White House race may be wide open

A tidal wave of anti-establishment feeling, or possibly working class fury, seems to have swept the New Hampshire primaries, whose verdicts in favour of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders have turned the 2016 White House race on its head. Club these results with the Iowa caucuses (caucuses are private meetings where voters indicate support for candidates, primaries are decided by secret ballot voting) and you have four different winners, indicating this may be a hotly contested presidential contest.

Several twists and turns are likely as other states vote for candidates who will be picked at the party conventions later in the year. The message the bellwether states conveyed so early is that nothing can be taken for granted in this no-holds-barred battle for the world’s most powerful position.

While the ascendancy of pollsters’ favourite Trump, who has expertly cranked up anxiety about a wave of immigrants through the southern border as well as from Asia, economic decline and terrorist attacks, might have been more predictable, the rise of the “socialist” Bernie Sanders is less easily explained.

The divisive Trump overturned political veterans in a thundering run of bombast, invective and outright calumny aimed at migrants, minorities and women. Of course, the Democratic challenger to the senior politician, former First Lady and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, is a self-declared left-wing candidate only in the American context.

Between them, Trump and Sanders have stirred “middle America” — defined as God-fearing, almost evangelical middle class and mostly white — into revolutionary thinking. The candidates of traditional American politics backing Wall Street, the entrepreneurial class, emerging racial minorities as well as immigrant-based populism have taken a back seat, at least for now. If the mantra is true that “Iowa picks corn, New Hampshire picks Presidents”, then Hillary, with the supposed backing of liberals, moderates, women and African-Americans, may be in real danger of losing her base.

Candidates have been canvassing resident Indians. Who is going to rule in the White House will be crucial for an increasingly fractured world, particularly in volatile West Asia, where American foreign policy failures have created horrendous failed states, breeding vicious forms of terrorism.

Of a little over two million ethnic Indians resident in the US, a little over a million are naturalised US citizens, and if they were to vote as a bloc they could make an impact. As the most socio-economically successful ethic group in the US, they do have a voice. While political divisions are a given in any collection of Indians, they know now that they have some clout to influence, if not quite determine, who will occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from January 2017.