‘None of the campaigns are doing much’
As volunteers head to New Hampshire, few primary candidates remain
During his first visit to the snow-swept presidential proving ground of the New Hampshire primaries, Scott McLean followed thenVice President Al Gore as he took a walk through a suburban neighborhood, knocking on doors greeting voters with a hoard of secret service agents, reporters and curious onlookers in tow.
In subsequent years, McLean — a political science professor at Quinnipiac University — has seen celebrities such as Kevin Costner and Ted Danson stumping for their preferred candidates, as well as the well-worn tradition of having senators, governors and business tycoons humbling themselves before voters at coffee shops and lunch counters.
As McLean prepared to make his seventh quadrennial excursion to observe the primary in action on Thursday, however, he said the current atmosphere in the Granite State holds little of the allure of the past.
“There’s no action going on up there, none of the campaigns are doing much,” McClean said. “It’s very much a top-down, from-30,000foot campaign now.”
Just a few hours drive from Connecticut, the New Hampshire primaries have for decades been a magnet for local politicos hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite candidate, or even lend a hand barnstorming for someone who may one day occupy the White House.
With the number of viable candidates in the 2024 presidential election dwindling before the first votes are even cast, longtime primarygoers like McLean say that opportunities to participate in the state’s legendary grassroots campaigns are getting harder and harder to come by.
For Democrats, a switch in the party’s nomination schedule has left
New Hampshire with a primary in which no delegates are at stake and the frontrunner, President Joe Biden, will not even appear on the ballot.
While Biden’s backers in New Hampshire have mounted a surreptitious write-in campaign against a pair of longshot opponents, the lack of any obvious campaigning has left little room for participation from neighboring states. A spokeswoman from the Connecticut Democratic Party this week said they were not aware of any local Democrats traveling to help out either Biden or his rivals.
On the Republican side, former President Donald Trump’s wide lead in nearly every poll has caused him to forgo debating former U.S. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who ended his bid for the GOP nomination Sunday.
In New Hampshire, Trump has relied largely on holding his signature rallies to court voters, rather than more intimate events.
Haley, his closest rival in New Hampshire, is running a now-or-never campaign focused on courting the state’s many independent voters — who are allowed to cast ballots in the party primaries.
While McLean said that primary has in recent years had the feel of a “Disney World” version of its former heyday — homeowners, for instance, were given advance notice when Gore came to town in 2000 — the increased reliance on
big ad expenditures and stadium-sized events have further eroded the myth of a grassroots election.
New technology, including apps that allow supporters to campaign for candidates on their smartphones, have also limited the need for all but the most zealous activists to travel inperson to persuade others.
“Not too many door-todoors right now, the weather’s so frigid the next few days,” said Joe Visconti, a former West Hartford town councilman travelling New Hampshire on Friday to support Trump. “Phone banking is the big thing right now.”
On Wednesday, the
Connecticut Republican Party sent an email to its members with links to the Trump and Haley campaigns where volunteers can sign up to contact New Hampshire voters. (In the email, the state GOP said it reached out to every campaign offering to share the same information, but only heard back from those two).
Those Connecticut Republicans still choosing to make the trek to New Hampshire include former Darien First Selectwoman Jayme Stevenson, a self-professed “admirer” of Haley who hosted a breakfast for the candidate earlier last year when she came to speak at the party’s annual Prescott Bush Dinner in
Stamford.
“If you’ve ever been in her presence when she is campaigning, she doesn’t leave the room until she has shaken every hand and answered every question,” Stevenson said. “To see her in action in this truly grassroots kind of environment, is going to be very inspiring to me.”
Stevenson said she would make her first in-person trip up to New Hampshire for the primary this weekend and planned to spend at least three days attending rallies, knocking on doors and phone banking for the candidate as part of a local chapter of the “Women for Nikki” group.
While she had originally
hoped to charter a bus to pack with other Haley supporters from Connecticut, Stevenson said there ended up not being enough interest, as many people opted to make calls from their own homes.
As for Visconti, the mood among Trump supporters in New Hampshire was “all about energy,” heading into the final weekend of the campaign, which he conceded could be a “very close” contest between Trump and Haley. As he spoke to a reporter on Friday, Visconti was driving up to New Hampshire to attend a weekend Trump rally in Manchester, before moving on to the northern resort town of Bretton Woods to engage with voters.
“We’re trying to make sure that people don’t just come to see Trump at the rally, but do the doors, do the phone banks,” Visconti said. “New Hampshire is everything right now.”
In a nod to the evolving nature of the New Hampshire primary, this year will mark the first time in which students in McLean’s class dedicated to the event — Presidential Campaigns — will not be actively campaigning on behalf of their favorite candidates.
Instead, McClean has developed an itinerary that will have 19 Quinnipiac students acting as “participant-observers,” trailing candidates as they hold last-minute events, talking with voters at their polling location and watching as national news crews document the remaining activity.
Plans to attend the final debate, however, were scuttled after Haley pulled out of the event, leaving no one else for DeSantis to trade barbs with.
On Thursday, those students clustered in the university’s recreation center as McLean went over the history of the century-old primary and handed out packs of hand warmers. One of the students, junior Nick Fizzano, said that even with candidates more scarce than in previous years, the presence of a former president vying for a comeback was, in itself, an historic event to witness.
“I think politically, New Hampshire is still a very dynamic place and I think we’re all going to get a really good chance to experience that,” Fizzano said.