Write-in bid aims to help Biden win N.H. primary
With his name not on ballot, party works to avoid embarrassment
CONCORD, N.H. — With just weeks before the state’s presidential primary, Democrats in New Hampshire are trying to lure volunteers from Massachusetts. They’ve reportedly launched a fledgling super PAC. On Thursday, they took the obvious, if extraordinary, step of modeling exactly how they want voters to fill out their ballot on Jan. 23.
Vote Joe Biden, they say. Or rather, write “Joe Biden.”
This multipronged effort to convince voters to write in the president’s name underscores the politically difficult — and fundamentally strange — effort before them: to convince voters not only to show up at the polls next month but also cast a ballot for someone who intentionally chose to keep his name off it.
“This is certainly different,” said Joe Caiazzo, a political consultant and an alum of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign who is helping organize volunteers from Massachusetts. “I don’t think that intraparty politics have damaged people’s commitment to the president.”
Leaders of the “Write-In Biden” campaign in New Hampshire trotted out a giant sample ballot on Thursday to show voters precisely how to support the incumbent president. During a news conference, state Representative Angela Brennan used a big black marker to demonstrate where to write President Biden’s name and which oval to fill, while urging voters to forgo picking any of the 21 names that will actually be printed on the Democratic ballot.
“While this process is simple and easy, we know that not all voters are familiar with it,” the Bow Democrat said.
“So our group is going to do everything we can to get the word out about how easy and important it is.”
The added step poses a hurdle for voters. It also makes more work for poll workers, who must hand tally write-in votes. Election officials are seeking additional volunteers to help count what could amount to tens of thousands of write-in votes.
Undeclared voters in New Hampshire can participate in either party’s primary. Conventional wisdom says they will gravitate toward voting in the primary with the more significant contest, which in this case is on the Republican side. Even so, Brennan said she expects undeclared voters will pull a Democratic ballot and take the extra step to help Biden win a contest in which he didn’t file.
Polling appears to support that. Nearly two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire plan to write in Biden’s name, according to a November survey from the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.
That doesn’t, however, mean they are thrilled about it: Just one in four said they would be enthusiastic if Biden wins the nomination again.
“All the polling shows that people are ready to write him in,” state Senator David H. Watters, a Democrat from Dover, said Thursday. “Our job is to make sure they know how to do that.”
Biden announced in October that he would not appear on the ballot for the state’s presidential primary amid a long-running feud between New Hampshire and the national party.
New Hampshire officials say the Granite State must go first, per a decades-old state law, while the Democratic National Committee pushed to give more diverse voices a say earlier in the nominating process, as directed by Biden.
The plan the party approved pushed South Carolina’s primary to first place on the nominating calendar, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on the same day. Previously, Iowa held the first-in-the-nation caucuses, and New Hampshire followed with the first-in-the-nation primary.
New Hampshire ultimately flouted the national party calendar, scheduling its primary for late January. As a result, the state could face sanctions, such as the national party refusing to recognize the state’s delegates at the 2024 convention in Chicago.
But New Hampshire Democrats said there’s no penalty their party could sustain that would be worse than losing the state’s spot at the front of the line. Now, they’re trying to boost the very person that advocated for taking that away.
Biden wouldn’t be the first sitting president to win a writein campaign in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, but history may offer little comfort to his supporters.
In March 1968, a write-in campaign resulted in President Lyndon B. Johnson finishing just 6 points ahead of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who was the only candidate listed on the ballot. Johnson withdrew from the race within weeks.
Dante Scala, a UNH politics professor, said the 1968 contest happened in a different political era, before the nominating process was reformed. And opposition to the Vietnam War helped to fuel McCarthy’s antiwar candidacy. So the meaningful parallels to 2024 may be few, particularly given the dissimilarity between Biden and Johnson, he said.
“Biden seems to inspire more apathy among Democrats than animosity,” he said.
That said, in the same way that LBJ’s team hadn’t expected New Hampshire to be as consequential in 1968 as it was, Biden might be unpleasantly surprised by the media narrative that follows his performance in New Hampshire if it’s underwhelming, Scala said.
To be sure, Biden is highly unlikely to lose the Democratic nomination in a race that features only longshot challengers, such as US Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and author and self-help guru Marianne Williamson. But Democrats are trying to ensure he avoids an early — and embarrassing — loss ahead of a potential general election rematch with former president Donald Trump.
The efforts to ensure that are varied. Supporters have reportedly launched a super PAC, dubbed Granite for America, to help reach voters. The group has filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, but it’s yet to report any fund-raising or spending. Kathy Sullivan, a former state Democratic Party chair who’s helping lead the effort, did not return a message Thursday.
In Massachusetts, Caiazzo and Nick Clemons — Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire state director in 2008 — are also trying to recruit volunteers from the state’s sprawling network of Democratic activists to travel north for the primary.
The focus, for now, is to station volunteers at polling sites to help instruct voters how to write in Biden, Caiazzo said. Massachusetts Democrats regularly travel to New Hampshire to help their preferred candidates ahead of the primary, even if this request “is not the usual run of events,” he said.
“Ultimately, it comes back to ‘Democracy’s on the ballot,’” Caiazzo said.
Some New Hampshire progressives, however, have expressed frustration about the amount of political energy being devoted to the write-in effort compared with other priorities.
State Representative Maria Perez of Milford, who switched her party affiliation from Democrat to independent this year amid frustration with party leaders, said it feels like establishment Democrats are trying to shut down the conversation prematurely.
“If they believe in democracy, that’s not it,” she said.
“They keep telling people, ‘Oh, it’s either Biden or it’s the worst of the worst,’” Perez said. “Let’s be honest: If you allowed other candidates to run, at least we’d have a chance to have open conversations about the issues and concerns the community is facing.”
Perez has endorsed Williamson, who has actively campaigned in New Hampshire and polled at 9 percent in the UNH survey. Biden garnered 65 percent of support.