One of the most striking things about the New Hampshire primary, on the GOP side, was how none of the Republican candidates (other than Donald Trump) played to win. Stuart Stevens wrote about this earlier in the week and it’s completely true: Trump took a commanding-but hardly unassailable position. And the response of the rest of the field was to wage scorched-earth warfare against … Marco Rubio.
Partly, that’s because, despite the polls, Rubio was the single biggest threat to win the nomination-the guy everyone assumed they would have to go through to get to Cleveland. Partly it was a muddle of campaign strategery.
If you’ll permit a sports metaphor, it reminded me of the 2008 women’s Olympic marathon. In that race, Romanian Constantina Dita moved out to a precarious lead about halfway through the race. The lead pack of runners-all of whom were more highly favored-didn’t pursue her, because they assumed that she would fall back. Dita was not considered a true contender. But Dita had a plan. About two-thirds of the way through the race, the course had a series of S-curves. Dita extended her lead going into the curves and when the lead pack lost sight of her because of the curves, instead of speeding up, they slowed down.
They thought they had totally lost contact with her and so they started conserving energy so that they could battle for second. This allowed Dita to extend her lead without expending extra energy. When the pack came out of the S-curve section and saw Dita, she was too far ahead to catch. The underdog walked to a triumph and the elite runners then waged an exhausting fight of moves and counter-moves for silver.
That’s more or less what happened in New Hampshire. Trump was sitting on a big pile of votes and none of the other campaigns even tried to peel away any of his support. Instead, they tried to kill Marco Rubio’s campaign, in the hopes that they could be finish ahead of him, remain viable, and move on to an indeterminate point in the future where they could somehow beat both Trump and Ted Cruz.
The result is that we have a muddled New Hampshire finish with six candidates still believing they’re viable. Which means that, in reality, we probably have a two-man race.
