Brendan Williams is the president and CEO of the New Hampshire Health Care Association. These views are his own.
President Biden’s effort to strip New Hampshire of its status as the first-in-the-nation primary state and bestow that honor upon the first-in-the-nation secession state, South Carolina, is quixotic on several levels.
In 2020, Biden finished a distant 5th in the New Hampshire primary, after his 4th place finish in the Iowa caucus. I imagine that did not endear the Granite State to him. Yet after losing the Nevada caucus, with his candidacy on the ropes, Biden rebounded in South Carolina with a strong win. It was his firewall.
However, there are dynamics in New Hampshire that Biden should not ignore in a peevish impulse to upset the presidential nominating process.
In 2000 George W. Bush became the first president since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to win the Electoral College but lose the popular vote. Many of us remember the litigation that occurred over the method of counting votes in Florida, upon which the belated outcome turned. What might not be remembered is that any wrangling over Florida would have been unnecessary if Gore had not narrowly lost New Hampshire. If Gore had won here, he would have been our 43rd president.
Whatever disappointment Biden felt over the February 11, 2020 New Hampshire primary should have been erased on November 3, 2020, when he won 52.7% of the general election vote here on his way to the White House. It helped make up for his landslide general election defeat in South Carolina, where he received just 43.4% of the vote.
I have been in the statehouses of both states. In Concord, everything celebrates being part of this nation, from the Civil War battle flags to the paintings, while in Columbia plaques and statuary still celebrate having left the United States. While I value all the states in our union, it is safe to say South Carolina isn’t going to become fertile ground for Democrats.
This year, Republican Sen. Tim Scott won re-election there with 62% of the vote over his Democratic challenger, and six of the seven U.S. House members are Republicans. Here Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan won, as did our two Democratic U.S. House members.
If we are to treat the primaries as something other than beauty pageants, and instead an exercise in building a party’s momentum toward general election success, trading a swing state like ours for a lost cause is illogical.
Is it really in the best, long-term interest of Biden, assuming he is serious about running again, to yield all early voter contact in New Hampshire to Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, or whoever else may run on the Republican side? Indeed, one prospective candidate may be Tim Scott, which would make for some irony, as I imagine the senator would not need to do much campaigning in his home state.
It is true diversity should be valued in the nominating process, but diversity can be measured in many ways. Our state has more ideological diversity, with both parties competitive. In South Carolina, Republicans have entirely controlled the legislature since 2000. New Hampshire also has the nation’s second-oldest median age, after Maine, and our society has done a deplorable job of valuing its elderly citizens. Honing one’s message here to appeal to older voters could do Democrats a lot of good, and, again, build momentum toward the general election.
My arguments may prove moot, as New Hampshire state law will, I hope, supersede Biden’s own preferences.