So now it's a four-way race, at least sort of. True, it may really be a one-way race: A guy who emerges as the winner in Iowa and New Hampshire is, after all, the favorite in a pretty huge way. On the other hand, Bill Clinton was neither of those things, a small fact still worth remembering, at least for another week.
John Kerry was obviously Tuesday night's big winner. But as I flipped back and forth and back among the cable channels, I kept seeing another winner. More than 200,000 New Hampshire voters turned out Tuesday night. The previous record was about 160,000. That's a signal -- and you better believe that the president's campaign people noticed it -- that anti-Bush turnout could be stoked in November.
And virtually all of those 200,000 -- nearly half of whom were independents, who were eligible to vote in Tuesday's primary -- voted for something that pollsters and experts have been saying for several years now is doomed to failure and that no reasonable person would vote for.
There were, obviously, differences among Kerry and Howard Dean and John Edwards and Wesley Clark. But what's most striking the morning after is what's similar about them: They're populists. Each of them, in his own way, is ripping into corporate special interests and even talking about class in America. Putting out such a message has been absolutely verboten for Democrats in the last few years. And the one candidate (Joe Lieberman) who ran away from populism as if it were a communicable disease finished a very un-Joe-mentum-ish fifth.
This was not, coming into this election season, the script that Democrats were supposed to read from. Think back: In 2002, when these candidates first started to dip toes into the water (and when Al Gore was still a candidate), the conventional wisdom was that Gore's brief flirtation with a populist message was a problem (a sentiment Lieberman echoed during his appearance at a Democratic Leadership Council conclave that summer). But now we have Kerry, Dean, Edwards, and Clark talking to voters in an explicitly populist way about the economy and, to some extent, about cultural issues as well.
Here's another interesting thing -- and it may well be the thing -- about the new Democratic populism: It doesn't really have much to do with organized Democratic constituencies. The unions and the other usual Democratic interests aren't driving this. Unions were for Dick Gephardt, who dropped out early, and for Dean, who came back in New Hampshire to some extent only. The fact that all four remaining serious candidates, three of whom have no organizational backing to speak of, are talking populism means that, this year, that message matters to regular voters.
I don't think anyone could have predicted that this would be the case -- none of our great experts, anyway, who spent half the night either wondering why Teresa Heinz Kerry was wearing orange or asking the Democrats whether they wouldn't just end up getting mauled on gay marriage.
And so the big loser of New Hampshire was the centrist, Republican-lite tendency within the Democratic Party. The centrists, after today, have no candidate. They'll pretend now that someone is their candidate -- Edwards, maybe, just because he has a southern accent, or Clark, because he has stars. But the truth is that the nominee -- and in all likelihood it's going to Kerry, but whomever it turns out to be -- will not be reading from the centrist playbook.
Will this work for Democrats in November? The media, on the evidence of Tuesday night's coverage, clearly think it won't. But this is where this election gets really interesting.
The press has been saying for a decade now that the Democrats would clearly fail if they moved to the "left." Now they have, at least on economic issues (and on cultural issues, they're defending their turf in a way they haven't for years). Of course, that message could lose in November. But up to this point it has gotten more people coming to the polls, in both Iowa and New Hampshire, than any message from a Democrat has in recent years. So far, populism doesn't seem like the problem that all those experts spent a decade predicting it would be.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's co-editor and executive editor.
