Quick Thought on New Hampshire

By James Kwak

From the Times (order of quotations reversed):

Mr. Sanders was the choice, nearly unanimously, among voters who said it was most important to have a candidate who is “honest and trustworthy.”

[Clinton] has gone so far as to promise to rethink and adjust her campaign strategy in hopes of connecting better with Democrats.

Part of the problem is that the Clintons have spent more than twenty years trying to say what their pollsters tell them people want to hear. When people no longer believe in the political class, feel (rightly or wrongly) like the government is controlled by distant socio-economic elites, and want someone “honest and trustworthy,” another round of message calibration is not going to fill the gap. If Clinton emerges from New Hampshire as the champion of the working man, it will be about as convincing as Al Gore’s desperate rebranding as a populist in late 2000.