Trump’s poor showing in New Hampshire

Read the results in the context of next November’s general election

Friends,

As I noted earlier today, the mainstream media is falling over itself in seeming awe of Trump’s “powerful” campaign.

The truth is just the opposite. Last week, he won fewer than 3 percent of registered voters in Iowa.

Today, he won just 54.5 percent of the vote in New Hampshire’s Republican primary, to Nikki Haley’s 43.2 percent. (Final tallies.) A 11.3 percent margin is nothing for him to brag about (although he’ll brag).

For a former Republican president, his showings tonight in New Hampshire and last Monday in Iowa are pitiful.

Trump and his surrogates will undoubtedly try to spin his relatively poor showing in New Hampshire by pointing out that many of the voters were independents rather than Republicans.

To be sure, according to preliminary exit polls, around half of voters in today’s New Hampshire Republican primary identified themselves as Republicans, while 45 percent said they were independents (and 6 percent identified themselves as Democrats).

But that’s exactly the point. Even if Trump dominated Haley among Republicans, he did terribly among independents. Which portends problems for him in the general election.

Trump will of course be the Republican nominee. But he’s likely to be an extraordinarily weak candidate in the general election, given that almost half the entire U.S. electorate is independent, while only 25 percent are Republican (and 25 percent are Democrats).

Trump’s base adores him. Most of the rest of America is justifiably afraid of what he might do with a second term.