Donald J. Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont harnessed working-class fury on Tuesday to surge to commanding victories in a New Hampshire primary that drew a huge turnout across the state.
The success by two outsider candidates dealt a remarkable rebuke to the political establishment, and all but guaranteed protracted, bruising races for each party’s presidential nomination.
With more than 80 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Trump had received 35 percent of the vote, and Mr. Sanders approached 60 percent.
WASHINGTON POST
Sen. Bernie Sanders scored a decisive victory in Tuesday’s New Hampshire presidential primary. Sanders’s victory, which Hillary Clinton conceded when polls closed at 8 p.m., confirmed the strength of his iconoclastic appeal and the power of an insurgent message that cast Clinton as a creature of the old guard. The outcome provides a fresh burst of momentum for Sanders, a senator from Vermont, in a race that will soon broaden to more challenging terrain and that is widely expected to grow more combative as Clinton tries to regain her footing. The former secretary of state, who was declared the winner of the Iowa caucuses last week by the narrowest of margins, now finds herself struggling to right her once-formidable campaign against a self-described democratic socialist whom she has accused of selling pipe dreams.
“Attention will inevitably focus on the next two of the ‘early four’ states: Nevada and South Carolina,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook wrote. “We’ve built first-rate organizations in each state and we feel very good about our prospects for success” there and in states that vote in March, the memo stated. Sanders planned to challenge those assumptions immediately.
Clinton is racing to shore up that advantage by turning next to states with large minority populations. She has scheduled campaign stops in South Carolina and Nevada in the next week, with an emphasis on criminal justice and gun control, issues on which she has attempted to get out ahead of Sanders or to his political left.
Donald J.Trump’s convincing victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday gave the irrepressible celebrity candidate the status his opponents long feared, as a bona fide leader in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Despite a stream of provocative and even offensive remarks by Mr. Trump right up to the night before the primary, comments that might have destroyed any other candidate, his supporters mostly appeared to have made up their minds months ago, and never wavered. Mr. Trump heads into a string of primaries in conservative Southern states in a position of strength.
Mr. Trump tapped into a deep well of anxiety among Republicans and independents in New Hampshire, according to exit polling data, and he ran strongest among voters who were worried about illegal immigrants, incipient economic turmoil and the threat of a terrorist attack in the United States.
Mr. Trump’s win on Tuesday keeps him in the race for the foreseeable future and means he will go to the party’s convention in Cleveland in July armed with delegates.
His win signals not just a potential shift in the way campaigns spread their message — social media over mainstream media; television shows rather than news conferences; big rallies instead of meet-and-greets — but also confirms the growing chasm between the Republican Party’s leaders and its voters. Mr. Trump has run hard on anxiety over terrorism and especially illegal immigration, and his calls for mass deportations and a “big, beautiful wall” at the Mexican border have shredded the party’s longstanding efforts to attract the growing Latino electorate.
Despite strenuous efforts to overtake Trump, none of his mainstream Republican opponents stood out from the pack. Now, they are left to muddle forward with no particular momentum into the next contests in South Carolina and Nevada.
If any strong alternative to Mr. Trump is to emerge, senior Republicans say, it will most likely come only after a long nomination fight, spanning dozens of states and costing many millions of dollars. At this stage, his most formidable rival appears to be Ted Cruz, the hard-right Texas senator who won last week’s Iowa caucuses, and who is even less acceptable to traditional party leaders than Mr. Trump.
Gov. John Kasich of Ohio finished second in New Hampshire, where he concentrated virtually all his energy and campaign spending in the race and offered himself explicitly as a softer-edged Republican who could work with Democrats in Washington. But Mr. Kasich took less than a fifth of the Republican primary vote. Mr. Christie, whose attacks on Mr. Rubio upended the race but did nothing to buoy his own campaign, said he would return to New Jersey on Wednesday instead of traveling to South Carolina, to decide how to proceed in the race. Mr. Kasich has vowed to compete in South Carolina, but his explicitly moderate brand of Republican politics will most likely be a tougher sell there than in New Hampshire.