MANCHESTER, N.H. – Bernie Sanders soundly defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary in the state of New Hampshire.
CNN called the race for Sanders at approximately 8 PM Eastern Time, based on extensive exit polls and early vote returns.
With 4.7 percent of the precincts reporting, Sanders had 7,548 votes (53.3 percent) to Clinton’s 6,315 (44.6 percent).
Sanders’ win was fueled by a massive turnout by independent voters and non-Democrats.
41 percent of Democrat voters were independents and only 55 percent were registered Democrats, according to CNN exit polling.
The line was out the door at Sanders headquarters at Concord High School in Concord, New Hampshire prior to the announcement. Massive cheers went up through Sanders headquarters when the CNN announcement was made.
Exit polling showed that one-third of New Hampshire Democrats voted income equality as their top issue. Forty percent of New Hampshire Democrats want the next president to be more liberal than Obama. A CNN poll released Monday showed Sanders leading Clinton 87 percent to 9 percent among 18-to-34 year old women. That’s right. 87 to 9.
Clinton’s loss comes just one year after she led Sanders by 56 points in the polls. Sanders is now the first Jewish candidate to win a major presidential primary.
What happened?
Clinton suffered bad optical defeats here in recent days. There was the rally where Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that women have a “special place in Hell” if they don’t support fellow woman Hillary Clinton. There was the remarkable Freudian slip by aging feminist Gloria Steinem, a Clinton supporter, who said that young women gravitate toward Bernie in order to meet “boys.”
The leftist uproar was swift and devastating. Clinton surrogate and Massachusetts state treasurer Deb Goldberg even hopped on a Clinton conference call to demand that the campaign make sure that Albright and Steinem are “kept away” in the future.
How jarring all this must be for the Clintons.
In the debates as in her awkward interview with Black Lives Matter protesters, Clinton resorts to dredging up the feminist victories of her past. She was, after all, a Vietnam-era radical, a Wellesley College campus idealist. As First Lady she went to China and gave a speech at a pro-woman summit in 1995 that featured a tent devoted to the cause of lesbianism. Doesn’t anyone remember? Her campaign is selling T-shirts about it in its online store.
Bill Clinton, as he did against Obama in 2008, stumped around New Hampshire to dwindling crowds railing against Sanders. How dare Bernie supporters attack his friend Joan Walsh, the Salon editor, another relic of his bygone decade?
“She and other people who have gone online to defend Hillary and explain — just explain — why they supported her have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often — not to mention sexist — to repeat,” Bill Clinton said.
The progressives didn’t buy it. Internet social justice warriors don’t respect campus legacies. They just wonder why “New Democrat” Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act and didn’t do anything about mass black incarceration. An entire progressive movement happened while the Clintons were palling around with Goldman Sachs. And the new movement is hostile to anything in American culture that came before it.
The cultural Left is done with the Clintons. As evidenced by Sanders’ cameo opposite Larry David on the last Saturday Night Live, Bernie is the new Obama. Even Chelsea Clinton slipped up and referred to Bernie as “President Sanders.”
Cachet, at least in politics, can only be gained once. And even if the Clintons manage to win the delegate count against Bernie in the end, they’ve lost a commodity that can never, ever be returned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQqfXIGfZlo
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