The New Hampshire primary is over and the results are in. Bernie Sanders came out on top, followed closely by Pete Buttigieg. It was mostly bleak news for the politicians with Massachusetts ties.
WGBH News' Adam Reilly spoke with All Things Considered anchor Arun Rath about how the local candidates did. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: So, we had three candidates from Massachusetts: two Democrats, Elizabeth Warren and former Governor Deval Patrick; and a Republican challenging President Trump, former Governor Bill Weld. Patrick has now suspended his campaign after getting just over a thousand votes. He was very far back in the pack. Warren, who was doing great not too long ago, came in fourth, and Weld got less than 10 percent of the GOP vote. So, of these three, who fared the worst?
Adam Reilly: I'm going to say Elizabeth Warren, because as you point out, there was a time when it looked like she was headed toward the nomination. She didn't just finish in fourth place, she finished in fourth place behind this top tier of candidates that includes Sanders and Buttigieg and Klobuchar. She tried to accentuate the positive. I was at her election night event, I actually got there just in time, not even quite in time, because she conceded so early, to watch her try to frame what was going on. Essentially, what she said is, congratulations to the people who finished ahead of me, but I remain the candidate who is most capable of bridging divides within the Democratic Party, uniting the party in a way that guarantees the big turnout that we'll need to defeat Donald Trump. This is a new line of messaging from her. She hasn't identified herself as the Democratic bridge between moderates and the left-wing. I think it's going to be a hard sell.
Rath: I don't know if it's a question that's possible to answer, but in terms of where those voters went, did they end up voting for Sanders?
Reilly: I can't give you a scientifically rigorous answer. I don't know where they went. It would not surprise me if a substantial amount of them ended up with Amy Klobuchar, because a lot of the people who are still with Warren who I spoke with are really excited about the idea of electing the first woman president.
Rath: So, let's talk about Deval Patrick, who has just ended his short bid for the Democratic nomination. It was obvious he was never going to win New Hampshire. So what did he learn last night that convinced him to get out now?
Reilly: Well, he didn't just not win, but he not won by a big margin. I think that the last results I saw had him getting about 0.4% in New Hampshire. It's hard, I think, after a showing like that, to get anyone to take you seriously. I'm not sure how seriously people were taking him anyway. It's possible that the governor has decided that the need he saw himself as filling when he got in the race, which was when both Sanders and Warren were surging. And then we saw this backlash that drew both Mike Bloomberg and Deval Patrick into the race, advocating a more moderate, inclusive approach to Democratic politics. Maybe he just doesn't see that need anymore. I mean, Pete Buttigieg has caught fire, and so has Klobuchar. They fit that same bill.
In a statement the governor sent out, a lengthy statement today, he blamed the media for driving him out of the race. He said that too many of us in the press — and by the way, this includes me because I asked him about this when I had a chance — talked about him getting in the race "late." And he went on to say that voters thought he was getting in too late because we in the press told them so. I've got to say, maybe I'm just being a defensive journalist, but that strikes me as a really shaky argument.
Deval Patrick got in the race late for very good personal reasons. His wife had some serious health problems, though she seems to be in good shape now. He got in the race late for good personal reasons. But then he was trying to build something in a very short period of time that the other candidates had spent a year or more building. And, speaking only for myself, when I was asking him, 'hey, you know, can you win this thing after getting in as late as you did?' I wasn't judging him for making that decision, but I think I was asking a very reasonable logistical, value neutral question.
Rath: Now, I do want to talk about about former Governor Weld. Obviously, he was never going to beat President Trump. But I'm wondering, 13,000 votes. It's about 9 percent of the total. What do those numbers say?
Reilly: My quick takeaway on Weld's finish is that he succeeded in showing that at least in New Hampshire, which as we know on a number of different front is not representative of the rest of the country — and I think this applies to the Republicans up there — but there is still a small segment of the Republican Party that doesn't like Donald Trump. It's a very small segment. My sense is that this is very much a glass half full, glass half empty kind of scenario for Weld. If you want to accentuate the positive, you can say he's running a purely symbolic campaign, he made the case against Trump and got some people to express their approval for that argument. The glass half empty take, I guess, is well, so what? You still got nine out of 10 Republicans completely on board with anything and everything the president does. And what are the odds that Bill Weld is going to change their mind in a way that's meaningful in any concrete sense?
