Maybe he’ll survive, maybe he won’t. After the Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump is back on his feet in New Hampshire, while Bernie Sanders, pulling the Democrats to the left, has gained a decisive victory over Hillary Clinton, considerably more so than the polls had predicted. What can we make of this? Things will be clearer – perhaps – after Super Tuesday on March 1. In the meantime, it remains an unusual race, full of question marks.
The results of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primaries raise at least two questions. Firstly, why was Donald Trump’s fear and smear campaign so well received in one of the most economically healthy states in the whole country, with unemployment below 4 percent? How did he win 35 percent of the vote against a plethora of Republican candidates?
The exit polls, published in Wednesday’s New York Times, show that Mr. Trump has done particularly well with voters who appreciate his “tell it like it is” anti-establishment rhetoric and his xenophobic attitude toward Muslims and illegal immigrants. So this electorate, in some sort of insular reaction against everything that threatens its shores, forgets, so to speak, the objective social reality and aligns itself with the general climate of anger. This is an incomplete but extremely worrying answer.
The second question is, how can we explain Hillary Clinton’s inability to do better at gaining the female vote? Women enabled her to win the Democratic primary in New Hampshire against Barack Obama in 2008. The “socialist” Sanders not only succeeded in mobilizing the youth vote, as he did in the Iowa caucuses last week, but against all expectations he also picked up the majority of the female vote – 55 percent against and 45 percent for Mrs. Clinton.
With 38 percent of the vote against Mrs. Clinton and 60 percent for Mr. Sanders, it is not an exaggeration of the depth of her defeat to say she comes out of these primaries a wounded leader. Since entering the race for the Democratic nomination, Mr. Sanders has managed to mobilize the left of the party with phenomenal success, and, for the moment, Mrs. Clinton has not been able to do much to counter this groundswell. That even women voters will drop an experienced candidate who, moreover, defends progressive positions and who has a chance of becoming the first female president of the United States, speaks volumes about the very negative perception of her untrustworthiness that continues to hammer her in the polls.
Although New Hampshire kicks off the primaries and history shows its results often set the tone, it is in no way the final word in the process. The caucuses and primaries move on to South Carolina, Nevada and then the 13 states who vote all at once on Super Tuesday on March 1. Demographically, all of these states are more Black and more Hispanic: that is to say, less uniformly white. Here, the polls give reason to think Mrs. Clinton will bounce back.
The race is more complicated on the Republican side, and more disturbing. The party establishment hoped the New Hampshire primaries would reveal a candidate capable of bringing together moderate republicans to block Donald Trump and the arch-conservative Ted Cruz. However, the three “moderate” candidates – John Kasich, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio – shared the vote, each gaining around 10-15 percent. And it is unlikely that the primaries taking place in a week and a half in South Carolina, where Mr. Trump is still leading in the polls, will enable a solid alternative candidate to emerge.
The race for the nominations this year are all the more unusual because they are giving rise to particularly implausible promises, particularly on the part of Mr. Trump. Although we can also wonder how Mr. Sanders – for whom we will not hide our approval, given the nature of his opposition to the “system” – will be able to “break up the banks,” as he likes to keep saying.
In the world according to Trump, one promise among others will see the United States deporting all illegal immigrants, building a wall along the border and sending the bill for it to Mexico! What electoral madness makes so many Americans think this is plausible? If he becomes president, God forbid, reality will shut him up, of course.
Trump, in his acute other-directedness in reading symptoms, sees the anger, and knows how to exploit it. Trump’s helped along by the acute nationalistic fervor whipped up by radio, TV and internet commenters of low repute.
Sanders is working with a far higher quality of voter, but with the same level of anger, more intelligently directed against the real malefactors of great wealth.
Hillary, for all her protestations of liberality, has too often betrayed that liberality with the famous Clinton triangulation. Everyone knows she’s the tool of the Establishments, both financial and political.