The silhouettes of New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and Nikki Haley, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, show through an American flag at a town hall in Manchester, N.H., on Dec. 12.Brian Snyder/Reuters
David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics. He teaches at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.
In the rich, much-cultivated history of New Hampshire, there is an obscure account that captures in one sentence the history, geography, geology, character and political essence of the state that Tuesday holds the first primary of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. It was written in 1827, when the United States was preparing for one of its most consequential elections, and it is part of a summary of an early climb of Mount Lafayette, 1,600 metres high in the White Mountains.
“We immediately began to ascend the mountain on a rough path, which bore the footsteps of some former pilgrims, who had conquered the rugged ascent to gratify curiosity, that insatiable curiosity which induced us to undergo the toil which we now began to experience,” an unknown climber wrote of the hike.
From the state’s seacoast (where large ocean-going ships, constructed of wood from the state’s dense forests, were built as long ago as the 1600s) to its western plains (where Indigenous peoples fished in the Connecticut River that today provides the boundary with Vermont), all the way to the high peaks of the North Country mountains (which today bear the telling name of the Presidential Range), candidates for the White House have been holding town-hall meetings, greeting voters in veterans halls and coffee shops, walking the streets of snow-encrusted villages, and fielding questions in barns, private homes and even rifle ranges.
The campaigning has been both intense and intimate. Fully eight weeks before Tuesday’s primary, for example – on the weekend after American Thanksgiving, traditionally a time of family and football, with Black Friday shopping squeezed in between – the businessman and then-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy scheduled eight events. They included a holiday stroll through the city of Nashua, a stop at a farm, a town-hall meeting, two “Free Speech and Free Drinks” events in separate sections of the state – and a session at the Granite State Indoor Gun Range where the first 50 people were offered a free day of shooting, though they were advised to bring their own ammunition.
“Here in New Hampshire, we get the candidates to do town-hall meetings and stand in front of voters and answer their questions,” Don Bolduc, who was the unsuccessful 2022 GOP Senate nominee, said in an interview. “Voters learn something here, but the candidates learn something, too. And these sort of encounters are the best kind of ‘debate prep’ a candidate can get – and a sure way to sense what people are struggling with and concerned about.”
Back in 1959, when senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts was preparing a long-shot presidential campaign against better-known contenders such as Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas and liberal lion Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, the writer Alan Sillitoe published a short story with the evocative title The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.
American presidential candidates today must be long-distance runners, and several White House hopefuls have discovered the loneliness of that pursuit, especially here, where the running, metaphorically and often physically, is uphill and conducted often when, as the poet John Greenleaf Whittier put it, the sun peeks out “cheerless over hills of gray.”
The loneliest of all the 2024 runners might be Asa Hutchinson, who despite a gold-plated résumé – he was a U.S. attorney and a successful governor of Arkansas – has failed to record more than 1 per cent of the vote for nearly a year. I caught up with him in August at former senator Scott Brown’s farm over on the state’s seacoast.
“I love campaigning in New Hampshire,” Mr. Hutchinson told a group that gathered in that picturesque setting. “I love the questions you people ask, the engagement you have. … Thank goodness for New Hampshire and people looking you in the eye and measuring you.”
That is the marrow of the primary here in New Hampshire, where the political sales pitches are made retail style, not wholesale; where the “lofty land with little men,” as Robert Frost once described his sometime home, nonetheless provides a forum for the little men and women of this state to question the people who would be their leaders; and where the jest that New Hampshire voters won’t make up their minds until they’ve met all the candidates three times is no conceit.
“There were times in 1980 and 1988 where I was fairly certain I had met every single person in New Hampshire,’’ former president George H.W. Bush once told me. “It was fun. Sometimes fattening. You were expected to eat a lot.”
And it is an occasion where dreamers like Mr. Hutchinson can try out their chances. “This remains the last, best hope of lesser-known, lesser-funded candidates to make their case and build their support,” said Fergus Cullen, the former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Committee.
Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor and long-shot GOP candidate, was in Salem, N.H., on Sept. 4 for the Republican town committee's Labour Day picnic.Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
As a spectator sport, New Hampshire’s primary is the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Stanley Cup Final, the Iditarod and the Indianapolis 500 all in one – an iconic, colourful testing ground with its own history, folklore and customs, often attracting political tourists from out of state.
Jennifer Britton, who operates a microbrewery and distillery in Rhode Island, drove three hours to see former governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina speak in Hooksett in late November.
“I knew that New Hampshire gives people like me an opportunity to see candidates in settings like this,” she said, standing among the voters taking the measure of the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “We won’t get that at home.”
No venue in American politics has been the staging ground over a longer period (108 years) for so few people and provided more memorable moments.
It was here, in 1968, that senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, propelled into the presidential race by his opposition to the Vietnam War policies of president Lyndon B. Johnson, took 42 per cent of the primary vote, not enough to defeat the write-in campaign mounted by supporters of LBJ, but enough to display the president’s vulnerability – and to lure senator Robert F. Kennedy into the race.
Eugene McCarthy waves to Democratic party workers in Manchester, N.H., in 1968.The Associated Press
It was here, in 1972, that Paul Newman flew in to boost the quixotic candidacy of representative Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey of California, who was trying to upend president Richard Nixon’s re-election bid. He failed.
It was here, in 1976, when Ronald Reagan was trying to thwart Gerald R. Ford’s re-election campaign, that security forces inspected my Bible for explosives – I was taking an English course called “The King James Version as Literature” – outside the hockey arena where the former governor of California was addressing Dartmouth College students. He failed, too.
It was here, in 1984, that senator Gary Hart of Colorado, no one’s idea of a top-flight presidential candidate, nonetheless defeated former vice-president Walter Mondale, who that very day had been anointed on the front page of The New York Times as an almost-invulnerable presidential candidate. Mr. Hart won in large measure on deep organization and on the strength of handwritten signs pinned to ironing boards shoved in the snow at remote rural crossroads.
“We worked the state hard, as if I were running for a minor office back home in Colorado,” he said in an interview. “We won that primary by winning over one voter at a time, in a place where each voter expected to be romanced.”
Bill Clinton and wife Hillary hug at 1992's election-night party in Merrimack, N.H.Ron Frehm/The Associated Press
It was here, in 1992, that governor Bill Clinton faced the first of his several sex scandals. He fought back, finished in a respectable second place to former senator Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts, declared himself the “Comeback Kid,” and eventually won the nomination and the presidency.
And it was here, in 2000, that governor George W. Bush of Texas, a prohibitive favourite for the Republican presidential nomination, lost by the huge margin of 18 percentage points to senator John McCain of Arizona. It took four weeks for him to recover fully.
All this was possible because New Hampshire voters often delight in scrambling the calculus of the presidential election. That is the great worry of the Donald Trump campaign.
“New Hampshire primary voters have a long history of upending front-runners – and it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump wins but not by very much,” said Dartmouth College political scientist Linda Fowler. “And if that happens, it will be treated by the press as a loss. Voters here are ornery and they really don’t like to be told what to do.”
A rainbow forms on Jan. 10 over Concord, the state capital. New Hampshire is home to just under 1.4 million people, about the population of Calgary, and has grown increasingly diverse as immigration drives a large share of its population growth.Holly Ramer/The Associated Press
Politics is not the only distinctive characteristic of a state that, once every four years, has a star turn on the national stage. Its other distinctions contribute to its character.
New Hampshire is a redoubt of continuity. But it is also a place of great change. The southern part of the state, where the population is clustered and, as a result, where the bulk of campaigning will be conducted this weekend, largely has been transformed into a suburb of Boston, about 50 kilometres to the south.
The brick mill buildings that hug the Merrimack River in Manchester once held one of the largest manufacturing complexes in the world, its 64 mills holding 700,000 spindles and 23,000 looms as the 20th century began. Today many of the remaining buildings are home to high-tech companies.
The descendants of the immigrants who were prominent among the 17,000 employees who produced 500,000 yards of cloth every week – some of them the fabled “mill girls,” many of them francophones from Quebec – are now part of the state’s host community.
Immigration once again is part of the state’s character, providing half of New Hampshire’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2020. One symbol of this transformation is Ali Sekou, who 13 years ago emigrated from Niger and who, two months ago, became the first Black and first Muslim person elected to the city council in the state capital of Concord.
New England landscapes such as New Hampshire's were a source of inspiration for artist Frederic Church, whose Mountain Landscape is displayed a museum in Valparaiso, Ind.Taylor Glascock/The New York Times
The state has long been a magnet for artists (the painters Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and Benjamin Champney and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens) and writers (Frost, Louisa May Alcott, John Irving and Ralph Waldo Emerson).
It is where Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote haunting gothic tales and where Grace Metalious wrote the shocking, saucy Peyton Place, which in 1956 both horrified and captivated millions of readers worldwide. It is where Thornton Wilder set his Our Town, a pointed look at small-town life between 1901 and 1913 that won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, in the mythical town of Grover’s Corners.
And it has been the home of several colourful political figures, including a governor (Meldrim Thomson Jr., 1973-79) who thought the state’s national guard unit ought to possess nuclear weapons; and a newspaper publisher (William Loeb, who led the Manchester Union Leader, the biggest paper in New Hampshire, from 1946 to 1981) whose front-page editorials described, for example, New York Democrat Bella Abzug as a “pot-bellied, porcine-featured congresswoman,” and senator Joe Biden as a “stupid, conceited jackass.”
It also is a state where the serious business of creating a new international monetary system was conducted when representatives from 44 countries around the world, including Louis St. Laurent, gathered in 1944 at Bretton Woods.
Delegates in Bretton Woods, N.H., discuss postwar monetary policy in 1944.United Nations
Speaking of money: New Hampshire is the only state with neither an income tax nor a sales tax; for decades, gubernatorial candidates have taken “the pledge” to resist any attempt to implement a broad-based tax. New Hampshire has long resisted the federal mandate to identify highway exits by mileage figures rather than by sequential numbers. In 1964, it became the first state in modern American history to raise money through a lottery, with results based on horse races.
As Tuesday’s primary nears, campaigners have been reminded – some comforted, some wary – of the streak of what retired Supreme Court justice David Souter, a New Hampshire native, called “an almost cantankerous independence.” That element of the state’s character was evident in the Indian Stream Republic, a tiny unrecognized nation-state that as part of a tax revolt declared itself independent in 1832 and persisted, in disputed territory between New Hampshire and Lower Canada, with its own constitution, postal stamps and 41-person militia, until 1835.
“This sense of independence grows out of the town meeting tradition that is so strong here,” said WIlliam Dunlap, president of the New Hampshire Historical Society and whose family first settled in the state before the American Revolution. “People here think they can, and should, control their own destiny – and, maybe out of hubris, we think we can and should affect the course of national politics.”
People gather at the home of state representative Luz Bay in Dover, N.H., for a Jan. 14 party supporting a write-in campaign to put Joe Biden on the New Hampshire Democratic primary ballot. Mr. Biden has ruled out an official primary in the state this year.Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
The biggest debate here in New Hampshire this winter isn’t over abortion, nor immigration, nor the economy, nor the turmoil around the world. It is about the nature of this primary and the prospect for future primaries here.
The Democrats aren’t holding an official primary in January this year; President Joe Biden, who finished fifth in 2020, made it clear that he wanted the Democratic race to begin in South Carolina, which was the launch pad for his nomination four years ago. New Hampshire howled. The Democrats stood firm, arguing that the Granite State (89 per cent white, 1 per cent Black) was too unrepresentative of the country’s diversity to have such a prominent place in the nomination. Only the Republicans agreed to keep New Hampshire first.
At the same time, New Hampshire political figures are worrying that the contest has become increasingly media-oriented, threatening the intimacy of the handshake-to-handshake campaigning that has long been the identity of the primary.
This has been a lingering concern for decades and came into focus in 1996 when magazine publisher Malcolm (Steve) Forbes spent so much money on local television that the gleaming new headquarters of Manchester, N.H.-based WMUR-TV became known as the “House that Forbes Built.” That concern arose again when Ms. Haley announced a US$10-million December ad buy in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“The candidates are spending more than they’ve ever spent, but that’s a lazy way to campaign,” said David Carney, a national Republican campaign consultant with deep New Hampshire roots. “The hardcore activists are saying they miss the old fun. But there are still plenty of events for the people whose hobby is to go to every candidate appearance. And the average primary voter is getting surveyed and getting mailings constantly along with seeing loads of television ads.”
The spirit of personal campaigning remains strong here.
“New Hampshire can be a tough place to campaign,” Ms. Haley said in a campaign appearance. “You guys want to see the candidates over and over again. You want to ask the questions over and over again.”
Scott Brown, left, plays host to Mr. DeSantis at a July 30 barbecue in Rye, N.H.Reba Saldanha/Reuters
One of the preservationists of the old-time New Hampshire tradition is a transplanted former Republican senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, who last summer invited all the candidates to join him for separate “backyard barbecues” in which he served up hot dogs (“Take two!” he said) and political commentary.
“As a New Hampshire voter, you get to be patient, to look at the candidates and see who is going to be the best bet down the road,” he said. “People here have an opportunity to meet the candidates without BS. Meeting presidential candidates, in an informal setting without handlers, is what the New Hampshire primary is all about. People see the candidates raw. We test them. If they can’t answer a question here in front of regular people they can’t answer Donald Trump.”
Mr. Cullen, the former state GOP chairman, remains a true believer.
“This is the only stop along the trail where this kind of thing still happens,” he said at one of Mr. Brown’s barbecue events. “Candidates from big states, like Kamala Harris and Rudy Giuliani, are used to interacting with voters only through mass media. They don’t feel the need to know individuals as individuals. For most of them, politics is purely transactional. That gets exposed on the trail.”
All New Hampshire primaries are different. This one is marked by the presence of a former president who has stratospheric polling numbers along with 91 indictments.
“There has been just as much campaign activity as ever,” said Neil Levesque, the St. Anselm College political scientist who is the director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics. “But the difference this time is that it is difficult for the campaigns to handle the situation of one of the candidates being essentially an incumbent. There is no precedent for this.”
The wild card in this year’s primary – even more so than in previous contests – is the role independents will play. By some estimates, more than a third of the voters could be people who are not Republicans but who nonetheless, by virtue of peculiar New Hampshire rules, will be able to vote in the GOP primary.
“Independents are where you could see the biggest surprise,” said Thomas Rath, the former state attorney-general. “This much is sure: No one will take a Republican ballot to vote for Trump. These people can be a Republican for a moment and make a big difference, yanking the extremists’ power out of the party. The polling isn’t tracking that phenomenon.”
Nor can it accurately assess the inclination of New Hampshire voters to pull off a surprise.
“If the Republican Party is going to end up with a candidate who can win in November, it has to happen by virtue of New Hampshire setting the table for an alternative candidate to Trump,” said the state’s former governor John H. Sununu, whose son, four-term current Governor Chris Sununu, endorsed Ms. Haley in December. “It’s not that everyone in the Republican Party is sure Trump can’t win. It’s that everybody is worried that Trump can’t win.”
In her classic 1846 account of the White Mountains, Lucy Crawford spoke of the early settlers in New Hampshire’s North Country. “Now, in the woods making a beginning, setting an example for others to follow,” she wrote, “they did the best they could.” For more than a century, this state has been, as Mr. Bolduc, the 2022 GOP Senate candidate, put it, “the great first filter for the country.” Its voters – the reliably loyal Trump supporters, the hopeful Haley and Ron DeSantis supporters, the unpredictable independent voters – are just now girding to make their choices. The political world awaits their verdict.
Emily Elconin/Reuters
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