Kasich comes in 2nd as Rubio slips badly
New Hampshire’s Republican voters were mad — angry at the government, frustrated with their own party and overwhelmingly in favor of keeping Muslims out of the United States. So on Tuesday, they found the perfect vessel for their rage in Donald Trump.
Polls had long predicted Trump’s overwhelming victory in the nation’s first primary, so it was little surprise that he crushed his eight rivals by taking 35 percent of the state’s record turnout.
The bigger surprise was that despite New Hampshire’s reputation
as a primary that often provides clarity by winnowing the field, Tuesday’s results muddied it. And that’s good news for Trump. Analysts say he hit his ceiling of support Tuesday, but that will be enough to continue winning as long as the more mainstream candidates in the race split the rest of the votes.
“If the rest of the field doesn’t shake out or narrow, it becomes a better campaign for him,” said Kelly Dittmar, a professor of political science at Rutgers University and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics there. “If the field narrows in the next couple of days, the question is, does he get the votes from the people who dropped out?”
Tuesday offered little clarity for mainstream Republicans looking for a Trump antidote to emerge. Sen. Marco Rubio, the mainstream’s darling after his surprising second- place Iowa finish, dropped to fifth place in New Hampshire — his terrible debate performance Saturday night hurt him.
And New Hampshire’s runnerup, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, is polling only 2 percent in South Carolina, whose Feb. 20 primary is the next stop on the Republican trail. As in Iowa, where Kasich finished eighth, more than 60 percent of the GOP voters in South Carolina are evangelical Christians. In New Hampshire, only about 1 in 4 Republican voters identifies as evangelical, polls indicate.
Kasich’s percentage of the vote in New Hampshire was similar to that of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman four years ago. Huntsman was similarly perched on the more moderate end of the field in 2012 — he wound up dropping out of the race shortly after finishing third in the primary.
“The problems that ( Kasich) has moving forward are identical to Huntsman’s,” said Carson Bruno, a research scholar at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. “Where do they go next? They don’t have the boots on the ground in the next few weeks to capitalize on this moment. And they don’t have the money, either, even though he’ll get a boost after this.”
Kasich saved his candidacy Tuesday by capitalizing on a strong performance in Saturday’s debate. The Ohio governor had banked everything on New Hampshire, holding 106 town hall meetings and visiting 70 times since January 2015, more than any other candidate. He won’t have the time to make that sort of investment going forward.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush bought himself more time by finishing bunched near the middle. Plus, various super PACs supporting Bush have $ 58 million on hand — more than any other Republican — and his brother, former President George W. Bush, remains popular in South Carolina.
A few candidates who performed poorly Tuesday — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson — are going to face extreme pressure to kill their White House dreams in the next 48 hours. Fiorina and Carson promised to forge ahead, while Christie said he was going home to New Jersey to ponder his next move.
If Christie exits the race, his lasting contribution to the 2016 campaign might be how he hatcheted Rubio in Saturday’s debate, exposing the first- term senator’s propensity to appear robotic and preprogrammed. Rubio has been widely mocked on social media since Christie lampooned him, inflaming concerns among Republicans that he might be too inexperienced.
Unfortunately for Rubio on Tuesday, nearly half of the Republican voters didn’t make up their minds until the last week even though candidates have been tramping around New Hampshire for more than a year. According to exit polls, two- thirds of those asked said that last debate influenced their vote. That proved to be bad news for Rubio.
“I’m disappointed with tonight,” Rubio told supporters Tuesday night in New Hampshire. “Our disappointment tonight is not on you, it’s on me. I did not do well on Saturday night. That will never happen again.”
Iowa’s winner, Sen. Ted Cruz, finished a respectable third despite spending only 27 days in the state, the same number as Trump.
But Trump won nearly every demographic. His hard line on immigration resonated with conservative New Hampshire Republican voters, 66 percent of whom supported his idea of banning all Muslims from entering the U. S. in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, according to exit polls. One in four Republican voters said terrorism was the most pressing issue facing the country; 30 percent said it was the economy.
Meanwhile, Kasich took a much softer tone in his upbeat post- primary speech Tuesday night. He noted that his campaign did not use negative ads despite being pilloried by rival candidates.
“Maybe, just maybe,” Kasich said, “we are turning the page on a dark part of American politics because tonight the light overcame the darkness of American campaigning.”