Bernie Sanders, in a decisive victory on Tuesday in New Hampshire, effectively swiped Hillary Clinton’s frontrunner status and stole her cloak of inevitability.

And though Clinton is still the favorite for the nomination, an invigorated Sanders may find himself disheartened when he learns what his competitor has long known: being a plausible contender for the Democratic nomination comes with the kind of media scrutiny he has heretofore gotten a pass on.

In particular, he will be questioned on whether he is prepared to serve as the country’s commander in chief at a time when national security is of utmost importance. It’s a policy area in which Sanders has often struggled to articulate a comprehensive understanding of the issues that America faces; as long as he is a credible frontrunner, the questions are likely to increase in both intensity and specificity (as many previous candidates have discovered to their likely dismay).

In his victory speech, Sanders seemed to predict that the trail was about to get more difficult: “Every single day they’re throwing everything at me except the kitchen sink, and I’ve got a feeling that kitchen sink is coming soon.”

We’ll see how he handles it – but those who would count Sanders out should take a lesson from recent history.

We may have expected Sanders to win this primary, but not in a landslide, not carrying women voters, and certainly not in a way that could fundamentally reshape the course of the race for the Democratic nomination. Heck, in 2008, New Hampshire women broke in favor of Hillary Clinton 46-34 over Barack Obama.

Times have changed.

This isn’t the race anyone thought it would be in spring of last year. It’s easy to forget – amid the spontaneous shouts of “Bernie!” at his victory rally – that the pundits got it wrong, the pollsters didn’t predict it and, last spring when the polling began, a potential Sanders bid drew just 13% of the Democratic primary vote in New Hampshire to Clinton’s 51%, according to a University of New Hampshire Survey Center between 24 April and 3 May 2015.

After a victory that underscores a deep disenchantment with establishment politics, Sanders was all smiles as he took the stage Tuesday, calling it “nothing short of a political revolution”. And an electrified crowd roared their approval as he continued.

“It is a political revolution that will bring tens of millions of our people together,” he continued to cheers. “It will bring together working people who’ve given up on the political process; it will bring together young people who’ve never participated.”

He is going to need more than just those young voters in the weeks to come: he has picked up plenty of delegates in the small, overwhelmingly white states of Iowa and New Hampshire because of them, but it’s not clear if they alone can carry him to continued victories as the election moves south.

And – ever the pragmatist – Clinton’s already been trying to turn the page on a Sanders victory in New Hampshire.



She has been campaigning in Michigan – spending a crucial day last weekend speaking with African American communities in Flint, Michigan, as her husband went to stump for her in Nevada – and, as soon as media outlets confirmed the Sanders victory, the Clinton campaign blasted out a memo from campaign manager Robby Mook. In it, he laid out a ground map for the states ahead. Interestingly the memo didn’t focus on the votes in Nevada or even South Carolina this month, but looked as far ahead as March primaries, saying “the nomination will very likely be won in March, not February”.

To make it through the multiple primaries and caucuses in March, Sanders will have to increase the size of his team and raise a whole lot more money (something he was already pushing for in his victory speech). But he has already out-raised Clinton’s campaign for January, and looks poised to do it again this month.



There are a lot of pragmatic reasons that Sanders and his team ought to feel trepidation looking at the long primary season and Clinton’s polling leads – but a pragmatic man probably wouldn’t have challenged her to a primary in the first place. And if pragmatism was winning over Democratic voters, they wouldn’t be voting in droves for the candidate promising a revolution.