What is the future of the New Hampshire primary?
2024-01-19 00:25:56
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
This is The Guardian.
Hi there, I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist for The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America, the first in a special three-part series, all coming from New Hampshire in the United States. That's where we are right now, on the snowy, icy roads, and it's a big, strong sense of deja vu for me, because I've been doing this every four years for decades now, actually, going all the way back to the 1990s, coming here every four years for what is now almost a sacred ritual in the American political calendar. It's when big candidates, senators, governors, come from all over America to this small corner of the United States to campaign one voter at a time, retail politics. It's a real phenomenon with huge history. They like to say that they make and break presidents in this small state.
This year, however, things are a bit different. I'm off to meet someone who knows all about the history of this state and this primary, Dante Scala, who's a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, and he and I are going to have breakfast in a New Hampshire landmark.
There he is, man in a hat, very sensibly. So, Dante, you've brought us here. Where are we exactly?
So, we're at the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, and, as you can see, we're in the middle of the city. And the Red Arrow is this historic place where a lot of politicians come. when a politician from out of state is here for the first time in New Hampshire, a wannabe presidential candidate. They usually have a sherpa who brings them around to different places to meet voters, and this is one of the stops.
In we go.
All right.
I do notice, as we're taking our seats here at the Red Arrow Diner, there's just a little, very small brass plate on the seat you're sitting on. It says Governor Richardson sat here, a reference to Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico. And where Danielle, our producer, is sitting, it says Senator Tim Scott sat here. He was a candidate in this current cycle. He dropped out even before he got to the starting line in New Hampshire.
But just a sign that even one diner, there's brass plates like that on every seat in this diner, even this one small place, just inundated with big politicians, candidates. This is how New Hampshire rolls. Just give us the sort of broad outline, the fact of this place, because the size of it, the number of people. Just tell us about that profile of New Hampshire.
You know, New Hampshire is a state of about 1.
3 million people. It's a small state. when it comes to the presidential election. You know, like in the general election, we only have four electoral votes, but we're obviously very outsized influence. now, in the presidential primaries.
People have moved up from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, which, when I moved here myself 25 years ago, was causing a lot of consternation, because at the time, New Hampshire was evolving from being a reliably red Republican state to what we call a purple state or a swing state. And Republicans were all flutter about this. I mean, Bill Clinton had carried the state twice in the general election and so forth, and they were looking for someone to blame. So they blamed Massachusetts. In fact, they blamed Massachusetts people.
Massachusetts liberals are getting in their cars and moving up here, up Interstate 93, and they're bringing their liberal politics with them. Well, as it happens now, you look for the base of the Republican Party in New Hampshire, and it used to be like the iconic Yankee Republican who lived out in the woods somewhere with the plaid jackets and the hat and so forth. And now, though, it's someone who lives in the suburbs of Boston. So you've got a state that is, you know, racially not very diverse, right? Ninety percent white.
But in terms of its politics, tend to be all over the place.
So you've got this community here with its own deep roots, but also some people here who are in bedroom communities, but working in Boston. They're commuters, in effect, from Boston. You've got this new profile. Now, crucial for the election is it's not just Republicans and Democrats. There are a lot of people in New Hampshire who defiantly register and identify as independents.
And that has a big impact on primary and presidential politics.
Yeah, I guess shows, like, you know, every state has a slightly different set of rules when it comes to presidential primaries, who can vote, who can't. And we in New Hampshire have adopted a very kind of open position regarding that. So these independent or undeclared voters, they're undeclared to either party. And so on the rolls, they are unaffiliated. And they are the ultimate free agents when it comes to the presidential primary, because I myself am an undeclared voter.
So next Tuesday, I can go to my polling place and I can ask for either a Democratic ballot or a Republican ballot. And they will give me either, not both, one or the other. And then I basically become a Republican. for five minutes. I go and vote.
I cast my ballot, which counts the same as a faithful, registered Republican for life. And on my way out the door, I can sign another piece of paper and revert back to undeclared status. So it's those people in the middle who bring a lot of the volatility to the primary that you may not see in other places, where it's all Republicans voting or all Democrats voting.
And you hear already Donald Trump picking up on that, as if to say if he loses New Hampshire, it won't really count, because its verdict isn't a truly Republican verdict, because so many independents are in the mix in just the way you said. Let's go back through some of the history of it, though, because New Hampshire, as you say, has this outsized role in the process. Can you direct us to when this began and how and why it became so important?
It all goes back to the progressive era of American politics way back at the turn of the 20th century. And so progressives at the time weren't only liberals, but they were Republicans as well as Democrats. And it was this reform movement. in American politics. Progressives felt as if the party system wasn't up to the challenge.
Party bosses at the time controlled who was nominated for various political offices. And these progressives, who were very kind of well-educated, reform-minded people, said, you know what, we need to get power out of the hands of party bosses, because all they care about is power. So what they did was, OK, let's have, let's have primaries so that ordinary party members, not the party elite, but just the party members can vote for the candidates of their choice to be the nominees. And then those nominees will fight against each other in the general election. So from 1920 all the way through to 1968, the Hampshire primary was first and occasionally important.
1968 is another kind of legendary New Hampshire presidential primary.
By any political measure, President Johnson has suffered a major psychological setback in New Hampshire.
In the White House is Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson doesn't even put his name on the ballot in New Hampshire.
Because he thinks it's a foregone conclusion.
Exactly. Why would I, Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States, need to run for the nomination of my party? It's a foregone conclusion. However, Democratic Party is being torn apart by the Vietnam War. And anti-war activists in the Democratic Party are looking for someone to run against Johnson.
They ask Robert Kennedy. He refuses. So then they turn to this little-known senator from the state of Minnesota, Gene McCarthy, to be the voice for these anti-war activists.
And he gets all the beardy hippies to shave themselves, go clean for Gene in their campaign in 1968.
. It's a big different kind of campaign.
Johnson doesn't win by enough. He wins by a small margin. And the story coming out of New Hampshire is Johnson is weak. The party is tearing itself apart. And just a few weeks later, Johnson announces he's not going to run for re-election.
And yet another New Hampshire legend is born. This whole idea of voters participating and sending a message to the country. That's where it begins, with Gene McCarthy.
And so the point there is. the message doesn't always have to be the winner. The message is just who outperforms expectations, who falls below expectations, who makes a strong and unexpected comeback. New Hampshire voters have many ways of expressing their verdict. So in 1992, I think famously, Bill Clinton's whole campaign was saved, not by winning here, because he actually was the runner-up, but he had been written off the dead because of various sex scandals and so on.
Came back here, did a strong second, and suddenly, yet again, the voters of New Hampshire play that role in deciding who can go forward to the next stage.
Right. Accompanied by the media, who have become, in some ways, like over the last half century, the new bosses of presidential nomination. Because once upon a time, it was the party bosses who would sit and say, huh, John Kennedy, young, handsome, he could be a good presidential candidate, maybe. Nowadays, it's the media that looks at, say, Ron DeSantis and says, well, looks like a good candidate on paper, I wonder how he is in person. You know, his smile, he smiles kind of awkwardly, that's going to be a problem, right?
So there's all, it's the New Hampshire voters, and they have this huge megaphone, the media, set right next to them, and everything they say is amplified across the country.
So New Hampshire acquires this importance, how does that then manifest itself? What are these primaries like, in terms of how many come here, the candidates, what they do here, the sort of pageantry of it?
The classic story of New Hampshire is, activists meet candidates in someone's living room. So every activist, Democrat or Republican, you know, worth their salt, has this story about, oh, I met the future president of the United States when he was nobody. No one knew who he was, but I was there first. Any campaign says to itself, I want to build gradually to bigger and bigger rooms. I want to go from a living room the winter before the primary to filling a high school auditorium with two days left before the primary.
And you're thinking about how to slowly build over time. Once upon a time, you used New Hampshire to catapult yourself into public fame. Candidates become so much better known so early. It's not as it used to be, where New Hampshire voters and activists had a monopoly on these candidates, along with a few members of the national media. Now it all starts so much earlier.
That period when candidates would traditionally come to town, they would come to diners like the one we're sitting in, they would bring a lot of press interest, hotel rooms would get booked up. Presumably, that was pretty good for the economy of New Hampshire.
There was a study done once upon a time about the economic impact of New Hampshire. And when the economists worked on it, they kind of figured it was probably like a weekend of stock car racing. So we had the NASCAR stock circuit that comes through, and they kind of equated the economic impact to that.
Yeah, politically quite similar too, actually.
Yeah, right.
People ramming into each other, trying to destroy them.
But it's not so much the economic impact as it is the civic impact. A couple decades ago, my wife and I had just moved to the state, and this rock formation called the Old Man of the Mountain had basically fallen off the mountain. And my wife and I are watching on the news, and people are mourning the death, so to speak, of this rock formation. And we're kind of like, what is going on here? But it was so much ingrained as part of the state's picture of itself.
The New Hampshire primary is like that. If the primary was ever lost, it would feel as if a part of our identity had been cleaved off.
Thinking of what Dante was saying about how sad voters in New Hampshire will feel if the primary loses its very special first-in-the-nation status, it chimes very much with what I picked up at an event on Wednesday night organized by the Boston Globe, which is really the big newspaper in this whole region. Lots of voters there, many of them Democrats or Independents, but all sharing in common this sadness that the New Hampshire primary that they remember, that they really cherish and love, is not quite the same anymore. This time around, it's different. I'm Peggy Van Valkenburgh from Peterborough, New Hampshire.
I've been here since 1976, and every four years we've had this joyous time.
where we could go and listen and hear and talk to any candidate you wanted to.
All fall, I have a photo file of myself with all of those candidates. That's how much it means to us.
We love to think about politically how things are.
I would go to both.
I never would align myself to just one party.
I think I really miss that. I really do miss that, and I think that's what's absent in this election.
My name is John Kelly. I'm from Concord, the state capital about 20 miles south. I'm disappointed when people drop out, even if I understand the strategies. I think to myself, you know, the primary is the beginning of the process. It's not the end of the process.
Why would you drop out before a single vote has been cast? I love the idea of democracy being you can vote for anyone. The other thing that's for me that is selfish is I have a son who's 18, and he loves politics, and he went to 30 events with me last time, and now we don't have that. I couldn't find 30 events. My name's Kaylee, and I'm from Manchester, New Hampshire.
The last New Hampshire primary was absolutely crazy.
Down on Elm Street, Lester Holt, walking through the main hall of the hotel, just the newsroom set up, all through downtown Manchester. We went and toured Elm Street that day. I can't do that. I cannot recreate that same experience, this primary.
All those people really voicing their sense of feeling bereft that the New Hampshire primary, which they really loved over many decades, is not quite what it was. But I was very keen to know why it had changed, and the man in the chair for that event is one of the Boston Globe's political reporters, James Pindell. We made a plan to talk about it all, which is why I've come here to the Doubletree Hotel, obvious place to be, ground central in any New Hampshire primary. This is the place where the political advisors, the journalists, the aides, the spinners all gather. They're in the bar there till late, trading gossip, trading nuggets of intel.
So this was obviously the place to come, and I made a plan to see James just before he does another TV hit. All the satellite trucks and TV lights are out here, so I'm going to get inside and out of the cold.
The remarkable thing about where we're at is this is pretty much the hub, like I said, of the universe for the New Hampshire primary. Once it's clear when the primary will be, this place is immediately sold out. But now people are cancelling. You can actually still get a hotel room here at the Doubletree. It's an incredible fact.
I can never recall a primary where you would have a remote chance of getting a hotel room here. And I'm doing more shows, and they're all, again, I'm talking to someone in New York or Washington, in this case Washington. They're not locally on the ground. So this primary is definitely a different primary.
And what explains that? What's the reason why? Because we're hearing it from lots of people that it's just not the same in 2024.. What's the explanation for that?
Well, there's two reasons, but one, the main driver for media coverage anyway, has been the fact that this is a foregone conclusion about who the frontrunner is and who he would win by a big margin. Of course, we're talking about Donald Trump. Had this been a more competitive election, there'd be more excitement. There's no question about it. The second part is we're still coming out of the pandemic.
The pandemic, it forced people to think, do I really go to the event that I would automatically go to? It's not that big of a deal when I stopped attending things. But overall, if Donald Trump was going to have a competitive election anywhere for the Republican nomination, it was here. And he's consistently been in the 40% range, maybe 43%, 44%. Last couple of polls, since the Iowa caucuses have now had him at 50 or slightly above it.
And unlike Iowa or these other states, there's a Democratic primary here, a robust one. And it's the first test to see how Democrats feel about Joe Biden. But here, you know, his name will not be on the ballot.
New Hampshire has been the first in the nation primary for over 100 years. This changed in February when the DNC decided to give that title to South Carolina.
And people will have to write him in.
But that has also led some Democrats to be fearful around the optics of Joe Biden losing the state, which is why a grassroots movement has started to write in Joe Biden's name.
So the stakes are high, but then everything seems so much smaller. You know, this is my seventh New Hampshire primary. There are fewer candidates. I mean, at this point, we basically have two. Ron DeSantis is decamped to a different state.
They are going to campaign this weekend in South Carolina.
There are fewer events. There are fewer people attending those events. I would say there are fewer debates, but there aren't any debates. So you can go down the line in terms of there's fewer campaign staffers. You know, this used to be a contest of both ground game and message.
And now we have message in terms of, I guess, what you're going to put in your television ads and what you kind of say on the stump. But the ground game is basically non-existent.
And is that? because these days it's all about media messaging, social media messaging, and what you do face-to-face, retail, on the ground, offices, just matters much less now?
I think that's part of it. There's no question about it. At the same time, there's been less money and less enthusiasm, because people don't think this is much of a contest, if we're being honest.
And so that would make you think, OK, four years' time, it will be an open contest because both sides will be looking for a new nominee. Does the New Hampshire primary come back? Or is this the beginning of the end of the New Hampshire primary?
I think that's a very open question. So there's two things going on on why this primary is lame. I mentioned the pandemic, but that's for crowd sizes. But big, structurally speaking, as you were asking that question, the primary has become much more nationalized, and we can get into the weeds on why that is. But there's less New Hampshire issues, less New Hampshire campaigning, less New Hampshire emphasis, and more of a national campaign emphasis.
and then, oh, by the way, I also pop in to New Hampshire. That probably will not change. But clearly, an exciting open primary where both parties will have to find new nominees, that part of the New Hampshire primary, the staffing, the events, I expect that to come back.
We've been talking a lot about how this is a loss in terms of just the democratic civic pleasure that New Hampshire citizens got out of having a big primary in their state. But in policy terms, what is lost when you get a situation where, you know, yes, Nikki Haley is doing some town hall meetings, fewer events than most candidates, but she's doing some, and Donald Trump will come in, do a big rally. But otherwise, Ron DeSantis, as you say, has skipped the state. What is lost in terms of scrutiny, democratic challenge, testing the candidates, in terms of policy?
Look, there's a lot of criticism and jealousy from other states about why the heck does the small state that's not racially diverse at all, that is highly educated, very wealthy compared to the rest of the country, why the heck does it go first and why has it gone first for 100 years? But there's a deep, deep romantic notion to this state. And if you believe, before a person becomes a leader of the free world, that at some place and at some time, these candidates, you know, they're governors, so they run states, they're U.S. senators, so they're, you know, one of 100 people, the most powerful people, or they're really successful in business, they exist in a rarefied air. Who they talk to, who they vacation with, who they live next to, is different.
So if you believe that just for a few days, all we're talking about here is basically 20 days or so of campaigning, or maybe more, that before they become the leader of the free world, that they are forced to talk to everyday people, that they should have to have a personal interaction, that people should size up their character versus spin machines and advertisements making these candidates whatever you want. We talk about these movements of populism around the world and around the United States. New Hampshire is what launched populists Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. And you could see that early on, two years before the New Hampshire primary, because these discussions are allowed to happen. You can poll questions all you want, but you have to know what questions to ask.
And those new things that bubble up, to ask about, whether it's the economy or how people really do feel, about the Iraq war, or whether it's about drugs, or you can pick your topic. Healthcare, for example. That is what these two early states in particular do really well.
So it's not just New Hampshire, and it's people that will lose out. if 2024 is, in a way the last of the New Hampshire primaries. You're saying it's America itself that will lose out.
Indeed. Now, look, this will not be the last of the New Hampshire primary, and I'm going to repeat this, and you can repeat after me if you'd like to try it. The New Hampshire primary will always be first. The New Hampshire primary will always be first. You were taking a sip of water, and you can repeat after me and continue.
I don't know whether the New Hampshire primary will always be first, James, because you've got a resolution of the Democratic Party under Joe Biden saying South Carolina is going to be first.
All right, I'll finish the statement. The New Hampshire primary will always be first. The real question is, will the New Hampshire primary always matter? New Hampshire has a state law that says it must be first. It will be first.
If the DNC or the RNC and the Republicans or Democrats do not want to count it, who cares? If the candidates show up and the media show up, it matters.
James, thanks very much for all your insights. Really good to see you.
I hope you enjoy your time here.
Out of really freezing temperatures. So, I mean, that is a sense really from him and from everyone we've been speaking to, of how much this four-yearly ritual has changed. The New Hampshire primary, very, very different. now. Nevertheless, there are still big candidates in the state.
They're holding events. It's time, I think, to go on the campaign trail for episode two, which will drop on Monday morning. The producer is Daniel Stephens. Our executive producer this week, Jagruti Dharve. I'm Jonathan Friedland.
Thanks, as always, for listening.
This is The Guardian.
Whether you know your kimchi from your kefir, or it's your first time boiling an egg, you'll be able to make delicious meals easily with The Guardian's new Feast app. Discover vibrant vegan dishes with me, Mira Soda, hearty comfort foods with Nigel Slater, bold flavours with Yota Motelengi, and many more tasty offerings from expert Guardian cooks. Experience the ultimate cooking app, Feast, today. Download now and enjoy a 14-day free trial. Terms and conditions apply.
v1.0.0.260408-1-a910ba6_os