Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, in which we rank 2020 presidential candidates according to their performance relative to expectations, their level of “momentum,” their likelihood of “seizing the narrative,” their potential appeal to supporters of other candidates who are actually still in the race, and their “mojo-daddy buzz quotient,” but never—never—according to the number of votes they received from Democratic voters in a Democratic primary.





No, just kidding. The first three here go in order of finish from the Tuesday voting in New Hampshire, a state to which your backup Surge author and his dumb college friends once drove on a whim in order to rent and fire an enormous bolt-action shotgun similar to the one used in Terminator 2, because in New Hampshire basically anyone who isn’t visibly intoxicated or obviously planning a murder can just go do that, whenever. At least until President Michael Bloomberg makes guns illegal.