Al Gore narrowly defeated Bill Bradley in this year’s Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, but Bradley was unable to move far beyond the traditional starting point for insurgent candidates – the state’s academic communities. Gore won decisively in New Hampshire’s largest cities (Manchester and Nashua) and old mill towns, and carried many of the state’s smaller cities as well.
The table below compares the winners in a sampling of communities around New Hampshire in this year’s Democratic primary with the contests in 1968 (when President Lyndon B. Johnson’s write-in candidacy barely turned back the insurgent challenge of Eugene McCarthy) and 1992 (in which Paul Tsongas and Bill Clinton finished one-two, respectively).
