MANCHESTER, NH—Former Vice-President Joe Biden has been telling his supporters here in New Hampshire, “We took a gut punch in Iowa.”

True enough; a week ago, he was the presumptive favourite in the Democratic party’s presidential nomination contest.

Now he appears to be struggling to keep his hopes alive after a fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

But then again, the whole party took a gut punch in Iowa.

The showcase contest there on Monday, kicking off the entire nomination process to determine who gets to take on President Donald Trump later this year, derailed when the announcement of the results dragged on for days due to a software failure.

Four days after the caucuses were held, it’s still unclear who won. (Bernie Sanders seems to have won the popular vote, while he and upstart Pete Buttigieg are a toss-up for the delegate lead.) Some numbers are disputed. There is talk of a “recanvas” and there are calls for the resignation of the head of the party.

President Donald Trump has been crowing about the dissarray of his opponents.

And right now, the projection website FiveThrtyEight.com says a brokered convention, in which no candidate secures a majority of delegates at the end of the primary process, is the second most likely result (after a Sanders victory).

Which means that as the rain fell Friday night in New Hampshire and the candidates gathered at St. Anselm College’s arena for a televised debate, the stakes were high.

They always are, during the primary here. Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus usually provides a Field of Dreams for the candidates, just as one of its corn fields did for Kevin Costner’s character in the magical movie of the same name. They campaign up close and personal with voters for most of a year, and previously unknown candidates, such as Buttigieg ,can use it as a launching pad to national prominence.

But then comes New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary a week later, where the license plates bearing the state motto outline what can happen to a campaign from here: “Live free or die.” The “free” part may be superfluous.

The trail of dreams that died here may begin with Lyndon Johnson in 1968, a sitting president laid low by an underperformance against an anti-war candidate. For those dreams that live on, the resonant memory is of Bill Clinton’s “Comeback Kid” performance — second place — in 1992, which revived the future president’s fortunes in the middle of a scandal.

It isn’t that those who win in New Hampshire always go on to be the nominee (just ask past surprise Republican winner Pat Buchanan, or the 2016 Democratic winner Bernie Sanders).

But what happens in New Hampshire shapes the race.

Among Democrats, the eventual nominee has placed first or second here in every primary since 1972.

This year, Biden and Elizabeth Warren seem particularly vulnerable after finishing fourth and third, respectively, in Iowa. While both hope to be the New Hampshire Comeback Kid of this cycle, it gets much harder for them to recover with a second weak showing.

Biden has long been counting on strong support from the Black community of South Carolina, which votes later this month, but it isn’t certain that support will withstand a prolonged fall from frontrunner status.

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Buttigieg, meanwhile, has to demonstrate that his success in Iowa wasn’t a flash-in-the-pan; as the least known of the major candidates and someone who has had trouble drawing support among non-white voters so far, he needs to cement his frontrunner status and build a sense of momentum.

Sanders hopes to turn his movement-based campaign into a steamroller. A convincing win could start to give his campaign a feeling of inevitability.

Sanders is the only candidate that has drawn vocal opposition from the Democratic establishment represented by Hillary Clinton, who, again, Friday, was discussing why she thought he was a bad candidate. He is the one who scares prominent moderate former Republicans such as David Frum and Tom Nichols, who have long vowed to vote Democrat, but have warned centrists will stay home rather than vote for Sanders.

But he’s also the candidate who has inspired the most enthusiastic following among younger voters.

On the way into New Hampshire, I talked with a 29-year-old Latino lawyer (who I won’t name because he works for a government agency), who says he gets all his news from YouTube and Instagram and is jealous of Canadian healthcare. He’s been donating $30 a month to Sanders since he announced his candidacy. He flatly said he wouldn’t vote in the general election if someone such as Biden is the nominee.

“Even though Trump is the alternative?” I asked.

He said he and others of his generation, in his estimation, would rather “burn it all to the ground,” if the American party of the left can’t stomach a genuinely progressive candidate such as Sanders.

Voters who’ll stay home if Sanders is the nominee; other voters who’ll stay home if he isn’t. Potential gut punches for the Democratic party either way.

But first it needs to recover from the one it suffered this week in Iowa.

In New Hampshire over the next few days, it will try.

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