New Hampshire primary 2016: updates and results

Whether you think it was a dumb overblown gaffe or a revealing moment that exposed the candidate as a lightweight, Marco Rubio’s debate performance on Saturday in which he robotically repeated the same talking point again and again and again (see above) probably contributed to his dismal fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary.

Rubio acknowledged this himself, telling supporters during his concession speech Tuesday night, “Our disappointment is not on you, it’s on me. I did not do well on Saturday night. But listen to me: That will never happen again.”

Donald Trump won the Republican primary election in New Hampshire on Tuesday night — and one of the reasons for that win is that many GOP voters view Trump as authentic.

But is Trump really that authentic?

Donald Trump is the Republican front-runner. And he’s a dominant one. In New Hampshire, in South Carolina, and now in Nevada, he’s won by double digits, winning all kinds of Republican voters.
The question is: How did it happen?
Trump didn’t create a movement on his own. He is a symptom of something much deeper in American politics -- a reaction to a set of economic, demographic, racial, and cultural forces that trouble a subset of Americans far more deeply and widely than most of the media realized.
Here are the trends that contributed to his remarkable rise — and show how far he could actually go.

On Monday, Donald Trump held a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he merrily repeated a woman in the crowd who called Ted Cruz a pussy. Twenty-four hours later, Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary in a landslide.

I’m not here to clutch my pearls over Trump’s vulgarity; what was telling, rather, was the immaturity of the moment, the glee Trump took in his “she said it, I didn’t” game. The media, which has grown used to covering Trump as a sideshow, delighted in the moment along with him — it was funny, and it meant clicks, takes, traffic. But it was more than that. It was the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president showing off the demagogue’s instinct for amplifying the angriest voice in the mob.

Marco Rubio leaves New Hampshire having learned a hard truth: Live by the expectations game, die by the expectations game.

Rubio was never expected to win New Hampshire, just like he was never expected to win Iowa. It’s typically very hard to win the nomination without either. But his campaign had made its plan very clear: the 3-2-1 strategy.

The results of the New Hampshire primary were chaotic and dispiriting for the two parties’ establishments, suggesting that both primary contests will last much longer and be much uglier than elites had hoped.

For the Republicans, Donald Trump not only won but won in a landslide. Emerging mainstream favorite Marco Rubio not only stumbled but plummeted. Jeb Bush wasn’t driven out of the race as some Republicans had hoped, but instead leads Rubio, meaning the “establishment lane” will remain crowded. And the second-place winner wasn’t someone with a national organization, it was Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who hasn’t raised much money and has been focusing solely on New Hampshire.

The results in New Hampshire were the best possible result for Donald Trump and the worst possible result for his Republican critics. New Hampshire didn’t just hand Trump a win, it left him perfectly positioned to dominate in South Carolina, Nevada, and other future races.

Trump won by a double-digit margin, which is, of course, great news for him. But perhaps even better for Trump is the order the other Republican candidates finished. John Kasich finished in second place. Third place will probably go to either Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz, with Marco Rubio likely finishing in fifth place.

Bernie Sanders easily claimed the win at New Hampshire’s primary Tuesday night against Hillary Clinton, and with record-breaking voter turnout.

Sanders, who had been leading in the New Hampshire polls throughout this past week, gave a victory speech that hit all his core talking points, from his campaign support to single-payer health care to his stand against Wall Street.

Even before Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders won their respective parties’ presidential primaries in New Hampshire Tuesday night, a lot of political analysts had spent a lot of time pondering the similarities between them. After their victories, there are likely to be even more.

But this clip from Sanders’ New Hampshire victory speech says it all.

In one very literal sense, there are only two winners of the New Hampshire primary most years. And by that understanding, Donald Trump definitely won the Republican race, and Bernie Sanders definitely won the Democratic one.

But the literal winner of the race basically doesn’t matter. New Hampshire just doesn’t supply that many delegates. The value of winning New Hampshire, as with Iowa, isn’t to gain those delegates; it’s to shape media expectations and set the stage for future wins in states that actually have people in them. And by that standard, New Hampshire can produce a great number of “winners” who didn’t come in first.

Trump’s New Hampshire win is a political earthquake for the Republican Party and American politics more generally. For the past year, pundits and political insiders have been confidently predicting that voters would sour on Trump as Election Day drew near, or that a defeat for Trump in Iowa would suddenly lead voters elsewhere to abandon him.

Tuesday’s results, though, make clear that Trump isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. And the polling numbers in upcoming states look good for him. The next Republican contest is in South Carolina, and polls taken in January — before last week’s Iowa caucuses — showed Trump leading his opponents by double digits. National polls also still show Trump beating his closest rival, Ted Cruz, by an average of 8 percentage points.

The political revolution has arrived in New Hampshire, as Bernie Sanders easily defeated Hillary Clinton in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, according to calls by multiple networks.

Sanders’s victory — which would have been all but unimaginable a year ago — is a truly remarkable achievement for a “democratic socialist” who began the campaign as a mere blip in the polls, little-known nationally and lacking any party establishment support whatsoever.

Every four years, a tiny, unincorporated town in the far northern reaches of New Hampshire becomes the first of three towns to vote in its state’s primary, casting ballots just after midnight.

And every four years, the media pays outsize attention to this one town’s results.