Unasked questions about the New Hampshire primary

How many of the votes for Sanders were really anti-Hillary votes and so would have automatically gone to somebody else anyway? The negative feelings that people - a lot of people - have towards Hillary run the gamut from out and out foaming at the mouth hatred to a vague kind of creepy crawly distaste. 

Have the large number of televised Republican debates drawn ambiguous voters to the party through something you could call the "Superbowl Effect"? That is the phenomenon of a huge number or people who pay no attention to football until the hoopla starts and, intrigued, wind up identifying with one team or another. Or maybe the "Parade Effect" is present when voters act like kids tagging along behind a marching band. I ask this because watching the Republican debates turned my neighbor from a Bernie guy into a Trumper.

Given the fact that Black voters are notoriously partial to members of their own race has anybody correlated Ben Carson’s vote percentage in New Hampshire (2.5%) to his attraction to the tiny Black population in New Hampshire (1.5%)? And if he got nearly all of them doesn’t that have tremendous national significance for the Democrat’s narrowly dominant coalition of voting groups should he wind up number two on the ballot? After all the general election is much like New Hampshire’s primary where anybody can cross over and vote for the candidate in either party.

Has anybody analyzed the effect of having Trump give his acceptance speech on a stage of well dressed, well groomed men and beautiful women in designer gowns vis a vis Bernie’s kind of seedy, crowded backdrop of supporters?

Why doesn’t anyone comment on the fact that of all the nations in the world which conduct legitimate elections - or illegitimate for that matter - why is there is no comparable institution to the first in the nation, Dixville Notch vote? Or ask what the hell those people do for a living up there?

 

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD See it Here. He lives and writes in the colonial era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs here and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com

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