Both parties’ establishment players face a harder road ahead
By J.A. | MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE
ICY New Hampshire on February 9th was supposed to be where America’s convoluted primary contest got simpler. On the Republican side, Donald Trump was expected to win in a state where he has led in over 70 straight opinion polls. But in Marco Rubio, who almost pipped him to second place in Iowa and had high hopes for New Hampshire, the Republican establishment was hoping to have found an able adversary for the rabble-rousing tycoon. Similarly, among the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian left-wing populist had looked likely to beat Hillary Clinton—for New Hampshire is packed with the white liberals who love him, and borders his own Vermont. Yet Mrs Clinton, buoyed by her narrow victory in Iowa, hoped to limit the damage—then advance with confidence to the more diverse states of the West and South. In the event, however, Mr Trump and Mr Sanders simply won huge victories. Mr Rubio and Mrs Clinton did horribly. If New Hampshire has simplified the contest, it is not in any way that Republican or Democratic party leaders will relish.
In a windy victory speech, Mr Sanders promised his victory would send a message that “will echo from Wall Street to Washington.” It will. Mr Sanders, who wants to break up banks, hike taxes on rich people and to set a much bigger role for the state in providing education and health care, won around 60% of the vote. His campaign staff claimed this was the biggest-ever victory in a contested Democratic primary: he trounced Mrs Clinton in almost every category of voter. Exit polls suggested Mr Sanders won over 80% of younger voters, which was startling, though somewhat expected, given the enormous enthusiasm he has worked up in college crowds, who “feel the Bern”. He also beat Mrs Clinton among men and among women, among college graduates and non-graduates, among those with guns and those without.
The only voters who mainly stayed loyal to Mrs Clinton (who won the New Hampshire primary in 2008 and had a 40-point lead there when she announced her candidacy last year), were voters aged 65 and over and those whose families earn more than $200,000. After her defeat she acknowledged—for she could hardly do otherwise—that she needs to do more to win the love of youngsters. But it is the vote of Hispanics and, especially, blacks that Mrs Clinton will now worry about most. African-Americans, who have hitherto favoured Mrs Clinton over Mr Sanders 2:1, represent half of all Democrats in South Carolina, which will hold its primary on February 27th. So long as Mrs Clinton can keep them on-side, she will probably win the nomination. Yet in the extremity of her defeat, that seems less certain than it did.
A former first lady, senator and secretary of state, Mrs Clinton represents continuity—and the electorate wants change. Exit polls in New Hampshire suggest 41% of Democrats want a more left-wing president than Barack Obama. This, naturally, is another group that Mr Sanders, who promises a “political revolution”, swept. Mrs Clinton, with her experience, also has formidable skills as a politician; name her a policy and she will speak on it. But voters, as well as change, want to be inspired, and that is not Mrs Clinton’s bag either. She appears to find the job of vote-winning a trial.
She has charm, but of a programmatic sort. Having failed, so far, to fire up many women with the promise of America’s first woman president, she is struggling even to make them trust her. An ongoing controversy over Mrs Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account as secretary of state has not helped her cause, having played to her longstanding reputation for being rather shifty. Her supporters decry that as the work of malicious Republican slander, of which there has been plenty aimed at Mrs Clinton. But the impression endures. “I worry that Hillary is dishonest,” said Reina Rodriguez, a retired teacher emerging from a polling station in the New Hampshire town of Nashua, where she had cast her vote for Mr Sanders. She said she considered him “a beautiful politician, a true democrat”. Ominously for Mrs Clinton, she was speaking in Spanish.
Even before the primary, there were reports that Mrs Clinton and her husband, Bill Clinton, who campaigned hard for her in New Hampshire, were planning urgent changes to her campaign team. Yet juggling her employees, who include many tested veterans of Mr Obama’s winning campaigns, may not help her much. In response to those reports, David Axelrod, a Democratic campaign guru and critic of Mrs Clinton tweeted: “When the exact same problems crop up in separate campaigns, with different staff, at what point do the principals say, ‘Hey, maybe it’s US?’” In any event, Mrs Clinton has some rethinking to do.
That is not Mr Trump’s predicament. In Iowa, the property tycoon performed significantly less well than opinion polls suggested he might. That, in turn, fuelled a suspicion that his support was insubstantial—because the disenchanted working-class whites who flock to Mr Trump’s rallies do not flock to the polling booths. And Mr Trump had not done much to address that worry. He campaigned less hard in New Hampshire than almost any of his rivals. He spent a total of 28 days in the state and almost no money; his campaign effort there had increasingly taken on the look of a Potemkin effort, cobbled together to try to reassure journalists that he was serious. By comparison, Jeb Bush spent 59 days campaigning in New Hampshire. He and the super-PAC supporting him spent around $30m on television advertising there, chiefly to attack his mainstream rivals, Mr Rubio and the governors of Ohio and New Jersey, John Kasich and Chris Christie. Yet Mr Trump outperformed his polling numbers to win New Hampshire with around 35% of the vote. Mr Bush got 11%, which put him joint fourth with Mr Rubio.
For the Republican leaders who recoil in horror at Mr Trump’s careless populism, his offensiveness and his frequent trampling over conservative causes such as free trade, Mr Rubio’s poor showing was perhaps the biggest story of primary night. Had Mr Rubio merely repeated his Iowa performance, beating Mr Bush, Mr Kasich and Mr Christie to come third, he would have been swiftly identified as the man likeliest to foil Mr Trump and Ted Cruz, the ultra-conservative winner in Iowa, whom his party’s establishment also loathe. Mr Bush, Mr Kasich and Mr Christie would then have been expected to remove themselves from the contest, as anxious Republican donors meanwhile showered Mr Rubio’s campaign with money. And that may yet happen. Mr Rubio is suffering from a perception that he is too green to be president; an embarrassing gaffe in a televised debate on February 6th, when he responded to an attack by Mr Christie by repeating a rehearsed attack on Mr Obama three times, reinforced it. Yet he remains clever and attractive; if he is not to be the mainstream Republican champion, it is not at all clear who will be.
Mr Kasich, who came second in New Hampshire with 15%, is too moderate for most primary voters. Mr Bush, an awkward public figure and a product of dynasty, jars with the anti-establishment spirit of the times—and has perhaps been ridiculed by Mr Trump once too often. Mr Christie, who won only 7% of the New Hampshire vote, is probably already finished.
More important, whoever is to be the anti-Trump, anti-Cruz candidate, commanding around 40% of the Republican primary vote, now cannot be settled until after the party’s South Carolina primary on February 20th. That is excellent news for Mr Trump and Mr Cruz, who quietly hoovered up New Hampshire’s most conservative voters to come third, despite spending little time or money in the state. While those despised candidates concentrate on developing their campaigns and winning delegates, their mainstream rivals will continue trying to beat each other.
Not that any of them, Mr Rubio, Mr Bush or Mr Kasich, is likely to do particularly well in South Carolina. Opinion polls put Mr Trump even further ahead there than he was in New Hampshire, with 36% of the vote. They put Mr Cruz, with 20%, securely in second place. The mainstreamers are a long way behind.
