In N.H., shots and beers, not pews and prayers
WEARE, N.H. — Stacey Brown slammed a shot of Bacardi as Ted Cruz explained his flat-tax proposal.
Karl Messner drank a locally brewed Henniker pale ale. Jennifer Stevens ordered another glass of white wine, and ESPN sportscasters made Super Bowl predictions on a muted television.
This is Generals Sports Bar and Grill, not the Christian church Mr. Cruz spoke at just three days earlier, and it isn’t the Baptist church or the Christian bookstore he visited before that.
That was Iowa, where presidential candidates were known to visit multiple church services on Sundays.
Here in hardscrabble New Hampshire, the nation’s second-most secular state, you’re more likely to find candidates on barstools than in pews.
“Candidates who were appealing so openly to the religious right in Iowa are going to find their message faltering in New Hampshire a week later,” said Randall Balmer, who grew up in Iowa and now is chairman of the religion department at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.
To win here, candidates have to quickly tone down the religious conservative images they projected in evangelical Iowa.
“I don’t think you’re going to see Donald Trump going to church in New Hampshire” as he did in Iowa, said Seton Hall University political scientist Jo-Renee Formicola.
“Politics is about doing what you have to do in order to win votes, and if going to church is going to win votes, they’re going to go to church,” said Ms. Formicola, who studies churchstate relations. “In New Hampshire, where do politicians go? They go to the bars. That’s where most of the business is done in New Hampshire.”
And that’s OK with voters here.
“Iowa is different than New Hampshire. They have to go where the people are,” said retired chef Mike Leccese, 68, of Weare.
That isn’t disingenuous; it’s smart, said Mr. Messner, 60, a Boston Harbor cruise-boat navigator.
“Candidates are going to go in the direction of where they need the votes. If we were Eskimos, they would come in fur coats,” he said.
Besides, he said, there’s nothing inconsistent about loving both God and beer.
“I’m a Catholic,” Mr. Messner said. “I go to church. I come here in the afternoon.”
Here, the only praying is in the form of a sheet of paper taped above the bar: “Our Father who art at Fenway, Baseball be thy game …”
Authenticity still counts
Candidates needn’t transform themselves from adherent to agnostic onboard their flights from Des Moines to Manchester. Voters are still looking for authenticity.
“An abrupt change might have worked 25 or 30 years ago, but it’s awfully hard to get that to work today. There are so many places you can go later in the campaign to find out what people said in Iowa, and the way the game is played now there’s a lot of ‘gotcha’ when somebody changes position,” said David Spaulding, dean of Iowa State University’s School of Business and former consultant to the president of Dartmouth.
At Generals Bar, Mr. Cruz, son of an evangelical preacher, didn’t back away from the faith-based principles that helped him win in Iowa. He invoked God, Scripture and Judeo-Christian values as he spoke to the packed barroom.
“I’m a Christian. I don’t think we should be afraid of our faith, but, at the same time, I’m not running to be pastor in chief. I’m running to be president in chief,” he said.
Religion less important
It’s difficult to turn winners of the Iowa caucuses into winners of New Hampshire primaries.
Just ask Rick Santorum, who — dubbing himself a “true Christian conservative” — won the 2012 Iowa caucuses but a week later could not get more than 9 percent of the vote in secular New Hampshire.
Mike Huckabee had a similar fate in 2008, when he won the Iowa caucuses but got the support of only 11 percent of New Hampshire’s Republican primary voters.
It isn’t a new phenomenon.
Take 1988. That’s when television evangelist Pat Robertson finished a close second to Bob Dole in Iowa. A week later, Mr. Robertson came in last in a field of five in New Hampshire.
That should give Mr. Cruz cause for worry ahead of Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary.
As he campaigns here and prepares for upcoming battles in Southern states that are more religious, Mr. Cruz is keying in on two groups: evangelicals and Reagan Democrats, whom he describes as blue-collar Catholics who own guns and work union jobs in steel mills and manufacturing plants.
“Evangelicals are a major part of the Republican coalition, the church is the center of their lives … and if they support a candidate, they’re going to do it as a group, as a bloc,” Ms. Formicola explained.
Political scientists such as Mr. Balmer are trying to make sense of evangelicals’ strong support of Donald Trump, a crass, twice-divorced Presbyterian who, like Mr. Cruz, wants to build a wall to keep out immigrants rather than house and feed them, as the Bible teaches.
“There’s not much religiosity in that,” Mr. Balmer said.” “Evangelicals are going for Cruz and Trump, and I fail to see how, in either case, these candidates represent the biblical values that these evangelicals claim they want,” he said.
“I interpret it as a measure of the extent to which evangelical voters have become political operatives.”
“They have had to make so many compromises politically that they’ve lost their theological moorings. They’ve become more interested in political influence than they are in doctrinal purity.”
Political scientist Mike Haselwerdt of Canisius College, a Jesuit school in western New York, is intrigued by the religious right’s attraction to Mr. Trump.
“Even if he doesn’t know what the Bible is all about, they like the idea of him because they feel under attack, and Trump is arguing that he is going to respond to that attack,” Mr. Haselwerdt said. “It’s astounding how well that resonated” in Iowa.
Religion is much less important in New Hampshire, where there is no churchbased voting bloc and where residents are more interested in individual freedom than religious doctrine.
“Voters in New Hampshire are fiercely independent and the GOP voters tend to vote for libertarian candidates, who also fight for ordinary working people,” said John Fea, chairman of the history department at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pa. “They like outsiders.”
Libertarian Ron Paul, party-switcher Pat Buchanan and self-proclaimed “maverick” John McCain all did well here.
For the current candidates to follow suit, they’ll have to recast themselves as principled rather than pious, political scientists suggest. “New Hampshire has a very different culture. It’s based more on a quest for individual freedom pursued politically rather than the maintenance of traditional values passed on through religious teachings,” Ms. Formicola said.