Sanders, Buttigieg and Klobuchar at Top in New Hampshire

The results appeared to be a grave disappointment to former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, two candidates who were once tied at the top of national polls but have faded in recent months. Biden’s fall has been especially swift and severe, and midway through the evening it was unclear whether he would even reach double-digit support in New Hampshire.

Even as results showed him headed for fourth or perhaps fifth place, Biden had left New Hampshire and headed to an event in South Carolina, a state he hopes might be able to salvage his candidacy. South Carolina would be the first state in the primary where the preference of the black voters who have buoyed Biden’s campaign will be reflected.

“I do love New Hampshire, and I mean it,” Biden said in Columbia, South Carolina, on Tuesday night, with a livestream carrying his remarks to a roomful of supporters in New Hampshire. “Now Jill and I are moving on to Nevada and South Carolina and beyond.”

The results showed a distinct separation of the presidential field into two tiers, with just three candidates collecting a fifth of the vote or more. Two long-shot Democrats dropped out of the race as the early results trickled in: Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and first-time candidate who developed a fierce but narrow niche following, and Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who qualified for only two debates and faded quickly into the background of the race.

Warren, speaking to supporters early in the evening, acknowledged that she would come up short in New Hampshire. Promising that she would continue on, Warren warned her fellow Democrats that the race had taken a harsher tone in recent days, and called on the party not to “fall into factions.”

And notably, Warren hailed the success of Klobuchar, until recently an extreme underdog in the race, calling her proof of “just how wrong the pundits can be when they count a woman out.”

The rise of Sanders, a democratic socialist from Vermont who remains a political independent, has distressed many centrists and traditional liberals at a time when Democratic voters are united by a ravenous desire to defeat President Donald Trump. As Trump acts triumphant after his acquittal of impeachment charges, and the chaotic vote-counting in Iowa has left Democrats frustrated and disorganized, many of these voters are worried the party is endangering its opportunity to win back the White House.

Yet for Sanders, 78, a victory here would cement his status as a front-runner and provide a moment of redemption just four months after he had a heart attack that threatened his candidacy, and four years after he lost the Democratic nomination after a long and often bitter primary race.

Sanders is benefiting from something he lacked in 2016: a field of opponents who are dividing moderate voters, preventing any of the centrist candidates from consolidating support. Buttigieg and Klobuchar asserted themselves Tuesday, while Biden is fading but staying in the race and the self-funding Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, is gaining strength in advance of the Super Tuesday contests next month.

Helping Sanders just as much is the decline of Warren, whose poor showing will make it difficult for her to finance her campaign and may allow Sanders to further coalesce the party’s left-wing voters.

Propelled by overwhelming support from young voters, Sanders got a lift in New Hampshire from an electorate that, like Iowa’s, is fractured along ideological and generational lines. He is the overwhelming favorite of younger and more progressive Democrats, while his rivals are splitting older and more moderate voters.

But Buttigieg and Klobuchar still roared into contention Tuesday, thanks to a late migration of voters who said they had just made up their minds.

The 38-year-old former mayor benefited from his virtual tie with Sanders atop Iowa and steadily gained support as Biden declined in the week leading up to the primary here.

Klobuchar’s surge was even more sudden. After a lackluster finish in Iowa, Klobuchar, a third-term Minnesota senator, harnessed a standout debate performance Friday to gain momentum and emerge as the unexpected story of New Hampshire, a state famous for springing electoral surprises.

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Another factor weighs heavily in Sanders’ favor: money. Besides Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, another self-funding billionaire, Sanders is the only candidate who has raised enough money to finance a robust advertising and get-out-the-vote effort in Nevada and South Carolina, which vote later this month, as well as in the 15 states and territories that all vote on March 3. His campaign announced it had raised $25 million in January, and even before polls closed Tuesday said it had already received 600,000 contributions in the first nine days of February.

In a number of the important March primary states, including California, early and mail-in voting will have been underway for weeks by the time Super Tuesday arrives, potentially giving a head start to any candidate who is ahead of the pack in the middle of February and disadvantaging those Democrats counting on a late-breaking shift in their direction.

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As promising as this moment may appear, Sanders still faces daunting obstacles. Most notably, he has not yet demonstrated an ability to build a broader coalition beyond his loyal faction of progressives.

His vote total in New Hampshire was expected to be about half of what he drew here in 2016, and he received only slightly more than a quarter of the vote in Iowa. Even if his center-left opponents continue to split voters, they still may deny him the delegate majority he needs to claim the nomination because Democrats do not have winner-take-all contests.

Each of Sanders’ top New Hampshire rivals insisted Tuesday that they were forging ahead; Biden did not even wait for the final results before heading to the rally in South Carolina, which votes Feb. 29. The Nevada caucuses will take place a week earlier, however, and the outcome there could winnow Sanders’ opposition.

Biden had been his most formidable opponent in Nevada, at least according to polls taken before Iowa and New Hampshire. But with 10 days before Nevada votes, Buttigieg and Klobuchar may prove stronger after their surges in New Hampshire. For both of them, Nevada represents the first test of their abilities to build support from racial minorities, something they did not have to do in the first two, heavily white states.

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A more significant challenge for Sanders may await on Super Tuesday, which takes place just three days after South Carolina’s primary: Bloomberg has used his wealth to saturate the states voting that day with more than $300 million on advertising and organizing. Polls show the former New York mayor rising nationally and also in some of the Super Tuesday contests, in part because no one besides him, Sanders and Steyer has been able to buy commercials in those states.

On the moderate side of the party, Biden’s apparent weakness has sent many of his voters scattering to other candidates.

In addition to Buttigieg, who has risen quickly in national polls, Klobuchar has appeared to pick up some of Biden’s supporters, and so has Bloomberg, who did not compete in any of the four states holding primaries and caucuses in February.

The central question for Democrats on the center-left is whether Biden can regain traction in the race or whether his support is likely to crumble after another poor showing in New Hampshire — and, after falling short again, whether any of the remaining moderates can sweep up the bulk of those votes.

Within the progressive wing of the party, the shape of the race seems clearer. Sanders is widely seen as having a good chance to win the Nevada caucuses, and the strength and enthusiasm of his national following may give him an upper hand on Super Tuesday over a diffuse field of rivals on the center-left.

Yet there are deep doubts across much of the party about his ability to win the general election. It is unclear whether he will be able to ease those concerns in time to take control of the race during the big-state primaries in March. For him to do that, Sanders would have to more fully sideline Warren, a Massachusetts senator who still has a sizable bloc of support on the national level, and do more to chip away at moderate resistance to his candidacy.

So far, Sanders has mainly been focused on driving up turnout within his progressive base — a sufficient approach in the earliest primary states, but perhaps not enough to secure the nomination.

If Democratic voters remain in an indecisive mood, there may still be several more shifts in momentum before the end of the month.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .