Hillary Clinton’s loss to Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. It was worse. Sanders’s margin of victory — 60 percent to 39 percent — was the largest ever by a Democrat who wasn’t a sitting president. It was a come-from-behind win: Eight months ago, Sanders was at 9 percent and Clinton held a 46-point advantage. And Sanders overperformed the polls. Only 1 of the last 15 polls had him above 60 percent; the Real Clear Politics average in New Hampshire had him at 54.5 percent going into the vote.
Then there are the crosstabs. The exit polling for Clinton was brutal. Sanders won men by 35 points; he won women by 11. He won voters under the age of 30 by 67 points. People expect that of Sanders and his children’s crusade. Clinton took home senior citizens, 54 percent to 45 percent. People expect that of Clinton’s boomers. But in the big band of middle-aged Democrats, ages 45 to 64 (who made up 42 percent of the electorate), Sanders beat Clinton 54 percent to 45 percent. He beat her among Democrats with a high school diploma or less; he beat her among Democrats with postgraduate degrees. Among people who’d voted in a Democratic primary before, Sanders won by 16 points; among first-time voters, he won by 57. He won self-identified “moderate” voters by 20 points.
Clinton made gun control a substantial part of her pitch in New Hampshire. Sanders won voters who own guns by 40 points. But he won voters who don’t own guns by 14. He even won voters who said that terrorism was their number one concern.
The biggest problem for Clinton, however, came in the candidate-perception categories. The second-most important quality voters said they wanted in a candidate was someone who “cares.” Sanders won these voters by 65 points. The most important quality people said they wanted was “honesty.” Sanders took those people home 92 to 6. Look at that again. When asked “Is Clinton honest and trustworthy?” 53 percent of all voters — not just Sanders voters, but everyone casting a Democratic ballot — said “no.”
The final insult came from the raw vote totals. The hardest thing to do in politics is convert a new voter. The easiest thing is to retain an old one. A voter who has previously pulled the lever for a candidate is the easiest person to get back on your side. In 2008, Hillary Clinton got 112,404 votes in New Hampshire. If she had brought all of those voters with her, she still would have lost to Sanders this time around. But this year she got just 95,242. That’s 17,000 voters — 1 out of every 7! — who refused to come back and vote for Clinton again.
On the ground in New Hampshire, it was obvious why Democrats were resisting Clinton. Her campaign is offering eight years of trench warfare. Everything is about “fighting.” To be sure, she’s promising to fight the “bad” half of America — those evil, nasty Republicans. But her entire pitch is like a recruiting poster for World War I: Vote for me and we’ll take this country back one trench at a time, whatever the cost! It’s hard to get excited for the political equivalent of the Battle of the Somme.
Sanders, on the other hand, is offering a revolutionary vision: He wants to turn America into Scandinavia. But in Sanders’s view, the revolution won’t require much of a fight, because once The People are engaged, they’ll impose their will on the handful of corporate oligarchs who have set up the current, corrupt system. In Sanders’s view, outside of a tiny number of super-elites, we’re all brothers and sisters. And no matter how conservative you might be, the truth is that Scandinavia is lovely. Who among us wouldn’t want paid maternity leave, shorter work weeks, free state-college tuition, and locally sourced dairy products?
In the face of this, the Clinton campaign has pinned its hopes on two theories. The first is that Democrats will eventually settle for her. Literally: At an event in Hudson, New Hampshire, a guy on the stage behind Clinton wore a T-shirt saying “Settle for Hillary.” There were two rays of sunshine supporting this theory in the New Hampshire exit polls. The first is that Sanders and Clinton were neck and neck among registered Democrats— 49 percent each. The second is that 62 percent of the voters said they’d be satisfied if Clinton wins the nomination. (To put this in context, 50 percent of New Hampshire Republican voters said they’d be satisfied if Trump wins the nomination.)
The other theory of the Clinton campaign is salvation at the hands of black and Hispanic voters. They assume, as a matter of course, that Sanders will not perform well with blacks and Hispanics and that Clinton’s margins with these groups will be enough to drag her to the nomination, eventually.
This theory will be tested, first at the Nevada caucus on February 20 and then a week later in South Carolina’s primary. Clinton thinks she can re-assemble her 2008 coalition, but with the addition of Obama’s minority voters. If she does, she will win comfortably. But the numbers from Iowa and New Hampshire suggest Clinton has lost a great deal of support from 2008. Gone are her “moderate” supporters— the Jacksonian Democrats of Kentucky and Pennsylvania who powered her to victories in Appalachia. Splitting minority voters with Sanders won’t be enough for Clinton; she’ll have to win them decisively. And even then, the delegate race will be a close-run thing.
For Clinton, the long, hard, trench warfare doesn’t start with fights against Republicans. It starts now. Her vision is that she will grind her way to victory over Bernie Sanders, one demographically advantageous state at a time. And a combination of her machine, her money, and her superdelegates will secure the nomination by late spring.
And she wonders why Democrats are resisting.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
