MANCHESTER, New Hampshire -- The New Hampshire presidential primary has become
a thing of legend. As the first primary in the nation, it's seen as a
temperature-taking for the rest of the country. If a candidate doesn't do well
in the Granite State, the trajectory of the rest of the campaign is easy to
plot: downward. In his classic The Boys on the Bus (Random House, 1973),
Timothy Crouse wrote of 1972 Democratic candidate Edmund Muskie: "If he took
New Hampshire he would be hard to stop, but because he looked like the one and
only contender, he could not afford to do poorly in that first primary."
But it's not just the primary's timing as the first in the nation that makes it
so important. It also owes much of its near-mythical status to the voters of
New Hampshire. In The Making of the President, 1964 (New American
Library, 1965), Theodore White wrote: "Hampshiremen are earnest about their
politics; they vote seriously; and in their perplexity, in their vacillating
indecision, in the great pulses of changing mood . . . one could see
foreshadowed all the agony of indecision [of the whole country]."
The Iowa caucuses may come first, but as caucuses (in which party activists,
and not regular citizens, cast votes), they don't serve as a proxy for the
nation's hopes and political judgments. And next year, the New Hampshire
primary will be even more important than the Iowa event, since exit-polling
data won't be compiled from those who participate in the caucuses. (Given the
snafus with the Voter News Service in 2000 and, more recently, in the 2002 midterm elections,
news networks are forming a new entity to conduct polling.)
As of this writing, six candidates have already announced their intent to run
in the Democratic primary (President George W. Bush is a sure bet for the
Republican nomination; therefore, all the primary action will take place with
the Dems): Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts, Joseph Lieberman of
Connecticut, and John Edwards of North Carolina; Congressman Dick Gephardt of
Missouri; former Vermont governor Howard Dean; and the Reverend Al Sharpton of
New York. Others, such as former Colorado senator Gary Hart, General Wesley
Clark, and Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware are also talking about getting into
the race. The candidate who ultimately faces off against Bush will be decided,
in good part, by the results of the New Hampshire primary, which is likely to
take place in February 2004. (Next fall, New Hampshire secretary of state
William Gardner will set the primary's official date.) Of the important factors
in the New Hampshire primary, candidates have control over two: field
organization and chemistry with voters. But they have little control over two
others that matter just as much: the expectations game and the will of
independent voters. Below is a guide to each factor, and how the declared
candidates are doing.
* Field organization. Vice-President Al Gore may have won the 2000 New
Hampshire primary -- and subsequent primaries, which fed on the New
Hampshire-generated momentum -- thanks to a traffic jam. At least that's what
many Democratic operatives with experience in New Hampshire seem to think.
Today, when people look back at the 2000 Democratic-
primary season, the
prevailing memory is of Gore trouncing former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley.
But he beat Bradley in New Hampshire by just four points, a relatively narrow
margin of 6395 votes. The bulk of these votes -- more than 3000 -- came from
Hillsborough County, home to Nashua and Manchester, as well as abutting suburbs
like Bedford, Goffstown, and Merrimack. This is a small, relatively compact
area where political foot soldiers can provide the margin of victory. And, many
believe, during the last New Hampshire primary, they did.
As late as 3 p.m. that day, Gore operatives had access to exit polls
showing the vice-president being defeated by Bradley. They also learned that
while Democratic voters were voting in large numbers for Gore, independents,
many of them upscale suburban voters, were voting for Bradley's sophisticated
brand of liberalism. Knowing that Bradley's strength came from tony tech havens
such as Bedford, the Gore team organized a caravan to clog highway I-93 with
traffic so as to discourage potential Bradley voters from getting to the polls.
(Michael Whouley, a chief Gore strategist, recounted the Gore team's Election
Day field efforts at a Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics symposium,
and his comments are included in a new book compiled by the Institute titled
Campaign for President: The Managers Look at 2000. He knocked down the
rumor that they considered overturning an 18-wheeler to clog up traffic.) The
caravan -- spoken of with awe by operatives who worked on the campaign -- had
the desired effect. It was harder for Bradley voters to get the polls.
Even as the traffic-jam caravan was making its way north, key Gore operatives,
such as New Hampshire state representative Ray Buckley, were organizing efforts
to get out the vote in Manchester and Nashua. "Field organization is
identifying voters and getting them out to vote. Phone calls. Door knocking,"
says Buckley, who chairs the Manchester City Democratic Committee and knows
much about the body-by-body battles on which elections can hinge. (Buckley's
Manchester office is adorned with scores of photographs depicting both
long-deceased Democratic icons, such as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson,
and current Democratic leaders, such as former president Bill Clinton, in
attendance at Buckley's birthday party.)
Setting the timetable: New Hampshire secretary of state William Gardner sets the date of the New Hampshire presidential primary. His job? Ensure itÕs the first in the nation
 |
Aware of early polls showing just how close the race was, Buckley showed up at
Gore's election-night party and found some 100 would-be partygoers dressed up
and eager to get into the festivities early. Buckley jumped on top of a table
and roused the group out of its partying mood. He told them the election was
too close for such a premature celebration and essentially ordered them out of
the hall to go find a campaign sign to hold in front of the polls.
Throughout the campaign, however, the Gore team directed its efforts at
working-class voters, who, polling data showed, were selecting either McCain or
Gore. Gore campaigners focused their get-out-the-vote efforts on blue-collar
urban enclaves like Manchester and Nashua, as well as on the Granite State's
trailer parks.
As Whouley recounted at the Kennedy School symposium, the Gore campaign hired
paid phone banks so volunteers could leave the phones and hit the streets to do
the nitty-gritty field work that New Hampshire voters famously expect: door
knocking, holding signs, and helping voters get to the polls. With this tactic,
the campaign actually "doubled the capacity" of the banks, Whouley said. In the
process, the campaign learned "where our votes were: our votes were with
registered Democrats."
The tactics worked, and Gore was on his way to a general-election match-up
versus Bush. Hoping to benefit from the sort of help given to Gore by local New
Hampshire politicos like Buckley, current candidates are working hard to court
the support of the Granite State's political activists. The Web site
PoliticsNH.com (see "Let the Games Begin," page 16) has a tote board listing
the allegiances of some 105 Democratic activists -- activists who can form the
backbone of a field organization. Of the last six contested New Hampshire
Democratic primaries, four have been won by the candidate with the strongest
field organization.
Republican wiseman: Former Granite State governor Hugh Gregg has some advice: ÒThe guy who gets out and shakes the most hands in the street is the guy whoÕs going to win in New Hampshire.Ó
 |
A caveat: as good as it is to have a strong field organization, it is not the
be-all and end-all of a successful campaign. Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska
forged an outstanding team for the 1992 presidential primary. He had inherited
the cream of Gary Hart's 1988 team. Tad Devine, later a top aide to Gore,
served as Kerrey's campaign manager; Manchester realtor Will Kanteres and
Democratic operative Ken Robinson, who will head up John Kerry's New Hampshire
effort in 2004, also worked on Kerrey's campaign. But however much Kerrey's
foot soldiers pounded the pavement, their candidate failed to take hold.
Early edge: John Kerry. The Massachusetts senator has been sending his
staffers up to New Hampshire since last summer. He has sown up the support of
Bill Shaheen, the husband of former governor Jeanne Shaheen, who, while not
formally committed, knows more about New Hampshire field organizing than almost
anyone. Whouley, who is based at Boston's Dewey Square Group, is also backing
Kerry, and Whouley was raised on the importance of getting out the vote. Still,
Buckley and much of the Manchester machine remain uncommitted.
* Chemistry with voters. New Hampshire secretary of state William
Gardner and former governor Hugh Gregg -- two politicians who know as much
about the New Hampshire presidential primary as anyone in the world -- sit
across from me in a booth at the Barley House Tavern, in Concord. The tavern,
located across from the State Capitol Building, is a political hangout. Gregg,
who is the father of US Senator Judd Gregg, was a governor back when Michigan
governor George Romney, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's father, was still
in the private sector. Clad in a gray hounds-tooth suit with a red tie, the
dapper, 85-year-old Gregg is still as involved as ever in state politics.
Interestingly, neither Gardner nor Gregg wants to talk much about demographics,
ideology, or field organizations. For them, the personal connection a candidate
can -- or can't -- make with the voters is what matters.
"The guy who gets out and shakes the most hands in the street is the guy who's
going to win in New Hampshire," says Gregg, a one-time supporter of New York
governor Nelson Rockefeller, to whom he refers as "Rocky." "If you're not going
to get out in their living room and tell them how nice they are, you're not
going to win in New Hampshire."
To say that New Hampshire voters expect this is an understatement. Everyone
interested in the New Hampshire-primary game likes to tell the story, probably
apocryphal, of the New Hampshire voter who is asked by a reporter whom he'll be
voting for, and answers: "I don't know. I've only met each one twice." Buckley
told me that his mother has already rejected a certain 2004 candidate -- he
won't say which one -- because the candidate got too close to her personal
space. The acuity of the average New Hampshire voter was further driven home to
me at the Merrimack Restaurant in downtown Manchester. After a quick meal with
a political operative, I was interrupted by a couple who overheard part of our
conversation, which focused on the upcoming Democratic presidential-primary
fight. Call me classist, but to my mind, neither the man nor the woman looked
like the kind of civic geek who would even know a presidential primary was
taking place next year, much less who was running. The man wore his hair
mullet-style and had a narrow mustache above his lip; the woman had a purple
hockey shirt draped over her frame. But this was New Hampshire, and they had an
opinion. "You know what I think would make a great ticket," the man said.
"Kerry-Gephardt."
For many, the presidential-primary candidate who best capitalized on the
importance of the personal touch in New Hampshire was Jimmy Carter, who was a
little-known governor of Georgia when he won the Granite State primary. Gardner
remembers first seeing Carter sitting alone in the New Hampshire State House
cafeteria months before the primary. Carter had been haunting the State House
in an effort to meet and recruit legislators for his presidential campaign.
Nobody could believe Carter was actually the governor of a state. But the
under-financed dark horse practiced an innovative form of retail politics: he
stayed with more than 70 New Hampshire families as he canvassed the state. (The
year after he won, he invited those families to visit him at the White House.)
Arizona senator John McCain performed similar magic during the 2000 election
cycle, when he participated in more than 100 "town meetings" and stayed long
after they ended to answer questions from townsfolk.
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean is actively cultivating comparisons between
his campaign and the standard set by Carter and McCain. When I met with him in
December, Dean went out of his way to liken his candidacy as a small-state
governor to Carter's. For what it's worth, both Gardner and Gregg cite a
"prognosticator" -- they refuse to reveal his name -- who always accurately
predicts the winner of the New Hampshire primary in the same folksy way that
The Old Farmer's Almanac forecasts weather. This mystery man says that
Dean is on the path to victory. "This is a guy who for all my years has always
told me who's going to win," says Gardner. "All he watches is how [the
candidate] personally interacts with people at events." For example, the
"prognosticator" watches the way New Hampshire voters react to how a candidate
answers questions, rather than how they react to what the candidate actually
says. Clinton and McCain could mesmerize voters, according to the
"prognosticator." And Dean seems to be similarly skilled.
A caveat: Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis was a better retail politician
than people remember today, but he was no McCain-style dynamo. Still, he came
away with a New Hampshire victory in 1988. The same can be said of Paul Tsongas
in 1992. Personal style can explain some victories -- McCain's in 2000,
Carter's in 1976. But too much can be made of this.
Early edge: Howard Dean. Dean has already been to New Hampshire more
than 20 times. His Dr. McCoy-esque "I'm a doctor, not a politician" refrain is
beginning to resonate with some New Hampshire voters.
* Expectations game. Here's something you haven't heard much about amid
the reams of copy that have already been written on the upcoming New Hampshire
primary: the last time a sitting Massachusetts senator participated in the New
Hampshire primary, he was handily defeated. In 1980, Carter trounced Senator
Ted Kennedy by 10 points. (Carter's campaign was run by then-up-and-coming
politico Jeanne Shaheen.) We're certain to hear more about this as Kerry's
people try to lower expectations for the senator.
The dynamic is a simple one. Everyone is so sophisticated about politics and
the media that it's no longer enough to win the New Hampshire primary; a
candidate must win the expectations game as well. If not, a candidate can win
the vote but "lose" in post-Election Day analysis.
To appreciate the importance of expectations, look at how they played out for
Clinton. Some assume that he won the New Hampshire primary in 1992. In fact,
however, he lost -- by eight points. In some circles, that would be considered
a drubbing.
But Clinton had suffered a series of blows to his campaign in January and
February of that year, just weeks before the primary. First were revelations
from Gennifer Flowers, an Arkansas lounge singer, that she and Clinton had
engaged in a long-time affair. Even worse, she had a tape of a phone call from
Clinton, in which the Arkansas governor described New York governor Mario Cuomo
as a "mean son of a bitch" who acted like a "Mafioso" -- which caused another
furor all on its own. Then the press obtained a copy of an old letter Clinton
had written to an Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps recruiter thanking him
for "saving" him from the draft, thus allowing Clinton to avoid military
service in Vietnam. Before you could say "expectations game," Clinton went from
being the front-runner to trailing Tsongas by almost 20 points. Tsongas won the
primary and Clinton came in a strong second amid a field of five candidates.
That night, Clinton was the first candidate to get on television. He thanked
New Hampshire voters and dubbed himself the "comeback kid." The rest is
history.
The media discounted Tsongas's victory because the former Massachusetts senator
came from Lowell -- less than 20 miles from Nashua. They reasoned that, in
light of this "home field" advantage and Clinton's campaign woes, Tsongas's
margin of victory should have been much larger. Lost in that spin-meistering
was the fact that Tsongas lacked the advantages in field organization and money
enjoyed by Clinton and several of the other candidates. At the Kennedy School
forum on the New Hampshire primary, Tsongas campaign manager Dennis Kanin
voiced annoyance over the extent to which the media and public failed to give
Tsongas his due for a difficult victory: "The amazing thing [that] happened in
New Hampshire . . . was that Paul Tsongas won New Hampshire,
considering that we were outspent by Clinton, and not just Clinton, but by
Kerrey and Harkin, by ratios of three to one and two to one."
Expectations are so much a part of the game that New Hampshire voters
themselves take them into account when deciding whom to vote for. One reason
McCain's candidacy took off in 2000 was the air of "inevitable" victory
surrounding George W. Bush prior to the election. Under the guidance of
political strategist Karl Rove, Bush had largely stayed home in Texas and waged
a "front porch" campaign. (Rove modeled the strategy on the 1896 presidential
campaign of William McKinley, who basically stumped from his front porch,
making politicos come to him.) Bush, accordingly, locked up the support of the
New Hampshire Republican establishment, including Senator Judd Gregg and
Congressman Charles Bass. Thus, New Hampshire voters were already open to an
alternative when McCain began aggressively making the rounds in the fall of
1999.
Early edge: anyone but Kerry. Almost lost in the early buzz you hear
about the 2004 primary are these historic results: Tsongas won only 33 percent
of the New Hampshire vote; Dukakis in 1988 won only 36 percent. There's an
early perception that Kerry will have to win New Hampshire by 50 percent for it
to be considered a real win. Given the number of candidates in the race, it
will be almost mathematically impossible for Kerry to finish that high. And he
has another problem. Vermont's Dean is beginning to view the liberal New
Hampshire counties such as Cheshire, Sullivan, and Grafton -- which abut
Vermont, where Dean's influence is obviously strong -- as his natural base.
Local political activists note that antiwar sentiment is strongest in these
counties; a recent op-ed in the Forward quoted Dean as telling a group
of voters in the Grafton County town of Lebanon that "if we had a
renewable-energy policy we would not be sending our kids to Iraq." Furthermore,
in 2000, Bradley -- to whom Dean bears some similarities -- pulled even with
Gore in Cheshire and Sullivan counties and won Grafton County by 1500 votes. A
January PoliticsVT.com report described Dean as having impressed a house party
in the Sullivan County town of Cornish. And Dean appears frequently on the
local television news on WNNE. The station, located in White River, Vermont,
lies across the Connecticut River from Grafton County, and its signal reaches
across Western New Hampshire.
* Independent voters. The giant wild card in the New Hampshire primary
is the block of independents who now make up the majority of New Hampshire
voters. Of registered New Hampshire voters, 37.6 percent are independents,
while 36.7 are Republicans and 25.5 percent are Democrats. Next year's primary
will be the first time independents are expected to vote in the Democratic
primary in huge numbers. To some extent, the politics of many New Hampshire
residents are a mystery, because so many people are so new. New Hampshire lost
300,000 people after the recession in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it
has gained 400,000 since. In 2000, three times as many independents voted in
the Republican primary, which was won by McCain, than voted in the Democratic
primary. (Most independents who voted in the Democratic primary supported
Bradley.)
The independent-voter factor in the New Hampshire primary muddles up election
scenarios in confusing ways. Right now, all the primary candidates are spending
the bulk of their time trying to woo traditional Democratic activists, whose
values in the Granite State are much like those of activists everywhere.
Antiwar and anti-Bush sentiment runs high. But when the primary does come,
liberal activists may not decide the day. History shows that in 1992,
independent voters may have put the two most conservative Democratic
candidates, Tsongas and Clinton, over the top. The two most liberal candidates
that year, Tom Harkin and Jerry Brown, ended up with only a combined 18 percent
of the vote.
Nobody knows to what extent independent voters will choose to participate in
the Democratic primary -- especially if Bush's popularity holds. But being New
Hampshirites, many may want to participate. Buckley, the Manchester activist,
says canvassing independents is difficult, but he expects them to be a factor
in 2004. "My instinct tells me that even those independents who like Bush will
want to participate in the primary," he says.
Early edge: who knows? It's possible that some independents will
gravitate to the rightward-leaning Lieberman -- although New Hampshire
politicos are quick to liken him to former Ohio senator John Glenn, who ran
with money and a national reputation in 1984 and then collapsed in the primary
because he didn't have a base. Dean's style could catch on with independents,
who, throughout New England, align with the socially liberal politics Dean
espouses, even as he embraces fiscally conservative policies. Kerry partisans,
meanwhile, point out that the voting record and profile of their candidate -- a
thoughtful and moderate Northeastern senator with a good environmental record
-- is not unlike the profile independents liked in Bradley. In the absence of
accurate polling, this is not a factor we are likely to know much about until
primary day.
NEW HAMPSHIRE is a quirky political state that witnessed a sweep of Republican
candidates in 2002. Governor Craig Benson won not so much through grassroots
campaigning as by having spent more than $10 million on television time.
(Former governor Gregg insisted during our meeting that Benson did more than
his share of old-fashioned campaigning, but Benson's primary victory over the
better-known former senator Gordon Humphrey can be attributed to his blitz of
TV advertising.) Popular Democratic candidate Jeanne Shaheen was defeated by
the son of the decidedly unpopular John Sununu, a former governor and White
House chief of staff in the first Bush administration. The New Hampshire that
was looking more and more like a tax-friendly, socially liberal haven for
Democrats was suddenly revealed as truly different from its neighbor to the
south. This state, with its anti-tax and less socially liberal sentiments, will
be the first battleground of Campaign 2004. We don't yet know who will win. But
attention to such factors as field organization, connecting with voters,
managing the expectations game, and wooing both independents and hard-core
Democrats will go a long way toward suggesting who will triumph in the long
run.
Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com.
Issue Date: February 7 -13, 2003
