MANCHESTER, N.H. — The revolution has not come. Bernie Sanders is looking like the front-runner anyway.
The more moderate, non-Sanders alternatives combined to far outpace the liberal Vermont senator’s vote share here on Tuesday night, with Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of a small Indiana city, again holding him to a virtual draw. His predictions of runaway progressive turnout remain unproved.
But the two fading former favorites who once seemed to have a hold on the liberal establishment and the moderate establishment — Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — lost, badly. Two other professed unity candidates, Mr. Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar, performed well in New Hampshire but have shown little capacity to resonate with nonwhite voters so far.
And with no consensus among his doubters about how best to stop him, and who is best positioned to do it, Mr. Sanders’s early hold on a fractured primary field has laid bare a distressing truth for some Democrats: The man who has long resisted the party’s label might just become the standard-bearer.
Mr. Biden had spoken for months of his peerless ability to win. But his debacle in New Hampshire, after another in Iowa, had him hustling to South Carolina by Tuesday evening, hastily scheduling an event in a state where he hopes his standing with black voters can save him.
“We’re still mildly hopeful here in New Hampshire,” Mr. Biden said earlier on Tuesday before jetting off. The adverb was doing a lot of work.
Mr. Buttigieg, hoping to supplant his rivals as the most viable center-left choice, has often leaned on tone as much as substance — Democratic elevator music, some critics suggest — presenting himself as broadly palatable to less ideological voters. After a punchy final few days in New Hampshire, where he and Mr. Sanders traded insults over electability and fund-raising practices, Mr. Buttigieg appeared to land a gentle dig at Mr. Sanders’s age (smuggled in a compliment) in his remarks to supporters on Tuesday night.
“I admired Senator Sanders when I was a high school student,” Mr. Buttigieg said.
Mr. Sanders’s challenges remain legion. He is still a democratic socialist who recently survived a heart attack. He is still viewed skeptically across much of the Democratic electorate. He has, for the second state in a row, fallen well short of his support levels from the 2016 primary against Hillary Clinton, though the field was much smaller then.
Yet “the establishment” of Mr. Sanders’s daily warnings is less a monolith than a collection of anxious officials and strategists, with wishes not necessarily decisive in a moment this chaotic.
And if there are probably still a few smoke-filled rooms where party eminences gather to worry aloud about his chances in a general election against President Trump, recent history suggests that a coalition this ungainly — unbending progressives, disaffected moderates, Obama-Trump voters — cannot be herded with ease.
“This isn’t the Kremlin,” said Steve Israel, the former New York congressman and onetime chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The thought that Democrats are disciplined enough to march from orders on high is a fantasy.”
So far, the orders from on low suggest that Mr. Sanders is doing something right.
“We have an unprecedented grass-roots movement from coast to coast,” he said in Manchester on Tuesday.
The best way to win is to win, generally speaking, but the primary now includes several campaigns arguing that the reality is more complicated.
Hours before the polls closed on Tuesday, Ms. Warren’s team sent reporters a memo from her campaign manager, Roger Lau, maintaining that she is still the candidate “with the highest potential ceiling of support.”
Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor, has wagered an entire candidacy on not bothering with the first four states and hoping for a messy February among his peers. (Iowa was particularly accommodating to his cause.) His nine-figure ad spending could further jumble the race in the coming weeks, as candidates like Ms. Klobuchar strain to establish a presence across the national map.
Then there is Mr. Biden.
Even when he has not attacked Mr. Biden directly, Mr. Sanders’s crusades against the establishment can feel precision-engineered to diminish the onetime front-runner. Mr. Biden is a proud capital wheeler-dealer, trumpeting his ability to find compromise in the decades since he was elected to the Senate at 29.
To this day, Mr. Biden defaults to language befitting a longtime committee chairman: He sometimes seeks to take a “point of personal privilege,” he frequently references various pieces of legislation from years ago, and he has referred to at least one campaign rival as his “distinguished friend.”
Some of his top 2020 surrogates were longtime Senate colleagues, including the Democratic Party’s 2004 nominee, John Kerry.
At the debate last Friday, he sought at every turn to highlight his past political and legislative accomplishments. Take on gun violence? “I’m the only guy that beat the N.R.A. twice.” Campaign finance reform? “The way to deal with Citizens United is to pass a constitutional amendment I introduced 25 years ago.”
Yet voters have so far rejected Mr. Biden’s insistence on Washington experience, and those who do believe in his message of bipartisanship have gravitated toward younger candidates offering their own versions of that pitch.
Mr. Biden’s campaign was already in turmoil in recent days, on the heels of a significant leadership shake-up and pleas from some supporters to embrace sweeping changes in media and travel strategy: Make Mr. Biden more accessible to the reporters, they suggested. Engage in more retail politics, Mr. Biden’s greatest strength. Maybe even sharpen the message. (After spending a day lighting into Mr. Buttigieg on Saturday, complete with a digital ad that belittled the former mayor’s small-town experience, Mr. Biden was back to oblique swipes on Sunday.)
Perhaps his most urgent concern now is financial: While Mr. Biden’s campaign worked to set expectations low for Mr. Biden in New Hampshire, some donors, alarmed by the Iowa result, have privately voiced nerves about another weak finish — and showed renewed signs of interest in Mr. Bloomberg.
Mr. Biden’s allies hold no monopoly on political panic at the moment. For many Democrats, recent weeks have been pocked with reminders of a primary that could have been. After a midterm triumph that owed heavily to the success of female and nonwhite candidates, the contest has instead been dictated often by white men, including a few in their 70s.
In particular, the stumbles of Ms. Warren, a polling leader for much of 2019, have registered as a startling disappointment for many supporters. In her closing days here, she had dwelled often on the third anniversary of the time Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, inadvertently coined the phrase “nevertheless, she persisted” inside the Capitol, a slogan now printed on T-shirts, embroidered on pillows and tattooed on bodies, as Ms. Warren has reminded voters.
“Her life is her message,” said Allison Cutler, 63, who had traveled from Vermont to help as a Warren volunteer. “And her message is her life.”
Addressing supporters on Tuesday night, Ms. Warren — whose allies have suggested all week that prognosticators are not to be trusted — was left to salute somebody else for defying predictions.
“I also want to congratulate my friend and colleague, Amy Klobuchar,” she said, “for showing just how wrong the pundits can be when they count a woman out.”