After Sweeping New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump Now Face the Nation

It's all uphill for one, and hopefully downhill for the other.

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Complex Original

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Which is the bigger news: Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic primary in New Hampshire last night? Or Donald Trump winning the GOP primary in New Hampshire last night?

Either victory signifies the temperament of American politics in 2016. Both Sanders and Trump are ideological outliers within their respective parties, if not outsiders in the true, institutional sense. For primary voters, Sanders and Trump offer rebuke of “the establishment,” a term generally understood to implicate pundits, career politicians, and cynical elites.

Sanders and Trump didn’t just win their respective primaries; they crushed even their nearest rivals by double-digit margins. Hillary Clinton, the most experienced politician in either field of candidates, won just 38 percent of the Democrats’ vote tally last night. As many post-mortem headlines note this morning, Sanders won a majority of female voters, and a vast majority of voters aged 29 or younger.

Trump’s lunacy and Sanders’ socialism aren’t the disqualifying charges that they might have been in previous years.

Still, Clinton is the long-odds favorite in this race, which now moves to a few, crucial Southern state primaries where Clinton and Trump have the respective advantage. While Sanders may well be riding the zeitgeist—for now—he’s a much tougher sell in conservative regions where Jewish socialists are rare, if electable at all.

Earlier this week, Gawker published a report titled, “This Is How Hillary Clinton Gets the Coverage She Wants,” about the Clinton campaign’s transactional hold over prominent political journalists, who defer to Clinton’s press team with an immediacy that likely eludes smaller, novice campaigns. Such awesome clout is a crucial advantage for Clinton, though it also represents the sort of entrenchment that many Trump and Sanders supporters resent.

At a stage of this campaign when bloggers and columnists sympathetic to the Clinton campaign have synchronized their criticism of Sanders supporters—the so-called Bernie Bros—Sanders has nonetheless mounted a campaign that’s so far proven more successful than most pundits would have predicted ten months ago, when Sanders announced his candidacy.

On the GOP side of things, the competitive dynamic is messy and all the more difficult to predict. There’s five leading contenders among fifteen candidates total. All I can say confidently for now is: poor Marco Rubio, the fifth wheel among Republicans candidates in New Hampshire. He pulled just 10.5 percent of the primary vote despite some late speculation that Rubio might surge among relatively moderate voters who are theoretically fearful of a Trump administration. (Or, worse yet, a national blowout in favor of the Democratic nominee.)

Trump’s lunacy and Sanders’ socialism aren’t the disqualifying charges that they might have been in previous years.

So far, the 2016 race has not been kind to the politicians who honor congeniality and convention. In the most recent GOP debate, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who today suspended his campaign, eviscerated Senator Rubio for his robotic adherence to programmed language about President Obama’s legacy.

"Let's dispel once and for all with the fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he is doing, he knows exactly what he is doing," Rubio stated again and again, and again.

"There it is," Christie pounced. "The memorized 25-second speech."

The studious, starched Senator Rubio fritzed, and the crowd went wild. “Only after the senator scrolled through Twitter—flooded with brutal, mocking reviews—did he fully grasp the damage he had done to his own campaign,” reports The New York Times.

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