NEW HAMPSHIRE
Next would come the New Hampshire primary on February 8. Expectations by Cruz and Rubio that Iowa would push them into stronger contention in the Granite State were dashed. In the end, Cruz finished a distant third to Trump, and Rubio surged before crashing into fifth place after a disastrous few minutes in a televised debate the weekend before primary day.
For all of the drama provided by New Hampshire in the past, Donald Trump’s eventual victory in 2016 was foretold by months of consistent polling. Indeed, Trump led the RCP polling average in New Hampshire from July 28, 2015, through the primary, most of the time by ten to twenty percentage points.19 After Iowa, some analysts questioned whether the polling would hold up. One reporter observed among Republican activists and officials “a remarkable level of confusion, frustration, and just plain bewilderment at what is going on in their state’s presidential race.”20 Incredulous long-time New Hampshire Republican activists asserted that they did not know any Trump supporters and doubted that his strength was solid. One veteran political operative noticed Trump signs in front of houses that had never displayed signs before. Trump was not the kind of candidate who had done well in New Hampshire in recent years—the John McCains and Mitt Romneys—nor was he doing what candidates normally do (i.e., building an organization and doing retail politics). He even had the temerity to insult the editor of the legendary Manchester Union-Leader when he failed to receive the paper’s coveted endorsement.
Yet, at the end of the day, the polls were proven right: Trump won with 35 percent. John Kasich, his nearest competitor, kept his campaign alive with 17 percent. Ted Cruz held on to third with 12 percent. Jeb Bush scratched his way ahead of Marco Rubio with 11 percent to Rubio’s 10.5 percent. A total of 3,157 votes separated Cruz from Rubio, and only 1,278 separated Bush from Rubio.
Other than Trump’s victory, the biggest story of the primary was Rubio’s failure to capitalize on Iowa. His campaign had laid out a plan (the “3-2-1 plan”) predicated on a third-place finish in Iowa, a second-place finish in New Hampshire, building to a win in South Carolina that would propel him to the nomination. And, in line with this strategy, Rubio’s RCP poll average in New Hampshire had gone from 9 percent and fifth place on January 29 to 16 percent and second place on February 5.21 Then Chris Christie set his sights on Rubio. Christie complained that Rubio was a robot, programmed with scripted responses to every question. At the final pre-primary debate, Rubio fell into the trap. Arguing that President Obama had not been incompetent, but rather very competent at advancing a pernicious left-wing agenda, Rubio was challenged and repeated his argument, coming back to it yet again moments later nearly verbatim. Christie pounced on the “robotic” Rubio. Although by most accounts Rubio’s debate performance was otherwise effective, it was these few moments that were replayed in the media over and over. Rubio’s momentum was halted, his support shrank, and he was exiled back to fifth place. Christie had taken Rubio down but did himself no favors. Having done Trump’s work for him, he finished sixth.
Overall, Trump was the big winner. Not only did he himself win by a large margin, but one of his most promising opponents was waylaid and John Kasich and Jeb Bush were encouraged to continue the fight, Kasich for several months. So what did Trump have going for him that the Republican pros of New Hampshire did not see?
First, though New Hampshire had recently favored establishment candidates, it has long had a dissident streak in both parties. On the Republican side, Ronald Reagan beat the establishment’s George H. W. Bush in 1980, the Trump-lite Pat Buchanan gave Bush fits in 1992 then beat Bob Dole in 1996, and John McCain who won in 2000 was the maverick in the race. In the 1992 general election, Ross Perot won nearly 23 percent of the vote, above his national total of 19 percent. Even on the Democratic side, unexpected difficulties in New Hampshire helped convince both Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson not to seek reelection. Trump was able to tap into this latent tendency.
Second, the demography of New Hampshire was much more fitted for Trump than Iowa. Most notably, while the Iowa Republican electorate had one of the largest percentages of evangelicals in the country, New Hampshire had one of the smallest—25 percent. As in Iowa, Trump did much better among the non-evangelicals than among the evangelicals, 38 percent to 27 percent.22
However, this explanation obscured the breadth of Trump’s victory. Trump actually narrowly won the evangelical vote, too, with 27 percent to Ted Cruz’s 23 percent and Marco Rubio’s 13 percent. He broadened his coalition in other ways. He again decisively won the high school educated, but this time won other educational categories, including postgraduate, by smaller margins. He also won every income group, both men and women, and both first-time Republican primary voters and veteran voters (with a slight edge to the former). Two out of five voters in the primary were independents, but he won equal percentages among them and among Republicans.
In New Hampshire, Trump won among those most concerned with electability as well as those who most wanted a candidate who tells it like it is and those looking for an agent of change. Cruz edged out Kasich among those who wanted a nominee who shared their values, meaning that neither Kasich nor Rubio finished first in any category of candidate quality. Trump won voters who said the candidates’ position on issues was most important and those who said leadership qualities were key. Not least, Trump won among every ideological group, even beating Cruz 36–23 percent among the self-described “very conservative.” While Trump’s victory was broad, he did best among those who said their families were falling behind and those who said they were “very worried” about the nation’s economy. At the same time, his message seemed to evoke optimism, as he won 45 percent among the plurality who said life for the next generation of Americans would be better and only 31 percent among those who predicted it would be worse. Overall, 50 percent said they wanted someone from outside the establishment (versus 44 percent who preferred someone with experience), and Trump won a whop-ping 62 percent of that group. This sentiment was the engine pulling his otherwise multifarious and not entirely consistent train.
Other candidates could draw little comfort from a detailed analysis of the results. John Kasich finished second, but also demonstrated the limits of his appeal, winning 27 percent among self-described moderates but only 14 percent among the somewhat conservative and 6 percent among the very conservative. Kasich and Bush finished first and second among those looking for experience, but that was cold comfort in an outsider year. In that respect, both Cruz and Rubio appeared to fall between the stools, with too much experience to satisfy the outsider vote and not enough to compete for those who wanted experience. The greatest hope for anyone not named Trump was that the victory of the Orange was broad but not deep, netting just over one third of the vote. Kasich, Cruz, Bush, and Rubio had combined for over 50 percent, and this did not count the also-rans who littered spots six and below. Each nourished the possibility, perhaps even the expectation, that Trump had hit his ceiling in a favorable state, and that someone—preferably themselves—could beat him by consolidating the rest of the vote.
Within a few days after New Hampshire, the consolidating process had advanced. Huckabee, Paul, and Santorum had already left the race after Iowa. Now, in the wake of New Hampshire, Christie, Fiorina, and Gilmore departed. But would it be enough?
SOUTH CAROLINA
The next major contest was in South Carolina on February 20. Since 1980, South Carolina had been a critical primary for Republicans, the gateway to the South and a frequent “firewall” for the establishment. South Carolina had a significant evangelical vote, but also a large military vote and an active Republican business community. It was South Carolina that restored Bob Dole to political health in 1996, where George W. Bush regained his footing after losing New Hampshire to John McCain in 2000, and where McCain held the line against Mike Huckabee in 2008. Many outsiders had come into South Carolina with high hopes and left with a widening disaster on their hands.
Despite all
of this, Trump had opened an early lead in South Carolina as he had around the country. Along with being a historically pro-establishment state, South Carolina was a state that remembered all the textile jobs it had lost to international competition, and had long been open to protectionist arguments on trade. The other candidates had opportunities. Kasich might have had appeal to South Carolina Chamber of Commerce Republicans. Cruz had placed great hopes in evangelical, conservative South Carolina, seeing a win there as a strategic necessity to opening up the South. Jeb Bush, whose father and brother had both owed their nominations in no small part to South Carolina, hoped to trade on family and the momentum, such as it was, from surviving New Hampshire. Rubio needed a strong showing if he was to have any hope of overcoming his New Hampshire setback. Ben Carson was already a spent force, having come within a couple of points of Trump in mid-November polls before collapsing.23
In the event, Kasich faded fast and Bush never expanded his meager support. Cruz built a stellar organization but treaded water in the polls. Rubio, however, engineered a comeback that put him back in the race. He, too, built an organization, and then he landed some key Republican endorsements in a state that values endorsements more than most: Governor Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott, and Congressman Trey Gowdy. Haley was the nation’s first Indian American woman governor, while Scott was South Carolina’s first African American senator since Reconstruction. At an event at the state capitol, Haley noted the ethnically diverse nature of the assembly on stage, saying “Take a picture of this, because the new group of conservatives that’s taking over America looks like a Benetton commercial”24—an Indian American woman, a younger black man, and an older white man working for the election of a young Cuban American.
Meanwhile, Trump did what Trump did, holding rallies, tweeting, and making full use of free media. However, his position in South Carolina did not seem to have been bolstered by his win in New Hampshire, as his RCP polling average peaked at 38 percent on February 6 (three days before New Hampshire) and began a decline. A critical debate near the primary date also seemed to put Trump in jeopardy. Aligning himself with Code Pink and other victims of Bush Derangement Syndrome, Trump announced his view that George W. Bush had lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and should be blamed for 9/11.25 Cruz and Rubio teamed up effectively against Trump for the first time in the campaign. While Cruz waxed erudite on the Constitution, Rubio got on Trump’s level, calling him a “con artist,” ridiculing him for his ignorance about health care policy, and asserting that if Trump’s father had not left him millions, he would have been hawking watches in Times Square. Rubio and Cruz had, together, gotten the better of Trump.
When the votes were counted, Trump remained in the lead, winning just under 33 percent. After lagging badly for most of the past several months, Rubio climbed into second place with 22.5 percent, about 1,100 votes ahead of Cruz. No one else came close. Bush, Kasich, and Carson, in that order, all clustered between 7.8 percent and 7.2 percent. Bush promptly exited the race, his campaign and associated super PACs having spent more than anyone, a large percentage of it on negative ads attacking Rubio.
The cross-ideological appeal Trump showed in New Hampshire was weakened, as Cruz beat him among the two in five voters who described themselves as “very conservative.”26 Although Trump performed the (for him) rare feat of doing better among evangelicals than non-evangelicals, he lost to Cruz among voters who said that shared religious beliefs mattered a great deal. Trump won among voters who said that immigration was their number one issue (10 percent), that the economy was their number one issue, and that terrorism was number one, but he had to settle for a three-way tie with Cruz and Rubio among the quarter of the electorate that saw government spending as the top issue. Rubio again won the voters looking for electability and Cruz the voters looking for someone who shared their values; Trump again won among those who said they wanted a candidate who “tells it like it is” and “can bring change.” Rubio won among those who said they were “dissatisfied” with the federal government, Trump among those who called themselves “angry” with it. Finally, the electorate was split evenly between those who wanted experience and those who wanted someone outside the establishment; Rubio won the former, Trump the latter. Exit polls also showed that Trump had indeed faltered in the last week of the campaign, which was won by Rubio and Cruz. Trump had the votes of nearly half of those who had made their vote decision earlier, and only 17 percent of those who decided in the last week.
Had the field thinned enough to take on Trump? Had Trump peaked in New Hampshire and started his inevitable descent in South Carolina? Had voters realized after New Hampshire that a vote for Trump was not just a protest but could actually make Trump the Republican nominee? As these questions came to the fore, the race was about to turn away from retail politics to a national campaign.
SUPER TUESDAY
The next major event of the campaign was so-called Super Tuesday on March 1, on which twelve states, ranging from Vermont to Georgia and Minnesota to Texas, would vote. Leading up to Super Tuesday, Trump secured a solid win in the Nevada caucuses, his first win in the West and his first in a caucus state. As in South Carolina, Rubio finished second, slightly ahead of Cruz but far behind Trump.
Trump, as was often the case, was his own worst enemy. Just as many Republicans started to make peace with the idea of a Trump nomination, he declined in a February 28 interview to repudiate David Duke, the Louisiana politician who had been a member of the American Nazi Party and a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Though he did so several days later, Trump’s reluctance to criticize Duke put a spotlight on other unsavory aspects of Trump’s campaign. One, closely related, was the degree to which Trump seemed to be favored by white supremacists and the shadowy “alt-right,” a loose online collection of hard-right nationalists whose targets were “global-ists,” which, it turned out, often meant Jews. The alt-right’s tactics frequently included online harassment and merciless trolling. Another was the increasing tendency of violence to break out at Trump rallies, accompanied by the candidate’s own exhortations to punch protestors in the nose or carry them out on stretchers.27 One rally in Chicago had to be cancelled due to fears of violence. Late in the fall campaign, videos surfaced seeming to show that at least some of the violence had been deliberately stirred up by Democrats, who had hired provocateurs to infiltrate Trump rallies and start fights,28 but scenes of rallies degenerating into chaos fed into another narrative: Trump as authoritarian.
Even if some concerns proved extreme—commentator Andrew Sullivan’s long piece for the Atlantic positing that Trump was a neo-fascist was the prototype of an entire genre—Trump himself gave sufficient cause for worry. Aside from encouraging his supporters to beat up protestors, Trump had expressed admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a “strong leader,” declared that he hoped to make it easier to sue the media for libel, promised what sounded to many like a presidency unchecked by Congress or the Constitution, and told audiences that he could and would give them “everything.” His “populism” was increasingly seen as coupled with a “strong-man” mentality, both from his end and from that of his most ardent fans. Republicans who were not anxious to hand him the keys to the party dug in.
Super Tuesday itself produced a mixed result, though one generally favorable to Trump. A widespread campaign stretched every campaign thin except Trump’s, which was not based on organization or even local media buys but on national publicity and celebrity. Trump won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia. Cruz won Alaska, his home state of Texas, and Oklahoma. Rubio prevailed in the Minnesota caucuses. In the Colorado caucuses, no presidential preference poll was recorded; first-round delegates were selected, which ultimately led to national convention delegates. When that process concluded weeks later, Cruz had swept the Colorado delegation.
Trump did not break 50 percent in any of his wins, did best in the atypically liberal state of Massachusetts, and barely b
eat Cruz in Arkansas, Rubio in Virginia, and Kasich in Vermont. Even where Trump won handily, as in Georgia, Cruz and Rubio frequently combined for more votes, and Rubio could plausibly blame Kasich for keeping Virginia and Vermont out of his reach. In each state, the patterns laid down earlier mostly held, and differences in outcomes were more the result of different state demographics than any shift in momentum.
The contest had pretty clearly become a three-man race, but Kasich did not get the memo, and insisted on hanging on in hopes of winning Ohio and enough delegates to keep Trump from the convention majority in the splintered field. Indeed, the campaigns and the national media had caught on to the possibility that no candidate would achieve a majority before the convention met in Cleveland in July. From this point until early May, the candidates not named Trump believed they could force an open convention by staying in the race, at which point all bets would be off and anyone could, in theory, have a shot. Practically speaking, Cruz seemed best positioned to benefit, as his organization was quietly effective at collecting delegates even in states Trump had won.29
Defying the Odds Page 13