captioning sponsored by wnet >> brangham: on this edition for saturday, february 6: republican presidential hopefuls hunker down in new hampshire, while the democratic candidates look beyond that first primary. in our signature segment, the campaign road ahead: how the complex delegate rules of individual states help determine who makes the ballot in november. >> brangham: next, on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: lewis b. and louise hirschfeld cullman. bernard and irene schwartz. judy and josh weston. the cheryl and philip milstein family. the citi foundation. supporting innovation and enabling urban progress. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii.

corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we are your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. from the tisch wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, william brangham. >> brangham: good evening, and thanks for joining us. we begin tonight with politics. since 1952, new hampshire has held its influential, first-in- the-nation presidential primary, and will do so again three days from now. tuesday's ballot features the two democrats and eight republicans still in the running for the white house. new jersey's chris christie is one of three current or former governors reaching for the top tier of the republican pack. >> you got to ask from each of us, who do you believe is going to stand for you? >> brangham: ohio's john kasich is another, as is florida's jeb bush, who has greeted voters

with his 90-year-old mother. >> good to meet you. >> brangham: the governors are trying to catch businessman donald trump and senators ted cruz and marco rubio. >> on our worst day, we are a hundred times better than any of the republican candidates. >> brangham: before knocking on doors today, democratic senator bernie sanders-- from the state next door, vermont-- appeared at a big party fundraiser, as did former secretary of state hillary clinton. >> you want a president who will pull up her sleeves and make a difference in your lives! ( applause ) >> brangham: ...and seven remaining republican presidential candidates take the debate stage tonight in manchester, new hampshire. that's where national public radio senior editor and correspondent ron elving is covering the campaign, and he joins me now. >> the battle for supremacy at the top of the republican pack as well as at the bottom of the

pack. they have a big debate tonight, what are you expecting to see? >> we expect to see donald trump and ted cruz firing back and forth at each other because ted cruz won iowa, donald trump is polling way ahead here in new hampshire and nationally. we also expect to see many of the other candidates going after marco rubio, who is polling suddenly second here in new hampshire after finishing third in iowa. we also expect many of these candidates to be on the brink of extinction after this primary, so everyone's battling to get in there and one of the top three. >> brangham: do you think trump can real estate gain some of the trajectory he had after losing a little bit to cruz in iowa? >> some of donald trump's polls here in new hampshire show hem with well over 30%. if he can do that here and if ted cruz, as is quite possible, falls back to something like fourth place, then it really becomes donald trump versus the pack, or donald trump versus marco rubio. and he is polling quite well in soutsouth carolina, which is gog to matter a great keel to the

republicans. so he could resteer some of the remarkable momentum he had had last fall. >> brangham: let's turn now to the democrats. bernie sanders continues to do very well in the polls. he's here in new york tonight to be on "saturday night live." >> bernie sanders, of course, is a neighbor in vermont to new hampshire, and he was popular right from the beginning of this contest. but his numbers are still quite robust and even rising. so there's a great deal more going on here. hillary clinton is not making the kind of connection, particularly with younger voters, and intensely loyal progressives that bernie sanders is making here in new hampshire, and really all around the country. so while she is still certainly competitive, and we expect this to be a long fight, and she certainly does look brave and happy as she goes around the state, shooez going to be beaten badly here, and she knows it. the polls show anything from 10 to 30 point. >> brangham: in fact, hillary has left new hampshire and is going to flint, michigan, i

understand. what do you make of that move? >> she wants to change the stair little bit from the usual new hampshire door knocking and handshaking which she has been doing today, before going to flint, and she's going to come back. but in flint, michigan, vut lead poisoning crisis that is a national tragedy, and she has a chance to show she's been concerned for that for a while and she can be one on one quite personable and warm with people, and she does care about what is really concerning people in their own everyday lives. >> brangham: all right, ron elving of national public radio, thank you so much. >> thank you, william. >> brangham: in other news, president obama is calling for the federal government to double its investment in renewable energy, to try and reduce the carbon pollution that contributes to climate change. in his weekly address today, the president said the budget he'll send to congress next tuesday would increase research and development on energy sources like wind and solar-- from $6.5 billion this year to nearly $13 billion a year by 2020.

>> while republicans in congress are still considering their position on climate change, many of them realize that clean energy is an incredible source of good-paying jobs for their constituents. >> brangham: but as with all spending ills, congress must approve the president's request. in taiwan, at least 14 people are dead and more than 100 are unaccounted for, after a strong, pre-dawn earthquake today. rescue efforts focused on a collapsed 17-story apartment building in the city of tainan, where 11 of the dead were found. rescuers pulled at least 340 people from the rubble, including this young boy. most people were asleep when the 6.4 magnitude quake struck. taiwan's interior minister says there will be an investigation into why the large apartment building collapsed. nine smaller buildings in tainan also fell, though most structures in this city of 1.8 million people were not seriously damaged. the 15-year trend in declining traffic deaths in the united states has come to a full stop. the national highway traffic safety administration reports fatalities on u.s. roads and highways went up last year. for the first nine months of

2015, traffic deaths rose a sharp 9.3%, compared to the same period in 2014. more than 26,000 people died on the road-- the most in the first nine months of any year since 2008. traffic deaths had been falling steadily since the year 2000, dropping by some 22%. officials say 94% of the fatalities resulted from human error, such as drunk driving, not wearing seat belts, and driving while texting. officials also attribute the spike to more people driving more miles, as a result of both lower gas prices and lower unemployment. >> brangham: despite the outsized attention they receive from candidates and the media, new hampshire and iowa, which held caucuses on monday, account for less than 5% of the delegates at stake in the national conventions where the republican and democratic nominees will be ratified this summer. for instance, after winning iowa, republican ted cruz has eight delegates, while marco

rubio and donald trump each have seven. primaries and caucuses are scheduled through june, though candidates in both parties may emerge with the magic number of pledged delegates needed to win the nomination sooner. in tonight's signature segment, special correspondent jeff greenfield reports on the long road ahead, and the different sets of rules for choosing delegates in each state. >> reporter: this is where american politics lives, this week. the candidates... >> i wanted you to meet my family because they're going to be here for eight days. >> reporter: the crowds... >> reporter: the attacks and counter-attacks... >> he views the constitution as an annoyance. >> reporter: but while new hampshire is obviously the center of the political universe this week, the real fight for the nomination will begin after tuesday's primary, when the survivors set out on a long, winding, four month-long road, whose incredibly complicated

rules will in large measure determine who wins the nomination and how. in fact, republicans and democrats travel two different roads, with rules that reflect the different core philosophies of the parties. democrats require every state to use pretty much the same rules for awarding delegates. >> democrats are very, very regimented and very centrally ruled. >> reporter: author and brookings institution scholar elaine kamarck has been on the democratic party's rules committee for almost 20 years. >> so we tell the states exactly how many delegates they can have and how many delegates each congressional district can have in the state. we tell the states how they have to allocate delegates to presidential candidates. there's a lot of central control from washington on the democratic state parties. >> reporter: democrats require every state to award delegates proportionally, in a percentage that more or less reflects their primary vote total. they've long banned the "winner- take all" approach.

republicans, by contrast, take a more "federalist" approach. >> the theory behind the republican delegate selection process is that each state has a great deal of authority and autonomy in choosing its own method. >> reporter: ben ginsberg is former general counsel of the republican national committee and was an election lawyer for the campaigns of george w. bush and mitt romney. he says this year's rules are a mixed bag of proportional and winner-take-all states. >> there is a period of proportionality, in this case it's the first 14 days in march, must be states dividing up their delegates proportionally. but other than that, the states can do it pretty much any way they want to. >> reporter: if you want to see just how critical such rules can be, look back to 2008. when republican john mccain won early winner-take-all primaries in big states like florida, new york, and new jersey, he got all the delegates, helping him secure the nomination in early march. on the democratic side, although

hillary clinton won most of the big states, like ohio and pennsylvania, because of proportional rules, she took home only a handful more delegates than barack obama did by finishing second. obama, on the other hand, campaigned hard in small states, like idaho and kansas, and won such a huge proportion of votes, he actually went home with a larger surplus of delegates than clinton did in the big states. >> if you don't understand the delegate game, you can make a lot of mistakes. and the history of the presidential nomination process is just filled with examples where a campaign made the wrong call and it cost them momentum and eventually the nomination. so understanding this is the key to winning the nomination. >> reporter: for 2016, it's the republican road, with its dizzying array of rules that requires close attention.

each flip of the calendar brings new states front and center, with their own rules about how delegates are won. so hang on, it can get very bumpy. after new hampshire, comes south carolina. the winner there has won the republican nomination in every campaign, except 2012. nevada votes three days later. a key date is march 1, when twelve states award 632 republican delegates, a quarter of the total. some call this "super tuesday." it's led by seven southern states, including texas, georgia, tennessee, and alabama. if you're celebrity businessman donald trump, you approach these states the same way you do the others. hold huge rallies and hope that your fame and your words turn supporters into voters-- and voters into a big proportion of delegates. senator ted cruz's campaign has a far more specific approach to win his proportion of delegates: targeting the large percentage of republican voters who call themselves "evangelical"-- his base. >> i don't know who drew the map, but we thank them.

>> reporter: rick tyler, the cruz campaign's communication director, knows the evangelical makeup of these states by heart. >> you go to georgia, which has over 60%, then you have tennessee, is over 70%. alabama, over 70%. mississippi, over 50%. texas is over 50%. oklahoma has over 70%. arkansas has over 60%. all those states are going to go on march 1, except for mississippi, which will go on march 8, and the evangelical votes are just frontloaded in this campaign. now, that's an advantage to us, because we appeal to the evangelicals. we've already proved that in iowa. >> reporter: that constituency's power in these early states explains why senator marco rubio has been emphasizing his religious commitment. >> our rights do not come from our government. our rights come from our creator. >> reporter: and if you're ohio governor john kasich, assuming you survive new hampshire, you look at march 1 delegate opportunities outside the south: minnesota, massachusetts, vermont-- and you stake your

prospects on a different premise. >> you're going to think that i fell off a turnip truck or something on the way to politics. i haven't been doing it for a while. jeff, i think people are people. they have the same anxieties everywhere. i don't tailor. i've never changed my message from iowa to here to south carolina to nevada. i think what's happening is maybe there are politicians who are playing to certain factions. but i guess i'm a true believer. i think i can get every vote. >> reporter: candidates like kasich can take heart from republican rules that keep these early states proportional. even without winning, they might pick up some delegates. that helped eventual republican nominee mitt romney in 2012. josh putnam, a lecturer at the university of georgia, has a blog-- frontloading hq-- which focuses on these rules. >> he wasn't worried necessarily, or his campaign was not worried about winning in

mississippi or alabama or oklahoma. they just wanted to perform well enough to qualify for delegates and reduce the amount of advantage that his competitors, santorum and gingrich, got out of that. >> reporter: but there's a catch-- in two dozen states eds to reach a "reshold-e any delegates at all.y forof the >> when people think proportional, or when i say proportional, i think what people think is, well if you win 40% of the vote, you get around 40% of the delegates out of that. and that's simply not the case. >> reporter: putnam points to his own state of georgia as an example of how some delegate- rich states have a hybrid system: part proportional, part winner-take-all. >> georgia has a system where, you know, if you get above 20% of the vote statewide, you get a share of 31 at-large delegates. >> reporter: when it comes to choosing those at-large delegates at the statewide level, it's proportional. but at the congressional district level, it can be

winner-take-all. >> but there's still that battle to be waged in each of the 14 congressional districts of georgia. but if you can win a majority in one of those congressional districts, you get all three delegates from that congressional district. >> reporter: with the exception of donald trump, no serious campaign will ignore these complex rules, because they determine where resources should and shouldn't be deployed. republican election lawyer ben ginsberg: >> so take for example the march 1 states. there are 12 states that go. they're dispersed around the country, although the concentration in the south. no one will be able to afford, under the federal campaign finance rules, the amount of money they have in the bank, to run 12 statewide races. so in today's world of modern campaigns, the smart campaigns have done a lot of list development work, micro- targeting work, to find out where their supporters are, who they are and how to reach them. >> reporter: five weeks after

the new hampshire tumult dies down, the republican primary road takes a radical turn. after march 15, states are free to allocate delegates pretty much any way they want: proportional, by congressional district, even winner-take-all, and woe be to a campaign that does not understand how important that turn is. this year, there are only two early "winner take all" contests for republicans-- and they're big ones-- ohio and florida. both vote on march 15. the only candidate who gets any delegates is the one who comes in first. other big states down the road like pennsylvania--which has 71 delegates at stake on april 26-- use a hybrid system-- part winner-take-all, part proportional. pennsylvania republicans are more moderate and more secular than southern republicans, but the conservative cruz campaign intends to reach its voters there by using data analysis. >> we actually can tell from analytical data that consumers

offered to marketing companies all the time, what they like and how they want it to be communicated with. so we actually don't have one script for somebody who's pro- life or one script for somebody who's pro-gun. we have different scripts because people like to hear their issues in different ways. >> reporter: no one can say whether the road to the nomination will stretch all the way to the california primary in june. but this can be said: it's far less colorful than the spectacle of a campaign rally and the clash of ideas and personalities in a heated debate. but when the tumult and the shouting dies down, and the nominee emerges, these "rules" of the road often matter a whole lot more. stay up to date! pbs.org/newshour. >> brangham: in syria, government forces loyal to president bashar al-assad have intensified their offensive on the city of aleppo, causing tens

of thousands of refugees to flee toward syria's border with turkey. many now amassed at makeshift camps, hoping to cross into turkey. aleppo-- which was once syria's most populous city-- has been controlled by rebel forces opposed to assad. syrian government forces have been backed by intense russian military airstrikes for four months. this ongoing fighting caused united nations-brokered peace talks in switzerland to disband this week. joining me now to discuss the latest developments in syria is brian jenkins. he's written a series of studies on the conflict for the rand corporation. this move against aleppo, many people think that this is a major turning point in the conflict and gives it a decisive potential win to assad. is that your assessment as well? >> no, we've seen a lot of turning points in syria's spiral of violence. aleppo has been a contested city since 2012. there has been continuing fighting in the city. this particular campaign to drive the rebels out of the parts of the city they hold

began last october. i suspect it's going to go on, and even if the syrian forces are able to retake the entire city of aleppo, it is not like lie that they're going to be able to restore government authority throughout the territory of syria. >> brangham: if aleppo is blocked off, we saw what happened when smaller syrian cities were blockaded by assad's sources, and we saw horrible images of starvation and young children being incredibly malnourished. is that likely to happen in aleppo as well? >> we could see a potential siege and a potential slaughter. fightinfighting in urban areas y and brutal. and it can come down to block-by-block, house-by-house fighting is which disastrous for civilian populations. we've seen some of that already

in aleppo. much of the old part of the city, the historic part of the city, has been destroyed or badly damaged. >> brangham: let's talk a little bit more broadly. what does this mean for the larger fight against isis which obsentenceibly remains the u.s.' primary concern in syria. what's happening on that front? >> when the russians interveep, they intervene to protect an enclave, roughly a rectangle of western syria, which was the loyalist bastio bastion of the d regime's forces. the forces, the rebel forces that are being struck by the russian aircraft and that are the targets of this offensive are primarily al-nusra, al qaeda's affiliate in syria, and some of the other less-extreme, more moderate elements of the insurgents that are backed by the west. isil or isis, the forces are

concentrated in eastern syria, and that has been the primary target of the united states. >> brangham: we've seen these peace talks break down. i mean, is there any sense that progress could be made? and if so what, would that progress actually look like? >> i remain extremely skeptical of a successful peace process right now. the external actors have competing interest. the international participants, those groups fighting inside of syria are involved in a conflict that has become increasingly sectarian. in the long run, i suppose it's-- it is possible to look at a series of local accommodations, a series of cease fires. but that would leave in place primarily the partition that we already see in syria today. >> brangham: all right, brian jenkins of the rand corporation,

thanks very much. >> thank you. this is pbs newshour weekend, saturday. >> brangham: now an update on a few of our recent signature segments. last month, megan thompson reported on efforts by brooklyn's district attorney to clear a backlog of outstanding arrest warrants. these were stemming from citations for nonviolent, low level crimes. these warrants are issued when people fail to appear in criminal court-- something that happens almost 40% of the time in new york city. since our report, new york city mayor bill de blasio and the city council have backed a proposed criminal justice reform that would let police issue a civil ticket instead of a criminal summons for these so-called "quality of life" offenses-- things like drinking in public or remaining in a park after dark. and two weeks ago, chris bury reported on the efforts of some u.s. police departments to train officers to use less than lethal force in more of their encounters. philadelphia is one of those

departments, and now its former police commissioner, charles ramsey-- who appeared in our story-- has been tapped to help retrain the chicago police, who have been embroiled in several controversial cases, where police officers shot unarmed civilians. in addition, the "police executive research forum," a police research and policy organization, has unveiled 30 principles and tactics for the nation's 18,000 law enforcement agencies-- all in an effort to de-escalate potentially violent encounters, to engage in more effective communication, and to diminish the use of excessive force. and last week, christopher booker brought us the story about the state department- sponsored competition enlisting college students to combat violent extremist propaganda and recruiting messages by groups like isis, on social media. one team that appeared in our story, from the u.s. military academy at west point, placed second out of 45 teams that competed. the winner: the lahore university of management sciences, in pakistan.

>> brangham: lastly, a new development in the nation's opiod epidemic. a los angeles doctor convicted of overprescribing opiod pain killerwill spend 30 years to life in prison. lisa sang is the first u.s. doctor ever convicted of second-degree murder for overprescribing the drugs. three of her patients died of overdoses. before the judge handed down her sentence yesterday, sanger apologized to the victims apse families. the drug information administration say she wrote roughly 25 prescriptions over three years a day. follow the debate tonight with us online. that's all for this edition of pbs newshour weekend. i'm william brangham. thanks for watching. good night.

captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: lewis b. and louise hirschfeld cullman. bernard and irene schwartz. judy and josh weston. the cheryl and philip milstein family. the citi foundation. supporting innovation and enabling urban progress. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we are your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

announcer: tonight, from the historic east room, "women of soul: in performance at the white house." corporate support for "women of soul: in performance at the white house," is provided by pepsi, in recognition of pepsi's conversations project, a series of films about women thriving in the face of adversity. additional funding provided by the anne ray charitable trust. by the annenberg foundati. by corey brunish. by the corporation for public broadcasting and by the generous contributions to this pbs station from viewers like you, thank you. ladies and gentlemen, the president of the united states and mrs. michelle obama. [audience applause].