While the Republican primary got the most attention last night, there was a Democratic contest too.

So let’s look at those results.

President Biden didn’t campaign in the state because New Hampshire refused to abide by the DNC’s new primary calendar which put South Carolina and Nevada at the front of the nomination line. His name didn’t appear on the ballot either. He appears on track to get a bit over 65% of the vote as a write-in. He’s likely one of the few and possibly only presidential candidate ever to win a primary as a write-in.

Let’s call this a split decision. Not terrible for Trump. But definitely not great either. Losing would have been terrible. (Terrible on the way to winning the nomination.) At the moment Trump is beating Haley by about 54% to 45%, which isn’t a lot better. That margin may go up two or three points. As we knew last night and a year ago last night, Trump is absolutely going to be the nominee. But having a candidate who is basically no more than a stand-in for opposition to Trump pulling upwards of 50% is definitely suboptimal for him, to put it mildly.

Earlier today I said that Haley’s threshold was somewhere between 35% and 40%. She’s coming in at 45%. That’s solid.

Watching Trump speak tonight I got the sense that he was one of the few people watching the results tonight who realized this was kind of embarrassing for him.

Tonight is the night of the first and very likely the last meaningful primary of the 2024 primary calendar. Polls suggest a similar outcome to what we saw last week in Iowa: a bare majority for Trump, which in a normal contest would be a big win but is less clearly so when the candidate is the party leader and de facto incumbent. The difference is that unlike in Iowa where most of the remaining vote was split between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, now most will go to Haley.

People will be talking all day about just where we should place the thresholds over which Haley overperforms and keeps some semblance of a faux primary campaign going or Trump does the same and gets everyone to finally admit that this thing is completely absolutely done.

I’d put the number for Haley somewhere between 35% and 40%. For Trump, maybe if he goes over 60%. The truth is I have no idea. By any reasonable calculus, if she can’t win in New Hampshire she can’t win anywhere. And really … it doesn’t matter. We’re talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin when there actually is no pin.

Last week I pointed to signs that with Ron DeSantis’s campaign flatlining post-Iowa, Donald Trump was ready to settle scores with everyone who had backed DeSantis when he appeared to many to pose a genuine threat to Trump. The President and his top strategist strongly hinted that he would back a primary challenge (by Virginia ultra-Trumper John McGuire) against Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, who happens to the be newly elected chairman of the Freedom Caucus. Now it’s looking like that really will happen, or at least that Good has a serious problem on his hands.

Yesterday afternoon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene went on Twitter to endorse state Senator McGuire, Good’s challenger. Among other things she calls Good “an angry, disloyal, MAGA traitor who was caught on camera trashing President Trump and doing everything he could to defeat President Trump. Bob Good is NO GOOD and cannot be trusted.”

I wanted to flag to your attention this piece in the Times about the end of Ron DeSantis’s campaign. It contains a lot of themes you’re certainly familiar with. But I found it striking. Because it cuts through a lot of the pablum of conventional news coverage about how Trump operates and what Trump is about. In short, it explains how Trump devoted a solid year to a ritual and often sexualized humiliation of DeSantis which reached its crescendo in demonstrating that DeSantis was — in the face of Trump’s assault — unwilling or unable to defend himself. That last point was key. To the extent Trump was making an “argument” in the form of a performative and cacophonous psycho-sexual assault, it was DeSantis who made the final case about himself.

By taking it. By not fighting back. By making a fool of himself. By being, in the Trump right’s vivid degenerate phantasmagoria, a total cuck.