down in the weeds (and the margins) in Presidential elections for quite a while now anyway.