BEDFORD, N.H. — If there was any doubt that voters in both parties are in an ornery, establishment-flaying frame of mind (oh, and there wasn’t) Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary demolished the last illusion that 2016 would revert to anything approaching a normal election cycle.

Hillary Clinton was supposed to vaporize silly, old Bernie Sanders, but the once and perhaps future inevitable Democratic nominee turned out to be far more out of step with her party’s youthful and progressive core than she was in 2008. And that was the year when reporters would count the number of walkers and oxygen tanks in the front rows of her Iowa rallies.


You want clarity? You want a gut punch to the party’s chosen one? Boom. By midnight, Sanders was on pace to wallop Clinton by more than 20 points. His top political strategist Tad Devine told POLITICO his win “was, we believe, the biggest margin of victory in a contested Democratic primary in history." And Donald Trump, a loser in Iowa, prevailed by 18 points over a fragmented field likely to shed some of its also-rans — we’re talking about you, Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina, by Wednesday.

Here are five takeaways from Tuesday’s political tectonic plate shift.

1. Hillary is in real trouble. Will she panic? The Clinton team, hunkered down in a grubby Manchester Radisson saturated in booze and overrun by ill-kempt "Morning Joe" groupies, knew it was going to be a terrible, not-good night by mid-afternoon: The exit polls showed big turnout among young voters and, ominously for her, liberals who think Barack Obama isn’t liberal enough. It was a complete and humbling defeat: Sanders beat Clinton among all demographic groups — including all women, a remarkable rebuke eight years after she “found her voice” by tearing up at a New Hampshire diner.

Clinton prides herself on hanging tough through adversity, and she’s got her share now. How does she react? If history is any guide, she’ll freak out at first, then grudgingly make adjustments. But what adjustments can she make when many progressives think she’s so day-before-yesterday.

On Monday, my colleague Annie Karni and I reported that Bill and Hillary Clinton were pressuring campaign manager Robby Mook to enact strategic, “messaging” and staffing shifts that would take place if Sanders trounced the former secretary. Duh, that’s done.

Forget staff. The problem is — as I've written over and over again — with the candidate herself: She’s a less limber, more tone-deaf politician than she was in 2008 (after years of being kept sharp by the New York tabloids) and she has blown past staff suggestions that she simplify her message to match Sanders’ pound-one-nail, anti-Wall Street mantra.

There’s still a lot of generic confidence among her backers that ultimately she will prevail — and the campaign pointed out how far ahead she remains in South Carolina and the big, diverse March primary states where she remains overwhelmingly popular with black and Hispanic voters; But there are now specific anxieties about how she will put away a 74-year-old socialist regarded as the perfect patsy. At the top of the list is money. Clinton has done pretty well so far, but her online fundraising has lagged badly behind Sanders and there are fears that he will mine Granite State dominance into digital gold. “We have no message,” a Clinton ally involved in big-donor fundraising told me Tuesday night. “The big concern now is Bernie’s ability to raise millions off of this win.”

Oy, such a mess. Sanders may not have what it takes, and he may be too far left to ever occupy the Oval Office, but he’s taken a hammer to Clinton’s dreams of inevitability and a sickle to her oft-stated desire to avoid repeating the mistakes of ’08.

2. Yooge-ness. He promised it would be the biggest, most fantastic and luxurious victory in the history of the New Hampshire primary, and damn if the Donald didn’t deliver. With nearly 35 percent of the vote — more than doubling a suddenly viable John Kasich — he delivered the over-the-top win denied him in less-hospitable Iowa.

And he did so because of his most controversial ideas, including his temporary ban on Muslim immigration — not despite them — with almost half of New Hampshire exit-poll respondents saying they supported a position many of his fellow candidates have decried as xenophobic. The March state map is slightly more problematic for Trump, who is still locked in what looks like a long-term, mano-a-mano with third-place finisher Ted Cruz. But South Carolina, with its defiant and conservative GOP base, seems poised to deliver another big win for the developer-turned-realitystar, and he’s certainly regained the momentum he lost wandering among the cornstalks.

That said, he’s vulnerable to the inevitable consolidation of his opposition, especially candidates in the party’s overcrowded center-right lane; Add up support for John Kasich, a resurgent Jeb Bush (who re-acquired use of his “!” with a solid if not spectacular fourth-place finish that should keep him going in the near term), Christie, Fiorina and Marco Rubio — and you come up with more than 50 percent of the Republican electorate. Some of those voters would flock to him, but many have already rejected his circus-ring routine, if Trump’s high negatives are to be believed.

3. Brace yourself, Bernie. It’s impossible to overstate the personal disappointment experienced by Clinton’s loyal cadre of friends, aides and supporters on Tuesday night. Here was 2008 in reverse, and not necessarily in a good way: She avoided a repeat of her cataclysmic loss in Iowa — barely — but saw that year's transformational victory, and with it her tearful political redemption narrative desecrated. When I emailed one longtime Hillaryland stalwart to comment on the loss, she sent this reply: “I’m sad. What do you want me to tell you?”

But sorrow is nothing but a halfway house to rage-fueled counterattack in presidential politics, and two top Sanders aides told me they expect that the golden, heroic, insurgent period of the 2016 campaign ended at precisely 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, when The Associated Press called the primary for the Vermont socialist. “We expect things to get much harder for us,” said one Sanders operative.

It’s hard to find a silver lining in a dumpster fire, but aides with both campaigns say nothing could plant the seeds of failure like Sanders’ success. When I suggested to Devine that his boss would now face a “front-runner’s scrutiny,” he guffawed: “Come on, we’re a front-runner?” Maybe not, but now that he’s won something — and big — he’ll have to play by Clinton, not Che Guevera rules. The media and voters will now be focused on the very argument both Clintons (with an assist from President Barack Obama) have made so unconvincingly — that Sanders must be vetted for the right to clutch the nuclear football, not just cheered for tackling the party’s presumptive nominee.

“This doesn’t change everything, but it does change a whole hell of a lot,” says longtime Clinton adviser James Carville. “Bernie was different, he was the fun guy, he’s going to get the full treatment now. … Life is going to be different for him tomorrow, Wednesday is the start of something new for Bernie Sanders.”

4. Marco Rubio isn’t the droid you’ve been looking for. A week ago, the 44-year-old Florida senator had the look of an eventual winner, sneaking up on Donald Trump to grab third place in Iowa — and earning a sudden burst of media attention that drew 22 cameras, a dozen Korean journalists, Nate Silver, Chris Matthews and 100 odds-and-sods print reporters to a quotidian suburban Manchester rally on Sunday.

But it was Saturday’s debate performance where Rubio suffered what seemed like a circuitry malfunction — repeating the same innocuous dig at Obama four times — earning the ridicule of Chris Christie and one of the quickest sticking nicknames in recent campaigns — “The Robot.” Full disclosure: I didn’t think it was a big deal, but it weirded people out big-time, and unleashed a torrent of latent hostility at the bit-too-perfect candidate the likes this campaign hasn’t seen.

The whole episode seemed to demoralize Rubio, and his mood wasn’t helped by the fact that veteran union official Eddie Vale stalked him in a kitschy “Day the Earth Stood Still” robot costume consisting of a cardboard box and repurposed salad colander. Unfair as it was, the sight of Vale sprinting toward a frozen-smile Rubio and his press contingent at a high school here on Tuesday (clutching his colander with both hands so it wouldn’t fall off) somewhat undercut Rubio’s core message as steely, ready-from-Day-One commander in chief. Such is politics. In the end, he finished in fifth place. Rubio's Big Mo is now micro mo.

5. John Kasich got 16 percent! No candidate was a more natural fit for the cranky, look-me-in-the-eye, middle-road maple-sap Republicans here than the Ohio governor. He seemed like a native, holding over 100 town halls, and was so relaxed about the whole thing he took time off the trail during a Friday mini blizzard to pelt reporters with snowballs.

The question now: Is he a one-state pony? He’s likely to be a cellar dweller in South Carolina and several upcoming states, but if his big second-place finish translates into a string of decent fundraising days, he might stick around for the good stuff: the March 8 Michigan primary and the winner-take-all contest in his home state a week later.