Does confirmation of what we already knew constitute new information? The polls indicated that Trump and Sanders would win in New Hampshire, and they did. Has anything changed or genuinely become more clear?
I think a growing clarity is emerging about the major theme of the race so far. Yesterday's results amplify something we perhaps finally started to understand after Iowa, where Sanders essentially tied Hillary, and Cruz and Trump together won about 50% of the vote: a substantial percentage, bordering on a majority, of Americans, irrespective of party affiliation, see the critical problem facing the country as the built into the system itself. The surprise success of the candidacies of Sanders, Trump and Cruz all point to an active distrust and disavowal of the establishment.
At this point, it seems we face two possible outcomes.
The first is that the presidency stays as our focus, one of the people running wins, and everything else stays the same. In that scenario, what can possibly happen but the further devolution of our country's political system? What can happen but a further hastening of the partisan death-spiral that began in the '90s when the GOP decided that Perot's effect on the vote completely delegitimized the Clinton presidency and then did everything in their power to destroy it? For I see no good outcome from a general election in which any of our four current front-runners win. Trump is a bully and a demagogue, Cruz is insane, Clinton is absolutely loathed by half the country, and Sanders is so far to the left of most of the country that one has to imagine almost literal open warfare between a Sanders White House and the House.
And let's face it, the above is the most likely scenario. The race for the presidency will consume everyone's attention, someone will win the election, everyone on the other side will hate him/her, and things will get worse than they are now.
But if, instead, we are somehow able to realize that the driving motivation for an across-the-spectrum near-or-actual-majority of voters is that the problem with our government is built into the system itself, and we are somehow able to use this understanding and the momentum that's building up around these outsider candidacies to create a pan-political movement around serious campaign-finance and electoral reform--up to and including amending the Constitution, if that's what it takes--then we as a nation might still have a chance.
The presidency is a sideshow right now, and like every sideshow the carnies and freaks and grotesqueries sure attract the attention. We're going to get nowhere if we let that noise draw all of our energy and we avoid the harder work of dealing with problems that lack the can't-look-away fascination offered by the Combover Man, the Beady-Eyed Madman, the Ice Queen, and the Cantankerous Old Dude battling for the most powerful office in the world. Meanwhile America has become a shell of itself, half oligarchy and half plutocracy, as politicians, electorally safe in their gerrymandered fiefdoms, vie for the money of special interests who have few fetters in using their wealth to control as much of the world as they can. We face real problems. Without tackling our system's enormous deficiencies, it's hopeless to imagine that we'll even begin to solve them.