Trump wins New Hampshire — will anyone rise to take him on?
New Hampshire’s Republican voters were mad — angry at the government, frustrated with their own party and overwhelmingly in favor of keeping Muslims out of the United States.
Polls had long predicted Trump’s overwhelming victory in the nation’s first primary, so it was little surprise that he crushed his eight rivals by taking 35 percent of the state’s record turnout.
“If the rest of the field doesn’t shake out or narrow, it becomes a better campaign for him,” said Kelly Dittmar, a professor of political science at Rutgers University and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics there.
Sen. Marco Rubio, the mainstream’s darling after his surprising second-place Iowa finish, dropped to fifth place in New Hampshire — his terrible debate performance Saturday night hurt him.
In New Hampshire, only about 1 in 4 Republican voters identifies as evangelical, polls indicate.
“The problems that (Kasich) has moving forward are identical to Huntsman’s,” said Carson Bruno, a research scholar at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University.
The Ohio governor had banked everything on New Hampshire, holding 106 town hall meetings and visiting 70 times since January 2015, more than any other candidate.
A few candidates who performed poorly Tuesday — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson — are going to face extreme pressure to kill their White House dreams in the next 48 hours.
Unfortunately for Rubio on Tuesday, nearly half of the Republican voters didn’t make up their minds until the last week even though candidates have been tramping around New Hampshire for more than a year.
According to exit polls, two-thirds of those asked said that last debate influenced their vote.
Maybe, just maybe,” Kasich said, “we are turning the page on a dark part of American politics because tonight the light overcame the darkness of American campaigning.