New Hampshire House Speaker Steve Shurtleff says he struggled to decide which Democratic presidential candidate he’d support in the race for the White House.
“It was a difficult decision for me to make. I had an opportunity to meet with several of the candidates and was impressed with quite a few,” the Concord Democrat explained in an interview with the Monitor.
“I had to do a lot of soul searching,” the speaker added.
In the end, Shurtleff decided to endorse former vice president Joe Biden.
The U.S. Army veteran, retired deputy U.S. Marshal, and former Concord city councilor who’s led the state House Democrats for five years pointed to Biden’s foreign policy experience and his calls for bipartisanship as two key reasons he decided to back the former vice president.
Shurtleff’s known Biden for years and backed the then-senator from Delaware’s unsuccessful 2008 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Shurtleff emphasized the importance of next year’s presidential election.
“Four years ago, I didn’t endorse anybody for president in the primary. But this time around the election is so important that I did,” he noted.
Shurleff is the latest high-profile Granite State politician or official to back Biden, the front-runner for the nomination in national polling and a top tier contender in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. He joins, among others, former four-term governor John Lynch, former four-term Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter, and longtime state senator Lou D’Allesandro.
While high-profile endorsements can often be overrated, they do pay dividends by grabbing media attention and providing a candidate a well-known surrogate.
Democratic presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick had the big picture on his mind during his campaign stop Thursday in New Hampshire.
Patrick, who announced his candidacy for president just over a month ago, returned to the Granite State hours after releasing a broad policy agenda for his long-shot 2020 campaign. He described the four main pillars of his campaign as opportunity, reform, democracy and foreign policy.
After holding a policy roundtable discussion at CCA Global Partners, a shared services cooperative company headquartered in Manchester’s Millyard, Patrick told reporters his policy agenda is a “conversation starter.” He promised that “we will develop the policy and define the policy agenda” through conversations with voters and experts.
After a month in the race, Patrick’s building his campaign team in New Hampshire but has yet to resonate in public opinion polling.
Patrick, a long-shot when he first won election in 2006 as Massachusetts governor, downplayed the polls, saying “I think I am being considered seriously by voters. I don’t take all my cues from polls. It’s a good think I don’t because I never would have been governor of Massachusetts, twice.”
And he highlighted “you’ll see that we’ll be on air – at least digitally – soon. That will help.”
And with less than two months to go until the Feb. 11 primary, he emphasized that “we’re building organization in order to organize at the grassroots, and we’re doing that fast.”
At least five presidential candidates have tentatively committed speaking and taking questions at the College Convention.
The event – which has been hosted by New England College since 2000 – is a gathering of students from New Hampshire and across the country to discuss such issues as presidential primary voting, ranked choice voting, college debt, health care, climate change, criminal justice reform, and LGBTQ policy.
The upcoming seminars and discussions will be held Jan. 5 to 9 at the Double Tree Hotel in Manchester – with students attending from New Hampshire and 18 other states.
Veteran political scientist and New England College vice president of academic affairs Wayne Lesperance told the Monitor that “we are confident that not only will this be a great event for students and candidates who attend, it will also demonstrate the seriousness with which New Hampshire takes its responsibility as the first-in-the-nation primary state.”
The Democratic candidates who have committed to attending or will likely attend are Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, former representative John Delaney of Maryland, and bestselling spiritual author Marianne Williamson. Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, who’s primary challenging Republican President Donald Trump, is also attending.