Is the fabled New Hampshire first-in-the-nation presidential primary losing its clout? And should it be losing its clout?
Well, to the first question, yeah, probably. You could see it this season, when the seemingly dozens of would-be candidates would jet in for a few hours – or at most a day or two – before hitting the road to another state, likely worth a lot more delegate votes than the little old Granite State.
We are, increasingly, just one of many. And four years from now, as other states polish their performances and ramp up their advantages – more TV coverage, more potential voters! – that will be even more true.
As for whether it should be losing its clout, the answer’s likely not up to us.
Our fabled presidential primary seems to have been going on forever, but it was only in the later decades of the last century that it really hit the big time. And for much of our primary’s glory years it was unchallenged.
It was such an irresistible idea. A small state with a fairly well-educated and articulate population holds a presidential primary every four years. It’s a picturesque place in New England, close to the media heart of the country and its influential newspapers and TV networks, New York City. And – partly because of its political heritage, town meetings and all that quaint colonial stuff – it holds elections all the time, which means it’s pretty good at it.
New Hampshire is accessible. This was a major draw for both candidates and news folks – a first-in-the-nation primary in, say, South Dakota would have expired from lack of coverage. And so, every four years, aspiring presidents and the reporters who cover them would hotfoot it up here, tracking down flannel-clad Yankees in their general stores.
Local politicos became, at least every four years, well-known sages who happily pontificated to any ink-stained scribe – or, more recently, kid with a video camera – sharing their downhome wisdom about politics and life generally with a breathless waiting world. We were experts at “retail” politics, as it was called.
But things have changed a lot since the 1950s and ’60s. Planes, trains and automobiles are more plentiful – and a whole lot faster – than ever. Well, planes and autos, anyway. Highways go everywhere. And the internet goes wherever highways don’t go.
Other, more populous states – with citizens who were a lot more diverse and hence representative of the nation than we are – started getting into the primary act. They wanted the glory and dough that flowed our way. Our uniqueness became, well, less unique. Already we have South Carolina and Nevada nipping at our heels, and just after them comes the deluge – so-called Super Tuesday, when 14 states, including the largest, California (population 40 million), go to the polls.
Candidates no longer have the time to go door-to-door introducing themselves to Granite State voters. Their presence at house parties is far more likely to be by prerecorded video than in the flesh.
Our monopoly of the first primary has become – not surprisingly – increasingly unpopular with our fellow Americans, pols and regular people alike, over the years. And we’ve increasingly thwarted their attempts to do away with our primacy. So far we’ve fended them off, thanks primarily to a wonderful law promoted and shepherded through our Legislature by Portsmouth’s Jim Splaine, mandating our election be before other.
But now we have a problem. An Iowa problem.
Iowa is a vaguely rectangular-shaped state in the Midwest with a lot of corn and pigs. Every four years it has had a presidential caucus preceding the New Hampshire primary.
But we were fine with that because, well, no one was even sure where Iowa was and no one was sure what a caucus was except that it wasn’t a primary. It seemed to involve voters gathering for one night in gyms and the like and wandering around the place forming what sound like affinity groups, one for each of the various candidates, and it involved a lot of changing places, like musical chairs for grownups.
But only primaries count, we said from our lofty primary perch! Plus Iowa took the heat off us because we weren’t alone in trying to hog the spotlight.
But as we all know, the spotlight is now fixed squarely on Iowa, and it’s not a good spotlight. Because this year the Iowa caucus turned out to be an unholy mess. It was all the fault of an “app” the feckless Democratic voters used. God knows why this “app” was even necessary, since low-tech paper and pencils seem to be fairly simple to operate.
But the bottom line is that – whatever a caucus or a caucus “app” is – the Iowa caucus very spectacularly didn’t work. As I write this, 10 days after the botched caucus, the nation still doesn’t know how exactly the good folks of Iowa voted.
It has made for glorious fodder for late-night comics, major embarrassment for the voters of Iowa – and primo ammunition for the hordes of Americans who hate, hate, hate Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s perch at the front of the presidential candidate selection line.
And it doesn’t matter that we, the splendidly perceptive voters of New Hampshire, have no truck with this “caucus” nonsense and our elections run pretty much flawlessly. The rest of the political nation is out to get us. Our worthiness will be decided far from the hallowed halls of our State House.
And just a thought: Our continuing to use our privileged status to anoint – twice! – a humorless 78-year-old self-declared socialist with health issues for president sure isn’t helping make the case we deserve to go first.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)