How Anti-Trump Republicans Are Blowing Their Chance in New Hampshire

Just seven weeks before the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary, establishment Republican candidates find themselves on the cusp of losing a stronghold of flinty Yankee pragmatism—and last best path to the White House—to a billionaire celebrity and a tea party senator from Texas.

Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, John Kasich of Ohio and Jeb Bush (formerly) of Florida were supposed to prove their political clout in the Granite State. No Republican in the modern primary era since the 1970s has won the nomination without taking Iowa or New Hampshire, and the three have staked their campaigns on the state where the Republican electorate, relatively centrist compared to Iowa and South Carolina, has successfully selected the past two Republican nominees.