In New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders has supplanted Donald Trump as the catalytic figure, the man around whom the race bends. Photograph by Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty

The campaign has grown gentler in New Hampshire. Even Donald Trump has softened. The billionaire released an ad this week in which a diverse array of Americans explained their support for him. Yesterday, in Exeter, Trump claimed that we need “a big beautiful heart—we need heart,” he said. “It’s not running a business, entirely.” He praised the bureaucrats of the General Services Administration: “Extremely professional. They’re unbelievable. They’re very talented people.” Prodded for a vivid portrait of how he would demolish ISIS, he demurred. “Can you imagine General Patton out here, with all the press, saying how you are going to hit the enemy?” The billionaire complained about the environmental inefficiency of Air Force One, an old 747 “spewing like crazy into the atmosphere.” Pressed to attack Ted Cruz, Trump declined.

Trump has staged most of his rallies at night, so that they are bigger and rowdier, but this week he opted for more traditional New Hampshire settings. Even so, at Exeter Town Hall, there were hundreds of people lined up with little chance of getting in. A woman driving a car with a Bernie sticker on it pulled up and asked who was responsible for the line. Donald Trump, someone said, and she rolled her eyes: So that whole Trump thing was still going on. But, inside, the Trump phenomenon seemed to have adapted; Trump has been studying Sanders. The billionaire lamented the companies that are taking jobs and profits overseas through relocations and corporate inversions, and singled out the pharmaceutical industry. “They have tremendous power,” he said. Elected representatives, Trump said, “live for the special interests and the lobbyists, and they work for them.” A woman in the crowd suggested that illegal immigrants provide the country’s “backbone.” When she was booed, Trump, who in similar situations in the past has snarled for security, just calmed the crowd. “Who told you to be here? Bernie?” He asked.

Turns in Presidential campaigns are tentative; often they reverse themselves quickly. But, this week, in New Hampshire, one seemed to take place in which Sanders supplanted Trump as the catalytic figure, the man around whom the race bends. This week, the Republican candidates making the case for their own electability did not say that they would beat Clinton, they said that they could beat Clinton or Sanders. Trump incorporated Sanders’s populism, not the other way around. The early questions in the Democratic debate in Durham, New Hampshire, last night almost all followed Sanders’s themes, and the major question that emerged was whether a politician like Clinton, who took money from Wall Street firms, was helping to rig the economy. Clinton still does not have a good response. Last night, employing a phrase that sounded thoroughly rehearsed, she accused Sanders of an “artful smear”: the charge that she has been bought by Wall Street. The crowd booed, and Sanders issued a disdainful grunt, and through the noise Clinton tried to make the case she should have started with: “We both agree about campaign-finance reform. I worked hard for McCain-Feingold. I want to reverse Citizens United.” But it was subsumed in the noise.

Had this exchange taken place earlier, when Sanders’s issues were less ascendant, the debate might have seemed a decisive victory for Clinton, who emphasized not how radical Sanders’s ideas are but how narrow. Perhaps it has something to do with New Hampshire, where she won the primary in 2008 and where she seems more comfortable than in Iowa, but Clinton’s famously stony façade has opened a bit. At the Democratic Town Hall on Wednesday, addressing a question posed by a rabbi from Nashua wearing a whimsical necktie, she found herself exploring the complicated matter of her own personality. “I have had to deal and struggle with a lot of these issues about ambition and humility, about service and self-gratification,” Clinton said. “This is hard for me.” She described a treatment of the prodigal-son parable by the theologian Henri Nouwen, which, she said, became “a lifeline for me.” It is an extraordinary document to read, in light of the relationship between Clinton and her public. “I am the prodigal son,” Nouwen writes, “every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.”

This primary campaign does not hinge on self-knowledge, at least not right now. It hinges, instead, on the emotional relationship between the individual and the economy. This is the Bernie effect. This week, in New Hampshire, the atmosphere around these matters grew only more internally contradictory. On Sunday, the Times Book Review devoted its cover to an approving account, by Paul Krugman, of a new book by the decline theorist Robert Gordon, who argues that the long American boom may be dissipating for good. On Friday, the federal government reported that unemployment was down to 4.9 per cent. How to square the good statistical news about the economy with the foul atmosphere around it? Sanders has an insight: the financial crisis left people with such a strong feeling that the economy was rigged that the gains of the Obama era have not been able to dissipate it. Clinton does not believe that the economy is rigged, and so to see her in New Hampshire these days is to notice her searching for another connection between the good economic news and the climate of pessimism it enters. This is the challenge of the New Hampshire phase of the campaign. Three days from the primary election, Clinton hasn’t found an answer yet.