If you ever watch local broadcast television, you may have noticed this past election cycle that you saw just as many ads for New Hampshire U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassen, who was facing a tough fight for reelection, as you did for U.S. Rep. Jared Golden. That’s because a good portion of New Hampshire is served by the media market headquartered in Portland and covering the entire southern half of our state; most of the rest of New Hampshire is covered by the Boston media market. That puts New Hampshire in a curious position. Even though it has about the same population as Maine, it lacks its own media market. Meanwhile, Maine has three: Portland-Auburn, Bangor and Presque Isle.
It’s definitely good for Maine TV stations when New Hampshire has a competitive statewide race, but it becomes even more important every four years during a unique American political tradition: the New Hampshire presidential primary.
New Hampshire’s having the first primary is so entrenched in its political DNA that state law even allows the Secretary of State to change it to make sure of it. That’s good not only for New Hampshire, which benefits – financially and politically – from being the center of the political universe for a month or so, but also for Maine, which benefits from some spillover effects.
But President Biden has a scheme to do away with that tradition.
He recently announced that he supported moving the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary from the front of the calendar, and instead putting South Carolina first. Since he’s the sitting president, the Democratic National Committee went along with it. It’s not a good idea for Democrats of either state, or for the country. Instead, it’s just a really good idea for President Biden in particular and the Democratic establishment in general.
You see, back in 2020, Biden didn’t just lose in both Iowa and New Hampshire, he lost handily. In Iowa, he placed fourth; in New Hampshire, he placed fifth. In both states, he placed behind Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders. In New Hampshire, he was behind even Amy Klobuchar.
That’s right, more New Hampshire Democrats wanted Amy Klobuchar to be president than wanted Joe Biden.
Eventually, though, South Carolina arrived just in time to save Joe Biden’s candidacy, and now Biden wants to reward them for it – and ensure that he doesn’t face any serious challenge on the road to renomination in 2024.
Biden and his allies will say it has nothing to do with that. Instead, they claim it’s about putting a more ethnically diverse state earlier in the primary process and rewarding a key Democratic base constituency: African American voters.
While that’s a seemingly logical argument, it’s not as if South Carolina was last before and there were a bunch of less-diverse states hogging the schedule ahead of it; they were already fourth. Moreover, Nevada, like South Carolina, is more diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire – yet it’s not being rewarded with an earlier slot (perhaps because Bernie Sanders won the state last time).
It would also be worthwhile for Democrats to keep Iowa and New Hampshire at the front of the line for one simple reason, no matter how much it might irk Biden and the establishment: retail politics. Both are small rural states where voters fully expect to meet candidates one on one and shake their hands and ask questions, whether that’s at a diner, the state fair or the town dump (sorry, transfer station).
These are tough settings, where some candidates shine and others stumble, but even at the risk of enabling insurgent campaigns, it’s worth putting all candidates through the wringer of rural retail politics; it mentally hardens them for the tougher fight ahead in the general election. If a candidate can’t compete for votes on a one-on-one level, they don’t deserve to be the presidential nominee of either party.
New Hampshire and Iowa have two other major factors going for them that Democrats shouldn’t ignore, even if they’re not as ethnically diverse.
They’re rural states and they’re competitive in November. Lately, Democrats have been struggling to connect with rural voters, while Republicans have been doing better there at the expense of the suburbs. If the Democrats want to reverse that trend, and continue to win both states in the general, they shouldn’t upend the traditional presidential primary order just because it’s inconvenient for President Biden.
Jim Fossel, a conservative activist from Gardiner, worked for Sen. Susan Collins. He can be contacted at:
jwfossel@gmail.com
Twitter: @jimfossel
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