MANCHESTER, N.H. — At a polling station here Tuesday afternoon, a middle-aged woman arriving at an elementary school to vote stopped to take a photo of the dozens of demonstrators representing various candidates chanting and singing for a crowd of assembled news cameras.

“This is unusual,” she told me. “Usually when I come to vote it’s pretty boring.”

The Democratic race for the nomination to face Donald Trump in the November election didn’t get any less unusual — or any more certain — with Tuesday night’s results of the New Hampshire primary. Bernie Sanders won, but not as commandingly as he did in 2016. Pete Buttigieg finished among the top two candidates for the second contest in a row. Amy Klobuchar lay claim to a surge in her prospects with a strong third-place finish, while fourth-place finisher Elizabeth Warren promised to fight on and Joe Biden skipped town before his fifth-place results were even announced.

“Thank you New Hampshire! Let me take this opportunity to thank the people of New Hampshire for this great victory tonight,” Sanders told his supporters shortly after 11 p.m. “This victory here is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump. We’re going to Nevada, and to South Carolina, and we’re going to win those states as well.”

“Hello America, I am Amy Klobuchar and I will beat Donald Trump,” an overjoyed Amy Klobuchar told her supporters when it was clear she had finally broken through into the medal count. “My heart is full tonight, while there are still ballots left to count, we have beaten the odds every step of the way.”

As of 11:30 p.m., with 90 per cent of the vote in, Sanders led with 26 per cent of the vote, followed by Buttigieg at 24 per cent, Klobuchar at 20 per cent, Warren at 9 per cent and Biden at 8 per cent. No other candidate had more than 5 per cent of the vote.

The primary election in New Hampshire is the first in the country, held one week after Iowa kicks off the whole candidate-selection process with its caucus event. Both traditionally lay claim to huge influence on the nomination outcome. No Democrat since 1972 has ever won the nomination without placing first or second in New Hampshire. But after a week of intense campaigning and overkill media attention, it’s not clear that the race for the Democratic nomination is close to being won by any candidate.

Perhaps the odd thing is that so many watching expect it to be. The United States has set up a months-long candidate-selection process that involves contests in all 50 states, plus possessions such as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, but has come to expect a likely winner to be obvious after only two states representing less than 1.5 per cent of the population have voted. Though that is the perplexing tradition, this year seems set to break the mould.

In another sign of just how odd a year this is, the earliest results reported showed a district where the same candidate won both the Republican and Democratic contests — and the winner was not on either ballot. The district of Dixville Notch (five registered voters), has for decades opened its polls at midnight on primary day and then immediately reported results minutes later as soon as everyone in town has voted — in order to brag that they are “first in the nation.” This year Mike Bloomberg, who is contesting the later states as a Democrat but was not on the ballot in New Hampshire, won both Republican and Democratic contests because voters wrote his name in. (Voters unsatisfied with the available options are allowed to write-in any name they like.)

Obviously that early result didn’t reflect any wider New Hampshire voting trend, but the billionaire former New York City mayor’s unusual campaign was on people’s lips here after the release of a poll showing Bloomberg having risen to third place nationally among Democrats, with possibly surprisingly strong support among Black voters. Bloomberg has spent hundreds of millions on advertising already, and is hoping to make a splash on so-called Super Tuesday on March 3 when many states, including some of the largest ones, weigh in.

All of the leading candidates coming out of New Hampshire announced their determination to continue, although long shots Andrew Yang and Michael Bennet dropped out. Sanders and Warren planned immediate trips to Super Tuesday states, while Klobuchar announced her first ad buy in Nevada. Biden left town before the results here were even announced, heading for South Carolina, which votes Feb. 29 and where he hopes his strong support among Black voters will launch him back into contention.

After a massive rally in downtown Manchester Monday night, which drew blocks-long lineups and snarled traffic across the urban area, Donald Trump easily won the Republican primary. There was another candidate on the Republican ballot, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, who had attracted roughly 9 per cent of the vote in early returns.

A lonely Weld supporter, Manchester resident Richard Slingsby, told me outside a polling station Tuesday that he wasn’t hopeful for victory but felt it was important to show opposition to the sitting president as a registered Republican. “Donald Trump has just not proven himself to be a capable leader of the United States. My personal opinion is that he has embarrassed us on the world stage.”

That’s a sentiment widely shared by Democrats. Voters here seemed fixated on determining which candidate could beat Trump, many impressed with Buttigieg’s organization and with Klobuchar’s moderation. Both Buttigieg and Sanders finished the contest hosting large, energized crowds at multiple events Monday. Warren supporters demonstrating in front of polling stations on Tuesday chanting “Dream big! Fight Hard!” were visited by a doughnut-bearing Warren who told them she planned to persist — her campaign focusing on a message that she could be a consensus candidate to emerge from the split field in a long campaign.

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Democrats are facing the possibility of a campaign, for the first time in most Americans’ memories, that could extend right up to the convention in July. The last time a truly contested convention for the nomination was held was 1952, when Adlai Stevenson was elected on the third ballot before going on to be crushed by Dwight Eisenhower in one of the most lopsided electoral college results in history. Trump seems more vulnerable and less popular among the general public than Eisenhower was, but a consensus among pundits seems to hold that the Democrats would prefer an earlier victory to allow a focus on the general election to take over both party resources and public attention.

Next up on the nomination calendar is the Nevada caucus on Feb. 22 and then the South Carolina primary on Feb. 29, followed quickly by Texas, California and a host of other states on Super Tuesday, March 3.

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