New Hampshire primary sets tone for presidential race

With the last debates before the New Hampshire primary having concluded, the stage is set for the primary election.

The Iowa caucus saw a surprisingly close race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. While Clinton was able to edge out a victory by a narrow margin, Sanders is projected to easily take New Hampshire.

Even if Sanders wins New Hampshire, it might not be enough to persuade voters in other states of his electability, said Graham Bullock, a political science professor at Davidson College.

He said Sanders needs to win a state that is not so close to his home state of Vermont if he wants to convince the nation that he can win the nomination.

“I think that effect will be pretty marginal — if he loses, that effect will be much greater and that’s because he is expected to win because this is his backyard. So it becomes more of a question of how much he wins by,” Bullock said.

Like the Democrats, it remains unclear who the Republican presidential front runner will be.

Ted Cruz won Iowa, but Trump is expected to take New Hampshire.

But if lower-polling Republican candidates — governors John Kasich, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio — drop out of the race, where their supporters turn their votes will be key to determining the nomination, said Eric Heberlig, a political science professor at UNC Charlotte.

“I think that’s really the key for establishment candidates — if one of them doesn’t get a decisive margin over the others in New Hampshire, all four of them are likely to continue on and that makes it more difficult for quote-unquote establishment voters in the Republican Party to unite around one of them and be able to present a challenge to Trump or Cruz,” he said. 

After coming in third in Iowa, Marco Rubio faced increased media and other candidate scrutiny, which culminated in Chris Christie launching into a series of criticisms against Rubio during the most recent debate. 

"See Marco, the thing is this — when you're president of the United States, when you're governor of a state, the memorized 30-second speech where you talk about how great American is at the end of it doesn't solve one problem for one person," Christie said. 

Heberlig said the results of the debate will diminish Rubio's chances of emerging as the challenger to Cruz and Trump.

“With Rubio’s struggle in the debate the other night, it makes it more difficult to see him coming out of this with the clear victory he was hoping for," he said.

But the outcome of New Hampshire will likely leave many questions unanswered, since the populations of Iowa and New Hampshire are not representative of the United States as a whole, said Martha Kropf, interim director of the Ph.D in public policy program at UNC-Charlotte.

“Iowa and New Hampshire are small and rather unrepresentative, and there are other states that are more representative of the United States as a whole, but that is the way our primary system has developed and the state parties are very insistent on them going first,” she said. 

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