New Hampshire Introductory Essay

By Rhodes Cook

Really, what good is the New Hampshire primary, anyway?

Voting earlier than ever on Feb. 1, the first-in-the-nation presidential primary still attracts the candidates and the media in droves.

But a fail-safe predictor of the next occupant of the White House? Not anymore. For decades, the primary’s supporters boasted that no candidate could be elected president without first winning the New Hampshire primary – a boast that was deflated in 1992 when Bill Clinton finished second in the Democratic primary and still won the White House.

A guaranteed source of momentum for the winner? No candidate can really count on it, after Pat Buchanan won New Hampshire and nothing else in the 1996 Republican primary season.

A microcosm of the American electorate? Not demographically. Overwhelmingly white with only one city nudging 100,000 (Manchester), the state is at odds with a national population that is increasingly rainbow-hued and concentrated in large metropolitan areas.

Then what does New Hampshire offer? Almost certainly, a focused and attentive group of voters that provide the first important clues as to how several key parts of the electorate are apt to vote during the rest of the nominating process.

As a day-long primary, New Hampshire involves a much larger proportion of its voters than Iowa’s nighttime neighborhood caucuses. And in the suburban communities along the Massachusetts border, college towns such as Durham and Hanover, and old blue-collar mill towns that dot the state, New Hampshire provides insights into the voting behavior of three major constituencies.

How the candidates fare among these constituencies in New Hampshire is often replicated over and over as the primary season unfolds.

It was the academic communities of New Hampshire that provided the first real ballot-box evidence of the passionate appeal of the insurgent dark horse candidacies of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972.

It was the strong vote for Ronald Reagan in heavily ethnic mill towns such as Manchester and Berlin in the 1976 Republican primary that gave the first hint of Reagan’s appeal to working-class voters across the Frost Belt that were to be a cornerstone of his successful presidential runs in the 1980s.

And New Hampshire’s suburban voters, though not as large a part of the electorate as in many other states, are often the decisive battleground in the primary voting, as they are in elections nationally.

In 1992, for instance, Clinton lost the New Hampshire primary largely because he was unable to beat Paul Tsongas in the suburban communities that sprawl along the Massachusetts border. But Clinton survived to fight again because he won many of New Hampshire’s smaller mill towns – a preview of his appeal in Democratic primaries across the country that year.

From New Hampshire on, Clinton ran best among less educated, working-class voters during the winter and spring of 1992. His appeal to more affluent suburbanites, particularly evident in his 1996 re-election, came later.

Vice President Al Gore can only hope for such a transformation in his own vote-getting appeal. On his first try for the White House in 1988, Gore barely registered in New Hampshire. Concentrating that year on his native South, Gore made a half-hearted effort in New Hampshire that netted only 7 percent of the Democratic primary vote. He was unable to gain a toehold in either the academic communities, the mill towns or the suburbs.

But the good news for Gore is that like in love, it is often easier the second time around for a presidential candidate in New Hampshire – especially one who has spiced up his resume before resuming his courtship of Granite States voters.

There is probably no better model of such a transformation than the father of the Republican front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. On his first presidential run in 1980, the elder Bush was able to carry the academic communities of New Hampshire but little else, and was routed by Reagan.

Eight years later, as Reagan’s vice president, Bush swept virtually every community in New Hampshire but the college towns and won the primary handily. He went on to win the Republican nomination in 1988 that he had lost his first time out.

Since then, the New Hampshire primary has lost some of its luster. Clinton showed that a candidate can win the White House without first winning New Hampshire. Buchanan showed that one can win New Hampshire but not win another primary.

Yet while it may no longer be a reliable bellwether or launching pad, New Hampshire does offer the chance for redemption and the terrain for a fair fight - where candidates of all stripes get their first big chance to demonstrate the breadth of their vote-getting appeal.