“This victory will be the beginning of the end of Donald Trump,” Sen Bernie Sanders told the enthusiastic supporters  savouring his narrow win in Tuesday night’s New Hampshire primary.

Not so fast, there…

To a certain extent, the first primary in the Democratic nomination process fulfilled its function of shaking out the field a little and identifying a nominal front-runner – or two – while casting off a few stragglers, even if any reallocation of their support is unlikely to make a dent in the remaining top three or four. But the race remains just as jumbled and just as uncertain, regardless of media coverage that seeks to establish a clear order to the horserace.

And that inevitable notion of a horserace means that Sen Sanders, the 78-year-old Democratic Socialist who isn’t even a member of the Democratic party, is already being described as the “candidate to beat.”

According to Karen Tumulty at the Washington Post, Sanders “has also been helped by the fact that Democrats, in their desperation to find someone who can beat President Trump in November, find themselves at a moment of extraordinary political fluidity.”

And now also, perhaps, at a moment of extraordinary jeopardy for the nation’s institutions.

That’s because the split-screen nature of the news on primary day meant that the scope of what is at stake in the coming election was laid bare as the Department of Justice seemingly descended into chaos over the sentencing of long-time Trump associate Roger Stone, setting alarm bells ringing for the legitimacy of the very rule of law.

But we’ll get to that.

While Sanders won the popular vote on Tuesday – killing it among younger voters if not among people his own age – he ended up with the same number of delegates as Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend mayor who had run him to a similar near-tie in Iowa’s controversial caucuses last week. There, Sanders also took the popular vote, but left with one fewer delegate.  The two front-runners, divided in age by 40 years and by very distinct ideological differences, will make the most of their positions in terms of exposure and fundraising heading into the next contests, in Nevada on Feb 22nd – another caucus – and the South Carolina primary a week later.

A lot was riding on the shoulders of the Granite State after last week’s fiasco in Iowa, and while the process mercifully operated smoothly – notwithstanding the pointless homespun folksiness of Dixville Notch, where, as Brian Williams observed, the entire turnout could comfortably fit in a medium-sized SUV – it served mainly to begin a drawn-out war of attrition for delegates which will take us through Super Tuesday on March 3rd and likely well beyond.

* The up-to-date running delegate count is here

Tuesday’s surprising third-place finisher, Minnesota Sen Amy Klobuchar – who had come fifth in Iowa – appeared to have risen on the back of a strong debate performance last Friday, with a high number of voters making up their minds in the closing days.  It’s worth asking if the debate hadn’t given her that late boost whether Buttigieg might have beaten Sanders to first place. But the next two states, with their more diverse electorates, could be crucial for whether both Buttigieg and Klobuchar can build a coalition for a truly national campaign.

Since Sen Elizabeth Warren represents the neighboring state of Massachusetts she could be forgiven for expecting a better return on her investment than fourth place, raising the inevitable question that if she couldn’t win here, where can she win? As Steve Schmidt also suggested, if you can’t beat Buttigieg or Klobuchar, claiming you can beat Trump might ring a little hollow.

For former VP Joe Biden – who had already left for South Carolina by the time New Hampshire’s results were announced – the days of being the presumptive leader of the pack based largely on name recognition are gone and the viability of his campaign is increasingly in doubt.

At the single-digit end of the table, sadly the math just didn’t work for Andrew Yang and the last non-white candidate dropped out, saying he would endorse any other aspirant who came out in support of a universal basic income. “If we could do it over again, of course, we would not have sunk so much energy and time and resources in Iowa,” he told the Washington Post. “We would have been fighting it out here in New Hampshire. And then we probably would have been on the air in Nevada or South Carolina.”

Yang and his grassroots Yang Gang made for a interesting race, albeit briefly, and it is hard to imagine that this will be his last foray into politics. New Hampshire was also the end of the road for Sen Michael Bennet and former Gov Deval Patrick – described by Mother Jones as “the campaign that made the least sense.”

As the remaining Democratic candidates define their “lanes” of potential appeal, early though it is, pundits appear to be coalescing around the idea that there’s room going forward for Bernie and one or at most two, non-Bernies.

 But that’s the problem, according to the New York Times. Moderate Democrats “want a Sanders alternative. They can’t decide who.”

And that uncertainty has important implications for how long the nominating process will actually take, with a worst-case – although admittedly potentially entertaining – scenario that the Democrats head to their convention in Milwaukee in July amid the sort of rancor and bad feeling that characterized the run-up to their 2016 convention in Philadelphia.

“The turmoil in the party has the potential to extend the primary season, exacerbating internal divisions and putting off the headache of uniting for the general election for months,” the Times writes.

“The Democrats’ proportional system of allocating delegates could make it all but impossible to avert such an outcome. With no winner-take-all contests, and no indication yet that Mr. Sanders can broaden his appeal or that a moderate can coalesce support, the candidates are poised to keep splitting delegates three or four ways, as they did in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

If this was sports, we’ve basically had two minutes of game play, and we’ll have had four by the end of the month. While the early contests are important in terms of momentum and fundraising, in the grand scheme of delegate totals, they’re insignificant. Roughly 150 delegates are allocated in the month of February, and more than 1300 on one day: Super Tuesday.

The party is undoubtedly fractured – leading legendary strategist James Carville to say that Democrats are “losing our damn minds” – while waiting ominously in the wings is the equally divisive figure of former New York mayor Michael  Bloomberg. As Dan Balz writes at the Washington Post:

“Bloomberg has resources that Buttigieg and Klobuchar can only dream of having. But as a onetime Republican, he is not a natural fit in the Democratic Party. As a multibillionaire in a party that includes many voters who decry the influence of big money in politics, he will be accused of trying to buy the nomination.”

So who has been the overall winner so far? Probably Donald Trump.

Jonathan Freedland writes in The Guardian that the president is shaping the contest by making Democrats afraid of getting it wrong.

“Such is the nature of this race, in which Democrats place less weight on their own preferences than on what they imagine are the preferences of others – a process of second-guessing that left many in New Hampshire frozen with indecision until the very last moment. Democrats feel a great weight of responsibility in making this choice. They know they have only one chance left to stop Donald Trump – and they all know what’s at stake.”

As well a figuring out who will be running, the challenge for Democrats is how to run against this most unique of incumbents. For Trump himself, meanwhile, this week also saw him introduce a Budget that Charlie Pierce at Esquire writes would be “political suicide in any sane country.”

But then nothing is, apparently, rational anymore.

‘When the president does it, that means it is not illegal…’

The man whose face Roger Stone has tattooed on his back seems to be being quoted with increasing frequency these days. But Richard Nixon’s response to David Frost in their candid TV interview on the Watergate scandal is just one of many echoes of that time that have come to dominate our current situation. Famously the subject of a 2017 Netflix documentary, Stone has now found himself at the centre of not just another bad day for America’s institutions, but an unfolding purge of the president’s enemies.

Regardless of what happens in the Democratic race, this story will inevitably dominate politics over the coming weeks. Jeet Heer at The Nation argues that media coverage of the primaries is protecting the president  as he capitalizes on his impeachment acquittal by going on “a rampage against the rule of law.”

And it seems that what is now happening under Attorney General William Barr may be heading towards undermining and perhaps eventually annulling the Mueller investigation.

Barr has said he will testify before the House Judiciary Committee next month.

What he might be asked about by then is, honestly, anyone’s guess.