TRiUMPh in New Hampshire- The Death of Conventional Wisdom

Once upon a time, they (the pundits, the politicos, the experts) said it couldn’t be done. “There’s no way a brash and brazen ‘reality show’ celebrity, can win an election against ‘tried and true’ mainstream Republicans with long-standing pedigrees…no way,” they said. “There’s no way a ‘seventy-something year old socialist can threaten an inevitable political force, like Hillary Clinton…no way.”

Well, it happened.

By respective margins, of more than fifty thousand votes apiece, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders soundly defeated their opponents and won the New Hampshire presidential primary elections of 2016.

So convincing were their margins of victory that all of the pundits, all of the politicos and all of the so-called experts, who thought that they knew everything that was needed to be known about politics, received a message, loud and clear, that they don’t know “flip” about politics, at the end of the day.

Trump, who bested his nearest rival with a percentage that more than doubled John Kasich, who had devoted himself to a strategy that heavily invested both time and treasure into winning the New Hampshire primary, beat Kasich and the rest of the “mainstream” Republicans quite handily. Trump has also retaken the lead in the quest for the Republican nomination going into the Nevada, South Carolina and Super Tuesday contests which will ultimately decide who will be the GOP nominee. Coming in third behind Trump and Kasich, Ted Cruz, who was not expected to do well in New Hampshire, and did not expend much comparative effort into winning the Granite State, still bested Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and defied the conventional wisdom that said, “an evangelical cannot do well” in a comparatively secular state like New Hampshire. The remaining candidates, Chris Christie, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina did so poorly that the future of their own campaigns largely remains in doubt.

Over on the Democrats’ side, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) used a combination of his state’s proximity to New Hampshire, a groundswell of enthusiasm on the part of young voters, and a ponderous gap (93% to 5%) in comparatively perceived honesty and trustworthiness, to trounce the once-inevitable Hillary Clinton. He did so by more than a three-to-two margin of twenty-two percentage points. Clinton, who had hoped to attain a single-digit margin in defeat, had these same hopes crushed in the snowdrifts of a New Hampshire winter. Moreover Sanders, who lacks both the political machinery and control of the mainstream media that is Hillary Clinton’s, is now looking at a possibility, however remote, to continue his campaign into the Democrats’ national convention this summer, turning conventional wisdom on its ear. If Hillary cannot turn around, a three-pronged triad of perils associated with her handling of e-mails, the selling of favors vis-a-vis the Clinton foundation, and her own angry and caustic persona, her eventual nomination is anything “short” of the lock that it once was.

Essentially, the Republican tickets out of New Hampshire are four: Trump, Cruz, Rubio and, perhaps, Bush, because despite his impressive second-place showing, John Kasich can only last at the expense of Jeb Bush, who has much more money and resources than has the Ohio governor. Rubio, himself, must either win or place in South Carolina and Nevada, or he is through as a candidate for the top spot.

As both of these contests, Democrat and Republican, head towards much warmer climates, the vicious and frosty attacks that America saw in New Hampshire will only heat up, and become more incendiary, in the six weeks to follow.

Get out the sunblock.

 

-Drew Nickell, 10 February 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.