Now the Granite State will hold elections again to begin the presidential nominating process, Biden will not appear on the ballot, and Democrats are being asked to mount a write-in campaign to ensure the incumbent prevails when be the vote held in January That could have been the end of the story before last Friday.
That’s when, just hours before New Hampshire’s filing deadline closed, an outspoken congressman from the Midwest made it clear that he was not entirely free of deception and, to borrow the famous Tammany Hall leader George Washington Plunkitt, he saw his opportunities and took them.
Mixing the enthusiasm of a pre-teen eyeing a T-Rex likeness and the happy warrior glee of his political hero Hubert Humphrey, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) let out back-to-back “wows.” his declaration of candidacy and paid the $1,000 to appear on the New Hampshire presidential ballot.
Then he took to the insecurities of New Hampshire with the appetite of a T-Rex.
“I learned to love my country right here in New Hampshire,” Phillips said, telling photographers, reporters and state officials huddled in the secretary of state’s Capitol office that his summers were spent in a camp in the white mountains. (The camp is technically in Maine, although along the New Hampshire border, as reported by the union leader.) He also revealed his signature on the paperwork: “I love New Hampshire.”
After making it official, Phillips went into the next room, sat down with a group of New Hampshire reporters and answered the easiest question he could ever get.
“Yes,” Phillips said, he would return the state to its role at the start of the presidential nominating process. “The country can and should learn from New Hampshire.”
Terry Shumaker took it all in with a foreboding look. Shumaker knows about the New Hampshire primary, a longtime Democratic power player whose loyalty to Bill Clinton in 1992 earned him an ambassadorship to the Caribbean. And as he watched the self-funding, idealistic and slightly quirky 54-year-old collapse the “grotesque” industrial complex of Washington fundraising while promising to answer the questions of New Hampshire voters one town hall at a time, well, the old hand has seen enough. race here to find out what resonates in an independent-minded state where independents can change the primaries.
“His advisers and the DNC made a huge mistake, this was not necessary,” Shumaker said of the president’s inner circle and the national party. “There was no reason to move.”
It’s understandable that Shumaker, whose support for Biden dates back to the president’s first presidential bid in 1987, would blame staff members. But I’m reliably told it was Biden himself who wanted to rearrange the party’s nominating schedule to make South Carolina the front-runner, rewarding the state that revived his bid in 2020 and lifting black voters more moderates who make up the Democratic primaries there.
Biden’s upset in New Hampshire may not fully materialize. Phillips is clearly divided on whether to criticize the president. On Friday, he veered, sometimes with just seconds to spare, between praising Biden and launching attacks barely on his age and economic record. Unlike past primary challengers who made a political critique, Minnesota’s case is primarily about Biden’s electoral viability.
And while Phillips didn’t open his campaign by using summer as a verb, let the wealthy heir to a liquor fortune try to relate to a state recalling his youth there at the camp of dreams, however however genuine the affection, it is mature. by mockery and signal again he is to this process. Some senior Democrats tried to push former Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio into the primary against Biden, I’m told, and his tougher style might have been better suited to this time of economic malaise.
Then there’s the matter of Phillips’ shotgun marriage to former GOP consultant Steve Schmidt, which could work wonderfully, but could also prove to be a distraction.
Perhaps most significantly, if Phillips is convinced that his candidacy will only help former President Donald Trump by weakening Biden, it is plausible that he will withdraw.
However, that moment may have passed when Biden refused to even take the congressman’s call last week. Philips was clearly stung Friday, as he recounted how Biden’s director of legislative affairs, Shuwanza Goff, told his chief of staff that the White House was monitoring the news and that a phone call was not necessary.
Now, Phillips’ mere presence in the race presents a dilemma for Biden in a contest he was trying to marginalize.
If he urges well-connected New Hampshire Democrats to oversee his write-in campaign, a list that includes former state party chairwoman Kathy Sullivan and veteran strategist Jim Demers — to withdraw, he would effectively hand the primary to Phillips. However, if the group moves forward with the write-in push, Biden must prevail so he doesn’t face the same humiliation that has befallen sitting presidents when Estes Kefauver was swept. coonskin north and helped drive Harry Truman of the 1952 presidential race.
And remember, other incumbents have won New Hampshire, but still suffered stronger-than-expected showings from their opponents. This list includes, perhaps most famously, Lyndon Johnson in 1968 (also a write-in), who only narrowly defeated Eugene McCarthy, and Gerald Ford in 1976 and George HW Bush in 1992, both of whom had to fend off opponents in his right None of them survived to win another term.
To those who say that New Hampshire is moot now because there are no delegates at stake, at least if the DNC doesn’t quit, I’d like to point out that the delegate accumulation was not helpful for most of these races. It is the perception of state outcomes that shapes campaigns.
“There’s very little upside and a lot of downside for Biden,” said Steve Duprey, a half-century veteran of New Hampshire politics. A former state GOP chairman and close ally of former New Hampshire’s third-ranking senator, John McCain, Duprey voted for Biden in 2020.
“If he ignores New Hampshire or does it half-assed, he loses,” Duprey said. “But if he goes all-in and blesses the writing and loses, then it’s even worse.” The only answer: “He must win now.”
Attracting Biden, at least symbolically, would, of course, only be deserts for the protectors of the state’s primaries. But if New Hampshire’s political class is particularly sensitive right now, think about why.
One party has abandoned Iowa entirely and tried to demote New Hampshire. And the other party is willing to nominate a candidate who doesn’t bother with any of the supposedly essential rites of passage that, both states claim, make them unique.
Trump doesn’t have house parties, town halls or even participate in any debates. Yes, he is a celebrity and yes he is a de facto headline for many Republicans. But in 2016, he did the same fly-in-and-out routine and hardly hurt New Hampshire. If he can do it again this time and still win, well, what makes this state different from the others?
I posed a version of that question to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when he came to the state earlier this month, and he got the same ravenous look as Phillips.
“I think as we get closer, people who think they’re entitled to the nomination, that’s going to burn them,” DeSantis said of Trump’s refusal to engage with voters or his fellow candidates, adding: “You have to earn that. . . It’s something they look forward to. They want to be able to hit the tire.”
That may be wishful thinking, at least with Trump, but it’s not hard to find New Hampshire leaders delighted by these appeals, in part because they worry about losing a lucrative franchise, politically and otherwise, for the state .
“I think he’s going to pay a price for not showing up and being here and doing the things he’s supposed to do,” Tim Lang, a Republican state senator from the Laconia area, predicted of Trump.
I spoke with Lang at a GOP candidate forum in Nashua, the kind Trump never attends, in which at least one top surrogate introduced his preferred candidate while reminding GOP voters in attendance who’s campaigning the Granite State way .
“No one honors the First In The Nation primary more than Nikki Haley,” said retired Lt. Gen. Don Bolduc, citing the former South Carolina governor’s numerous town hall meetings in his introduction of Haley.
It may all seem so self-absorbed from a state clinging to a fading tradition, never mind that Iowa and New Hampshire were already becoming soundstages for increasingly nationalized primaries.
Still, I’ve covered enough races here to know that, as Duprey said, “New Hampshire voters like you to show up.”
Phillips intends to do just that and began his campaign by promising to break McCain’s record for total town halls held, an ambitious goal for the two and a half months before New Hampshire’s likely mid-to-late January primary date.
As with the McCain campaign in 2000, Phillips intends to provide broad access to the press. And as he rode with a gaggle of reporters and photographers in his new campaign bus, already decorated with his father’s old baseball glove and a stack of books, including J. William Fulbright’s “The Arrogance of Power,” he offered an advance of what he intends. to tell New Hampshire voters.
“There is a culture of civic engagement in this state that I think is unique,” Phillips said. “People are literally committing to vetting the same candidates that the rest of the country will soon be considering. It’s not to say that the other states don’t matter, they’re just as important. But the tradition is that we start here.”
As for Biden’s decision to try to roll back New Hampshire, he said it was an attempt to “disenfranchise” New Hampshire voters.
“We’ve seen a lot of leaders in this country who like to change the rules when the rules don’t suit them,” Phillips said.
Benjamin Johansen contributed to this report.
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