Hold on to your wigs, people, the 2016 U.S. presidential race is about to get even weirder. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are the winners of the New Hampshire primaries.
Fueled by “working-class fury,” as the New York Times puts it, the two outsider candidates surged to rousing victories tonight in a New Hampshire primary that drew robust turnout from voters throughout the state.
Snip:
Mr. Trump, the wealthy businessman whose blunt language and outsider image has electrified many Republicans and horrified others, benefited from an unusually large field of candidates that split the vote among traditional politicians like Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
But Mr. Trump also 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.
The win for Mr. Sanders amounted to a powerful and painful rejection of Hillary Clinton, who has deep history with New Hampshire voters and offered policy ideas that seemed to reflect the flinty, moderate politics of the state. But Mr. Sanders, who has proposed an emphatically liberal agenda to raise taxes and impose regulations on Wall Street, drew support from a wide cross-section of voters who trust him more to address income inequality and expand the health care system.
Photo above: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his wife Jane Sanders (C) watch returns with their family at his 2016 New Hampshire presidential primary night rally in Concord, New Hampshire February 9, 2016. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton.
This is how @BernieSanders is celebrating right now pic.twitter.com/A2oBa3iJfo
— MaryAlice Parks (@maryaliceparks) February 10, 2016
I remember being one of only two or three cameras at Sanders events #fitn pic.twitter.com/PxBTERowKl
— MaryAlice Parks (@maryaliceparks) February 10, 2016