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player ready...Every presidential primary creates its own history.
New Hampshire’s Tuesday legacy on the Republican side will be the measure of how angry those people are, and on the Democratic side, how hopeful they can be.
This drives traditionalists crazy.
You can’t have a vulgar and profane casino mogul and hotel builder as a Republican candidate, and you can’t have a onetime socialist as the leading Democrat, particularly when you have an aggressive, intelligent woman to collect your vote.
Except, now you can.
Donald Trump won New Hampshire with the same mix of arrogance, bluster and absolute certainty that has defined every aspect of his campaign so far.
Swooping in by jet, he broke most of the ground rules for primary candidates, who have been told for decades that you have to shake every single right hand in New Hampshire. The man sleeps in Manhattan and wins in Manchester.
Imagine that.
Also, Trump can get away with the kind of talk on TV that makes you want to move the children away from the screen. Very soon, his hair won’t be the most noteworthy thing about his persona.
He can get away with saying … well, never mind.
It was not a tiny victory.
Trump left most of the peanut gallery of wishful Republicans way back in his wake. Marco Rubio, the third-place hero of Iowa and potential savior for conventional Republicans distraught by Trump’s success, for example, was fifth, laid low by a remarkably stupid performance in the big New Hampshire GOP debate. (That was an object lesson in how dumb we are to accept conventional wisdom about these performances.)
Ohio’s John Kasich has become the new great hope of the GOP with his good second-place performance. He is a nice man. Now he has moved into the shadow of the sun king, which is no place to be.
It’s an unusual year full of angry Republican voters.
Over on the other side, an earthquake.
Bernie Sanders rolled over Hillary Clinton with such a strong performance that all the media assumptions about her assumptions (women for women and so on) can now be cast off.
Apparently, vast numbers of women are willing to risk a visit to Madeleine Albright’s “special place in hell,” except for those in the age group closest to the actual journey.
By 10 points, Clinton claimed voters older than 55. Everybody else — young, middle-age women, men of all types, working people, you name it, they gathered to back Sanders’ call for a tax looting of the super-rich to fund big health care expansions and free public college for the kids.
Why?
She’s not authentic, not trustworthy, not a whole bunch of other things people want their candidates to be. The fact that she collected roughly a decade’s worth of middle-class salaries for gabbing with the folks at Goldman Sachs probably did not help.
Unleashing her smart, but a tad rabid, husband on Sanders probably didn’t help either.
The focus is already shifting to the South Carolina Republican primary and Nevada Democratic caucuses Feb. 20.
A warning.
Anyone who says they can tell you what Republicans will do is sawing so far out on the limb that the tumble will be spectacular when it comes.
As for the Democrats, conventional wisdom is that Clinton has a firewall of ethnic support in Nevada that will give her a chance to bump Sanders off course.
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Maybe not.
Sanders’ New Hampshire victory is a measure of how little we actually know about the longings of some parts of our nation.
If the assumption is that Nevada Democrats will be so drawn by their loyalty to the Clintons that they will overlook the great motivator in all political contests — self-interest — then conventional wisdom may take the day.
I’m betting Sanders will find a great deal of support among the working people of Nevada with his arguments about the 1 percent and how they live.
Go visit a casino and take a look at whom the locals get to watch as they work their casino jobs. Rich people, in many cases. People not like them. People with their trotters in the trough.
The most important statistic to emerge from Iowa and then from New Hampshire on the Democratic side is that a vast collection of voters relate to Sanders in a way they cannot relate to Clinton.
They believe he understands their problems and cares about them. That is golden in a political campaign.
On the other side, South Carolina, the next Republican primary, has lots of evangelical voters for Republicans to reach out to. At the same time, it’s a different game this time. Texan Ted Cruz might believe he has a natural constituency there, but remember, most mainline Republicans despise him.
And South Carolina has lots of mainline Republicans.
Charles M. Madigan is an associate professor at Roosevelt University.