After election results came in on Tuesday evening, the two-term governor said he was returning to New Jersey rather than moving on to SC, the next primary contest, and would reassess his campaign.
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The next Republican contest is the February 20 SC primary. Even if the nomination battles still appear unsettled by mid-March, research on hard-fought primaries shows that they don’t derail the party’s choice.
Ben Domenech said that while Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the nomination, Ted Cruz remains as the likeliest nominee for the party. What’s more, for the first time in Morning Consult’s polling of the race, Sanders boasts a higher favorability rating among Democrats, enjoying the approval of 78 percent of his party’s voters, compared to 75 percent for Clinton.
Who had it worst in New Hampshire? But they all fell well short of Donald Trump, who dominated the field with 35 percent of the vote.
Mathematically speaking, it’s extremely unlikely that any establishment Republican can win a primary while three of them split up the vote. For some Republican leaders, back-to-back victories by Trump and Cruz, an uncompromising conservative, add urgency to the need to coalesce around a more mainstream candidate.
“Right now, while nothing’s definite in this business, anything can happen, I would say the odds are it’s gonna be a Trump-Cruz race to the finish, sooner or later”, King said.
While Clinton’s loss to Sanders in New Hampshire is not surprising, her lack of support from women in a blue state is a serious blow that “undermines the foundation of Hillary Clinton’s campaign”, according to the Huffington Post. Cruz is a freshman Senator elected in 2012, who is well known for being an ideological extremist. And the possible two percent up or down difference wouldn’t make much difference any way – Trump’s firmly in first, and the remaining Republican candidates are far behind him.
This ideological extremism and lack of personal likability should give Republicans plenty of worry as Cruz continues to do well with the highly influential evangelical Christian voting bloc.
“Donald Trump’s victory was really impressive and the reason I say that is, I know he was ahead in the polls, but I would say nine out of 10 political people doubted he would be able to take the celebrity factor and the large crowds and the rallies and actually translate that into votes”, he said.
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“Someone else” had one percent and six percent said they’re still undecided.
