I knew the GOP contest was Shakespearean drama, but really…
Nate Cohn:
Donald Trump won New Hampshire on Tuesday night, and not just because he finished with the most votes.
The results extend his biggest advantage: a deeply divided opposition. They all but ensure that several mainstream Republicans will remain in the race — perhaps even long enough for Mr. Trump to take a big delegate lead on Super Tuesday, March 1.
As recently as a few days ago, New Hampshire seemed as if it could produce the opposite effect. Marco Rubio had just taken a strong third in the Iowa caucuses, and a handful of polls showed him moving into the upper teens and into a strong second place in New Hampshire.
Instead, Mr. Rubio fared poorly in the last debate. He is currently in fifth place in the New Hampshire returns, trailing John Kasich, who is currently in second place, Ted Cruz and even Jeb Bush by a meaningful margin.
Robert Schlesinger:
There's no question that Donald Trump scored an epic win last night in New Hampshire. But there's still a lot of primary season left, and one item that shouldn't be easily glossed over is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's surprisingly strong performance in the Granite State.
Third is the new first!
NY Times:
At his campaign headquarters a few miles away, 500 volunteers from across the country had gathered inside an expansive maze of corporate-style offices, requiring so much pizza that stacks of empty boxes nearly touched the ceiling.
Over dinners across town, longtime friends of Mr. Rubio dared to speak of a surprise showing in New Hampshire: not just second or third place, but an outright victory.
What they never imagined was the breakdown that could jeopardize it all: A malfunction of the campaign’s single-biggest asset, its most nimble salesman and, until 8:34 p.m. on Saturday, a nearly flawless executioner of its strategy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (and read the whole piece):
Against endorsements
This morning I went on Democracy Now to discuss my critique of “class-first” policy as a way of ameliorating the effects of racism. In the midst of that discussion I made the point that one can maintain a critique of a candidate—in this case Bernie Sanders—and still feel that that candidate is deserving of your vote. Amy Goodman, being an excellent journalist, did exactly what she should have done—she asked if I were going to vote for Senator Sanders.
I, with some trepidation, answered in the affirmative. I did so because I’ve spent my career trying to get people to answer uncomfortable questions. Indeed, the entire reason I was on the show was to try to push liberals into directly addressing an uncomfortable issue that threatens their coalition. It seemed wrong, somehow, to ask others to step into their uncomfortable space and not do so myself. So I answered.
Kevin Drum:
In the LA Times today, Maria Bustillos says she can't support Hillary Clinton because of her vote for the Iraq War, her ties to Wall Street, her sellout "pragmatism," and the fact that Henry Kissinger recently said complimentary things about her...
So far, no problem. Those are all good reasons to vote for Bernie. But what comes next is pretty disturbing:
Much as I support Sanders' lifelong, rock-ribbed liberalism, I might have been persuaded to vote for a Democrat somewhat to the right of him in hopes of bringing some moderate Republicans along for the ride—especially in view of that party's clown car primary. But none of those halfway-reasonable leftists ran: not Al Gore, not Russ Feingold, not Elizabeth Warren. And the very clownishness of that madly tootling Republican vehicle, I believe, virtually ensures that whichever Democrat secures the nomination will win the general.
I wonder how common this belief is? Not too common, I hope, because it's wishful thinking in the extreme. Democrats have held the White House for eight years and the economy is in okay but not great shape. Those are not great fundamentals for a Democratic victory.
David A. Hopkins:
3. Trump continues to be a polarizing figure within the party, with significant proportions of Republicans voicing a dislike for him or reluctance to support him if he were to be the nominee. Yet Cruz and Bush also face resistance from a substantial fraction of Republican voters, and less than half of New Hampshire Republicans told exit pollsters that they would feel satisfied with a Rubio nomination. At the moment, none of the leading Republican candidates engenders broadly positive feelings within the party electorate.
4. Bernie Sanders's bigger-than-expected victory on the Democratic side does not dislodge Hillary Clinton from her position as the heavy favorite for the nomination. Yet it does signal that Sanders will be a serious competitor, perhaps extending the nomination race far into the spring. It is likely that the Clinton campaign will retool its message—Clinton's concession speech in New Hampshire appeared to foreshadow exactly such a development—to echo Sanders's anti-Wall Street themes while simultaneously appealing much more directly to the major social groups within the Democratic coalition, especially racial minorities.
5. Relatedly, Clinton is also likely to hug Obama even tighter (rhetorically speaking, that is) in the coming weeks. The Sanders campaign would be wise to prepare for repeated accusations that it represents a rebuke to the policies—and even the character—of the current incumbent. A race that turns into a referendum on Obama would not be in its strategic interest.
The above is from yet another political scientist I am following this cycle. If APR sounds smart, it’s partly because of them.
David Bernstein:
If you are a Republican who desperately wants to prevent Donald Trump or Ted Cruz from winning the party’s nomination, New Hampshire could hardly have gone worse.
And you’ve got 10 days to straighten things out.
That’s when the South Carolina primary takes place. At this moment, that looks like a two-way race between Trump and Cruz, with a host of others sniping at each other for small shares of the leftovers.
The Republican candidate who, a week earlier, looked like he was emerging as the alternative to Trump and Cruz, collapsed to an apparent fifth-place finish. Now, instead of clearing out the rest of the field, Marco Rubio is just somebody with third- and fifth-place finishes.
In doing so, Rubio breathed just enough life into Jeb Bush’s moribund campaign to justify going forward. But just barely. Bush has almost precisely matched the Iowa and New Hampshire showings of Rudy Giuliani in 2008, a campaign viewed as one of the worst failures of modern politics. (Giuliani finished 3rd with 3% and 4th with 9%; Bush was 3rd with 3% and appears to be 4th with 11%.)
Both finished below Ted Cruz in New Hampshire, pending the final votes to be tallied, an embarrassment that bodes ill for them heading toward Cruz’s natural home base in the South, which picks one-third of GOP delegates.
At least Rubio and Bush, conservatives from Florida with significant endorsements and financial backing, can theoretically compete in the South. It’s much harder to imagine John Kasich doing so.
Alex Eisenstadt:
For the establishment wing of the Republican Party, the picture just keeps getting bleaker.
Far from winnowing the crowded field of mainstream GOP contenders and allowing it to unify around a standard-bearer, New Hampshire thrust it further into chaos. Marco Rubio, after taking steps last week to coalesce the backing of the party’s upper echelons, saw his momentum halted in the state, which punished him for delivering an overly scripted debate performance.
The establishment picture is now more clouded than ever, with Rubio, Jeb Bush, and New Hampshire runner-up John Kasich heading for a brutal fight in South Carolina – a state known for its rough-and-tumble political culture. Chris Christie, who was also competing for establishment support, is reassessing his campaign’s future.
All of this, many in the mainstream wing of the GOP worry, is excellent news for one man: Donald Trump.
Thomas Edsall:
Despite Donald Trump’s victory in New Hampshire, what is the chance that Republicans will nominate Ted Cruz and that he will go on to win the presidency?
The website ElectionBettingOdds gives Cruz a 14.5 percent chance of winning the nomination — his victory in the Iowa caucuses and what looks like a third place showing in New Hampshire notwithstanding. It puts his chances of actually winning the presidency at 4.3 percent.
But let’s say Cruz beats the odds and wins the nomination. One of the most conservative members of the Senate, Cruz would test the argument made by leaders of the hard right that Republicans have lost four of the last six presidential elections because their candidates — George H. W. Bush of 1992, Robert Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney — were insufficiently conservative…
Cruz’s nomination would turn the general election in November into an almost perfect test of the viability of a pure conservative.
He’s actually the nominee I’d rather face. Trump is too much of a fascist and wild card to trust. I think the electorate would find him more appealing than Ted Cruz. And when Cruz loses, it might even break the conservative fever on the other side.
Pat Garofolo:
Politics isn't all about joining hands and singing Kumbayah, of course. The 2008 primary between Clinton and then-Sen. Barack Obama got pretty nasty, and yet Clinton Democrats still turned out for Obama, earlier protestations notwithstanding. Though there's always the possibility of long-standing animosity being an issue in November, I still feel, as I wrote after Iowa, that a long primary is good for the Democrats; it was nice to see Sanders nodding in the direction of a united front already.
So perhaps the bigger and better question is where does this result leave the Democratic Party? Sanders, if nothing else, has shown the appetite for an unabashedly, unashamedly liberal line in the party, one that isn't content with half measures, triangulation or a third way. Even if Clinton ultimately wins the day, she will do so at the helm of a party that doesn't look a whole lot like the one the last Clinton president led, thanks in no small part to Sanders' efforts, even if he only tapped into a vein of thought and feeling that was there all along.
It may be then, to tweak the cliche a little bit, that Sanders ultimately loses the battles and surrenders, and yet still wins the war. Vive la revolution.
Brendan Nyhan:
Mrs. Clinton will continue to struggle until she clarifies the stakes of the campaign — why does being more electable matter? Her concession speechin New Hampshire on Tuesday night, for instance, failed to connect her race against Mr. Sanders to the potential effects on the issues she discussed. In future ads and debates, Mrs. Clinton and her campaign are likely to describe in more detail how a Sanders defeat would empower the G.O.P. to enact its agenda, leveraging voters’ psychological responsivenessto threats and Democrats’ negative emotions toward Republicans.
Mrs. Clinton is likely to talk more in particular about the Supreme Court, which is perhaps the only area where she can credibly promise domestic policy change rather than simply obstruction of Republican legislation. At a candidate forum last week, she noted that “the next president could get as many as three appointments”because four of the justices are 75 or olderand likely to retire.