Dante Scala

It's been a slow fall. by Dante Scala

It's been a slow fall.

There's a good likelihood that New Hampshire will be framed as a Sanders-Warren competition with one ticket out.

Every presidential candidate worth his or her salt makes that trek way up north, they may not visit there often but everyone has to visit there at least once to be considered an authentic New Hampshire campaign.

A lot of the growth that you've seen in New Hampshire over the past 20, 30 years has occurred in these two counties, which in some ways represent the outer suburban ring of metropolitan Boston.

When election night rolls around in a general election how the town of Bow goes, whether it goes to Republicans or Democrats, usually will be a good signal of what kind of night it's going to be for one major party or the other.

It's one of the most interesting counties that no one ever talks about in New Hampshire because it's got this mix of polar opposites, very strong liberal Democrats and Tea Party Republicans. It should be a place where Donald Trump does well if he's going to do well anywhere, in working class mill cities like say Rochester and Somersworth.

Arguably over the last decade, it's been more powerful than those two giant counties I mentioned, Hillsborough and Rockingham county put together, and that's because of how strongly Democratic the Connecticut River Valley has become.

They were pretty sure based on demographics -- based on education, on social class -- they knew what areas to hit. The question will be for Sanders, on primary night, if it's a close battle, can he do the same thing, and will he know where his votes are coming from? one out of four Democratic primary voters has actually made up their mind, and so the question is, how do you start to try and anchor some of that enthusiasm and make sure to cement that?

Now that we're in this age of ISIS and so forth, Republicans have lost their ambivalence toward interventionism, it can be difficult for candidates to make news anyway during these summer months, and with Trump there, it makes matters worse. In some ways maybe it's unfair to judge him to see what happens in the fall. But that overarching problem is something he has yet to solve.

Given the apparent lack of interest in a Clinton alternative, it hurts Biden little just to wait and see as long as he can, in the hope of an unexpected event that changes many, many Democrats' minds about Hillary.

Hypothetically, Biden has the name ID to wait until the end of the summer. He's certainly well known among Democratic voters.