Unimpressive wins for Trump and Biden

Few want this rematch. New Hampshire voters are no exception.

Donald Trump’s victory in the New Hampshire primary confirms what we have known for quite a while — barring some intervention of unusual non-electoral events, Trump will be the Republican nominee.

However, Trump’s win was not impressive. Although polls suggested he was more than 20 points ahead of Nikki Haley, in the end he won by only 11. Nikki Haley collected 9 of the 21 delegates awarded, though she will be out of the race long before the nine can vote for her at the Convention.

Trump clearly was disappointed by his margin of victory. After his impressive win in Iowa, the former president praised his main opponents, including Haley. After this win, he reverted to type and took shots at the former South Carolina governor.

Exit polls suggest that Trump carried New Hampshire Republican primary voters by a margin of about 3 to 1. However, they show Haley carrying independents by a 3-to-2.

Trump cannot win the general election with the votes of Republicans, alone. He needs support from independents like the ones who rejected him on Tuesday.

That rejection doesn’t mean these independents, and others like them, prefer Joe Biden to Trump. But it suggests a danger that many of them will either vote for Biden, vote for a third party candidate like Robert Kennedy, Jr., or just stay home in disgust.

Fortunately for Trump, Biden’s performance in Tuesday’s primary wasn’t that impressive, either. The results on the Democratic side are more difficult to interpret because (1) Biden’s name didn’t appear on the ballot and (2) the primary wasn’t officially sanctioned by the Democrats and therefore no delegates will be awarded based on the outcome.

Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that Biden was no powerhouse on Tuesday.

Biden’s main opponent, an obscure congressman from the Midwest named Dean Philips, captured 20 percent of the vote. A third candidate, the flakey leftist Marianne Williamson, won 4 percent.

Biden’s share of the vote stands at 64 percent. In absolute terms, Biden received around 80,000 votes. Trump received 176,000 votes; Haley 140,000.

The New Hampshire Democratic Party and to some degree, the Washington Post treat the Democratic results as a triumph for Biden. I don’t see it that way. Considering the quality of his opposition, winning a little less than two-thirds of the vote seems underwhelming.

Sure, Democrats could only vote for Biden by writing in his name. But, as the Post reports, the party “organized a robust write-in campaign, staging volunteers with signs at many precincts to urge Democrats to write in Biden’s name on the Democratic ballot.” And how much effort did writing in Biden’s name require? Very little.

Recall that in 1968, then-president Lyndon Johnson’s name did not appear on the ballot during the New Hampshire primary. Voters who wanted four more years of LBJ had to write his name.

Johnson won the primary with 50 percent of the vote. Sen. Eugene McCarthy came in second with 42 percent.

The result was deemed a humiliating defeat for Johnson. No one outside of the Johnson camp excused his showing on the ground that he was a write-in candidate.

Johnson probably saw his write-in victory as a crushing blow too. Shortly after the primary he announced that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination.

Obviously, the 1968 New Hampshire Democratic primary is distinguishable from Tuesday’s contest. Biden has done considerably better than Johnson did. In addition (though I don’t know how much difference this made), this year’s affair was not an official primary.

But some distinctions cut against Biden. LBJ’s opponent was a formidable U.S. Senator, not an obscure Congressman. Moreover, Gene McCarthy was the darling of the powerful anti-Vietnam War movement and was viewed by many as a placeholder for the very popular Robert F. Kennedy (original version). As a college student in New Hampshire at the time, I can testify that, in large numbers, the state’s student population was out in the snow stomping for McCarthy (or being “clean for Gene” as the saying went).

Rep. Phillips, by contrast, doesn’t appear to have any great cause pushing him forward, other than the need to replace a doddering candidate. And although I no longer have a connection with New Hampshire, I would bet that there was no army of students campaigning on his behalf.

For additional context, consider the fact that incumbent presidents Bill Clinton (1996), George Bush (2004), Barack Obama (2012), and Donald Trump (2020) all reached the 80 percent mark in New Hampshire. Trump, who went on to lose the general election, faced opposition from William Weld, former governor of neighboring Massachusetts. Trump captured 84 percent of the vote to only 9 percent for Weld.

Nothing about Tuesday’s result should cause Joe Biden to consider dropping out of the race, LBJ style. But neither should Team Biden take solace from the fact that Biden, the sitting president, failed to capture two-thirds of the Democratic vote when challenged by a no-name congressman and a self-help guru.

To me, the New Hampshire primary provides more evidence that the voters who will decide November’s election don’t want either Biden or Trump as their president. They view both with distaste, if not contempt.

My guess is that when push comes to shove, these key voters as a group will decide, as they did last time, that they like the prospect of four years of Trump even less than they like the prospect of four years of his opponent. But that was also my prediction in 2016 and 2020. I was right only once.