Healey to headline call in Biden N.H. bid

Governor playing key role to boost write-in campaign

Governor Maura Healey will headline an organizing call on Thursday with leaders for the campaign to write-in President Biden on the New Hampshire primary ballot, providing a boost to the effort less than three weeks before voters go to the polls.

Thursday’s virtual meeting is intended to help recruit volunteers for the Jan. 23 primary. Those who RSVP are asked whether they can help the day of the election “to encourage Democratic voters to write in Joe Biden.” The event is also expected to feature leaders behind the write-in campaign who will offer an “inside look into [the] efforts,” according to an appeal circulated by Healey’s political operation.

There was already a Massachusetts-based effort to organize volunteers here, led by alums of Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaigns. But Healey’s decision to lend her name and time as the state’s Democratic leader represents one of her first formal forays into helping Biden in New Hampshire, where the president chose not to appear on the ballot amid a long-running feud between New Hampshire and the national party.

Healey, a New Hampshire native, was already involved in Biden’s reelection effort. She is serving as a super-surrogate after Biden’s campaign picked her for a national advisory board with Senator Elizabeth Warren and others.

Those behind the “Write-In Biden” campaign have launched a super PAC and other efforts to convince people to not only show up to the polls later this month but pull a Democratic ballot and scribble Biden’s name.

Undeclared voters in New Hampshire can participate in either party’s primary, and nearly two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters in the state have said they plan to write in Biden’s name, according to a November survey from the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.

New Hampshire officials have said their state must go first on the primary calendar, 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 — and Healey — are trying to boost the very person that advocated for taking that away.