Biden failed cataclysmically in New Hampshire — and Amy Klobuchar is the comeback kid. This changes everything

'I can't believe I lost to these people,' Andrew Yang said as he dropped out. These people? I could hardly believe it, either

A little bit of knowledge is supposed to be a dangerous thing, and everyone with a little bit of knowledge of the Democratic presidential nomination said Joe Biden was going to win. He was going to walk it, they’d tell you, because he was the only sensible choice. His experience as vice president alongside Barack Obama meant he knew the ropes; his age implied wisdom, experience and a steady hand. His moderate views would win over Republicans and keep less radical Democrats onboard, while those who would have preferred Bernie or Elizabeth Warren would still go “blue no matter who”. And Donald Trump was clearly afraid of what his candidacy would mean — why else would he go after Biden’s son Hunter, and why else would other members of the Trump family stir up conspiracies online about Bernie Sanders being pushed out by the bigwigs at the DNC? “Because Trump knows I’ll beat him like a drum,” the elder Biden is fond of saying, and for a brief moment in history we all believed it.

Then Iowa happened. Even as the disastrous results unfolded — agonizingly slowly — it was clear that Biden had underperformed. It was Sanders and Buttigieg who delayed their speeches as long as they could, hoping for official results to come through so they could declare victory. Biden limped in fourth in the end, with less than three percentage points separating him from outside-chance candidate Amy Klobuchar. Going into New Hampshire, Klobuchar was emboldened — and Biden was injured, indisputably. The injury has only been worsened with this less-than-underwhelming performance in New Hampshire. He left the state before full results were even in and, according to some reports, cancelled a planned victory party for supporters.

Bernie Sanders was expected to win big in the state that borders Vermont, but his victory is not the big story tonight. Biden has failed to convince voters that he is the safe bet after all. Even when behind a curtain, voting in private rather than moving in raucous packs during a caucus, voters clearly don’t think he fits the remit. Preliminary exit polls in New Hampshire showed that people were primarily voting on healthcare and electability; if it were only healthcare, Biden’s team could perhaps have explained it away with Sanders’ “pie-in-the-sky” Medicare for All offering, but as it is their ideal narrative clearly doesn’t fit. People have seen Biden flounder on a few debate stages now. They are wondering if he really has the requisite energy to give Donald Trump hell. After a particularly nasty impeachment process, they are also most likely wondering whether his long political past and his well-connected family might be a minus rather than a plus. Biden knows he’s in trouble: he spent the days between Iowa and New Hampshire publicly attacking both Bernie and Mayor Pete.

Perhaps Michael Bloomberg was right to avoid these initial circuses altogether. History has proven that they only get it right about half the time. But Joe Biden is not a billionaire maverick with a new way of doing things. He is the establishment candidate and a household name. His platform centers round his familiarity, his ability to return America to some semblance of normality after Donald Trump. The first caucus, the first primary — these were supposed to be the easy parts for him. Now that he has struggled to pull in numbers yet again, the moderate Democrats keen to back an electable winner who stuck with him after Iowa will gravitate toward Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar in even higher numbers than before.

Buttigieg is who we once expected Beto O’Rourke to be: the centrist golden boy smiling into crowds of adoring fans, the new young Democratic star. As he prepared for the New Hampshire primary to begin, rooms of his fans were so packed that people spilled out onto the stairs and into the February cold. But he still doesn’t do as well with African American voters as Joe Biden does. New Hampshire and Iowa are both over 90 per cent white, putting Buttigieg — whose record on tackling race inequality in South Bend, Indiana is far from perfect, to put it lightly — at a possible unfair advantage.

Klobuchar, who we once expected would drop out after this primary, is experiencing a resurgence in interest from voters. Older voters especially chose her over Biden, according to some later exit poll results. She is more politically experienced than Buttigieg and has styled herself as a unifier. Though she has been accused, like most successful women in politics, of being “not likeable”, she has smiled on through it. “I know a little bit about resilience,” she said tonight, as she celebrated her unexpectedly strong numbers. Few could have predicted that she would outperform Elizabeth Warren in the first primary, but somehow she managed it; results suggest she performed especially well with women, while Sanders performed especially well with men.

It’s still possible that Biden could rally. With the results he’s had in Iowa and New Hampshire, however, it’s going to be an uphill struggle. When you stand on electability and you fail to come out top — or even second, or third — in two states at the beginning of the contest, you do inevitably come out looking a little foolish. “I can’t believe I lost to these people,” said Andrew Yang after pulling out the contest tonight. It’s especially hard to believe it was these people — Klobuchar and Sanders, rather than media darlings Biden and Warren. There’s still time for the tide to turn, but then again, perhaps it already has.