When I watched the numbers roll in from New Hampshire on Tuesday night, I started to have flashbacks to a very different time. Here is the opening line of a Times story about the 1992 New Hampshire Republican primary:
“President Bush received a jarring political message in the New Hampshire primary today, scoring a less-than-impressive victory over Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative commentator.” And what was the margin when the Times published those words? George H.W. Bush was beating Buchanan by 18 points, 58 percent to 40.
As I type these words, Donald Trump is beating Nikki Haley by a far lower margin. So is this result a “jarring political message” for Trump in much the same way that it was for Bush? While Trump isn’t the incumbent president, he is the incumbent nominee, and he’s running a version of a classic incumbent campaign. Yet he cleared only 51 percent of the vote in Iowa and, as of this writing, has 54 percent in New Hampshire.
It’s a number big enough to show that he has a strong grip on the G.O.P., but it’s also small enough to expose meaningful Republican discontent. Trump’s team will hype the result as a mandate and try to bully Haley out of the race, and she might leave.
It’s doubtful she’ll repeat Buchanan’s performance and stay in a hopeless race, contesting primary after primary, but if she does stay in the fight, one would expect she’ll earn a far higher percentage of total votes than Buchanan’s 23 percent, and that percentage was a harbinger of Bush’s general-election defeat.
New Hampshire tells us the G.O.P. is still Trump’s party, but it also tells us that Trump’s party is fractured, and fractured parties struggle to win the White House, especially when an incumbent is under fire. Just ask Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Bush in 1992. Each incumbent confronted a credible primary challenger, and each incumbent lost.
No, the analogy isn’t perfect, but the warning is still clear. Barring Supreme Court intervention, Trump is virtually certain to be the G.O.P. nominee, but he’s like a British battle cruiser in World War I: The imposing facade can conceal fatal vulnerabilities.
Trump is strong enough to win the G.O.P. primary contest, but his weaknesses are real, and each Haley voter has done the party the favor of demonstrating that Trump’s bluster outpaces his popularity. His victory comes with a warning sign: There is diminished demand for Donald Trump.
If Trump vote was estimated to be at ~60% which is not so much more - French might have written “Haley must appeal to the old-fashioned Republicans who want somebody to vote for.” It would be a right-wing version of “This is how Bernie can still win.” It would be wish casting with only platitudes and zero details.
The funny thing is that in many ways, Trump is to the GOP what Bernie was to the Dems. He is the Republican that people want to vote for, and everyone else is a professional politician going along to get along. The difference is that the GOP primary is more democratic than the Dem primary, which will never not be funny.
The difference is that the GOP primary is more democratic than the Dem primary, which will never not be funny.
I wonder if in all its flag-waving coverage if MSNBC mentioned other democratic candidates by name who got votes in the New Hampshire primary. The primary was a joke anyway. It wasn’t official so zero delegates were at stake.
Of course - I’m being very silly and not a single verboten name was mentioned on the network. American civil religion demands filial piety to the two parties and the avoidance of the forbidden just like God intended.
The media so desperately wants this to be a real contest. At least they can feel safe in the knowledge that they won’t affect the outcome.
I was going to make this its own comment but I just saw what you wrote so I’ll put it here instead.
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David French is a right-winger at the NYT so the article is nonsense. But I thought it was funny.
tl;dr “There is diminished demand for Donald Trump.”
This is 80% of the way to an Onion article.
If Trump vote was estimated to be at ~60% which is not so much more - French might have written “Haley must appeal to the old-fashioned Republicans who want somebody to vote for.” It would be a right-wing version of “This is how Bernie can still win.” It would be wish casting with only platitudes and zero details.
The funny thing is that in many ways, Trump is to the GOP what Bernie was to the Dems. He is the Republican that people want to vote for, and everyone else is a professional politician going along to get along. The difference is that the GOP primary is more democratic than the Dem primary, which will never not be funny.
I wonder if in all its flag-waving coverage if MSNBC mentioned other democratic candidates by name who got votes in the New Hampshire primary. The primary was a joke anyway. It wasn’t official so zero delegates were at stake.
Of course - I’m being very silly and not a single verboten name was mentioned on the network. American civil religion demands filial piety to the two parties and the avoidance of the forbidden just like God intended.
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Edit
Related - President Boddie? - Hexbear
He’s right lol