US politics’ new reality as parties face dramatic change to rules and voters

Ted Cruz, who knew all the election rules of the GOP, failed to top Trump, while Hillary Clinton was almost toppled by a socialist. The rules are changing and so are the voters, writes Ross Barkan

Bill Clinton was supposed to be at St Gabriel’s Episcopal Church in Brooklyn to talk about his wife. But in the fashion of a former president who remembers what it’s like to be in a good dogfight, he couldn’t resist taking on her nettlesome rival.

The pews of the small wood-lined church, a pillar of central Brooklyn’s black community, were not entirely full, and the reporters packed into the back weren’t as plentiful as they were in Clinton’s heyday. And yet, despite sounding hoarse, his whirl of grey hair long gone snow-white, Clinton summoned a hint of his old vigour to try to take down Bernie Sanders.