SWING STATE PRIMARIES A DIFFICULT BALANCE
Candidates can build enthusiasm early for the general election, but their stands in the primary can also distance key voters
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Ellen Roy, working on a campaign phone bank, pleads with a party loyalist to show up at the polls Tuesday in New Hampshire. To vote for Barack Obama. Who doesn’t have a real opponent.
“You’re 99% sure you will?” Roy, 61, a retired insurance company employee, says. “Can I persuade the 1%?”
The president’s victory in the Democratic primary isn’t in doubt. Even so, his campaign has opened seven field offices, hired more than 20 staffers and deployed phone-bank volunteers for three hours each night as a way to get organized and energized for November in this battleground state.
Indeed, three of the four states with opening contests in the race for the GOP nomina- tion — Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida — are among the nation’s battlegrounds. The swing states that typically decide the outcome of presidential elections are frontloaded on the primary calendar: Eight of the 12 vote on “Super Tuesday” March 6, or earlier, well before any candidate will be able to mathematically clinch the nomination. That poses both opportunities and risks for Obama and his Republican opponent. What happens in these states during primary battles in the winter could affect the election’s outcome next fall.
“You’ve got thousands of ads being aired in each of these markets that are focused to some extent on the need for change and the need to replace President Obama,” says GOP pollster Neil Newhouse, a top strategist for
Mitt Romney. “It’s getting the Republican message out early and often in key, targeted swing states and laying the groundwork for our message in the fall campaign.”
On the other hand, some of the ads attack not the president but the candidates’ Republican rivals; that could leave a lasting impression as well. What’s more, the push to take policy positions that satisfy a conservative primary electorate now may complicate efforts to reach out to moderates and independent voters later.
In the final days of campaigning before the Iowa caucuses last week, during a stop at the Family Table restaurant in Le Mars, Romney was asked if as president he would veto the Dream Act. The proposed legislation would provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. “The answer is yes,” he replied. Those four words pleased immigration hardliners. For Romney, it helped distinguish him from former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who supports a path to legal status for some illegal immigrants who are long-time U.S. residents, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who signed a law granting in-state tuition to some illegal immigrants.
Also delighted: The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee, which has been hammering Romney about the comment ever since — including in Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and other states with large Hispanic populations.
“They’ve had to do this right-wing dance, and that’s becoming a problem,” says Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, mentioning not only immigration but also campaign promises by Republican contenders on Medicare and taxes. “Once independents start focusing on the general election, they’ll look at the positions Romney and Gingrich and (former Pennsylvania senator Rick) Santorum have taken . . . and those kind of things are going to be difficult in the general election.” A hard fight in the Granite State
New Hampshire has only four electoral votes, but in a close race that could count. (Without New Hampshire in 2000, George W. Bush would have lost.) It’s the only swing state in generally Democratic New England: In the past 10 presidential elections, New Hampshire has gone Democratic four times, Republican six.
In a briefing Messina has delivered to reporters, contributors and others, he outlines five “paths” for Obama to claim the 270 electoral tally needed to win a second term, building on solidly Democratic states. One of the five scenarios counts on adding four states with lots of independent-minded voters, three of them in the West (Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico) plus New Hampshire.
“We clearly think New Hampshire is a swing state,” Messina says.
On this, Republicans agree with him. “New Hampshire will likely be a bigger player this fall than usual and Republicans will benefit from the energy and activism this competitive primary season has generated,” Gingrich strategist Kevin Kellems says. “We will be better organized and have more volunteers focused on working to beat President Obama in November.”
Romney owns a vacation home at the state’s scenic Lake Winnipesaukee and served as governor of neighboring Massachusetts. His campaign is running phone banks in its Elm Street headquarters, a few blocks from Obama’s Maple Street office, and on the campaign’s final weekend sent canvassers to walk door-to-door in key precincts.
The voter data they gather and supporters they identify for the primary would be an asset in a general election as well.
The Granite State hasn’t been particularly friendly territory for Obama. In 2008, he seemed poised to win the primary and effectively clinch the nomination after carrying the Iowa caucuses, only to see Hillary Rodham Clinton come from behind to defeat him here. That set off a primary battle that would last five months.
In the fall, Obama easily dispatched Republican nominee John Mccain here, carrying 54% of the vote. But in head-to-head surveys in 2011 taken by the polling firm PPP, he trailed Romney by a single percentage point — the only one of the 12 swing states where the president didn’t have at least a narrow lead. (The other battlegrounds: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.)
New Hampshire Democrats faced significant losses in 2010, when Republicans gained control of both houses of the state Legislature and both of the state’s U.S. House seats. That leaves a rockier landscape for Obama than four years ago.
“The two differences are a revived Republican base and independents skeptical about how well the president has done in keeping his promises,” says political scientist Dante Scala of the University of New Hampshire. “While our economy is doing well, the recession has been so huge and it’s shaken people’s confidence. Plus, there’s no part of Obama’s natural base here. Minorities are bare- ly present. He’s very dependent on the opinions of whites and white working-class voters in the state who were never that thrilled with Obama.”
As president, Obama has returned to the state three times, most recently in November to stump for his administration’s proposed jobs bill in a rally at Manchester High School Central. While he was in the state, the Romney campaign aired ads on New Hampshire TV decrying the president’s leadership on the economy.
Emily Gold, 17, a senior, saw Obama at her school then and watched Romney in the same auditorium Wednesday when he held his first rally after the Iowa caucuses. Romney’s vow to repeal the federal health care overhaul that Obama signed and his opposition to same-sex marriage, which is legal in New Hampshire, reinforced her support for the president.
“I wanted to do more than vote, especially since I can’t vote,” Gold says. (She’s too young.) She’s volunteering at the phone bank, coaxing voters to go to the polls. “Some people say because he’s not opposed, it’s not important to go out and vote. I tell them it’s important just to show support for the president.” Still, that can be a difficult sell. New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner says he expects 75,000 Democratic ballots cast — it will list Obama and 13 obscure opponents — and more than three times that number, 250,000, on the Republican side. The lessons of 2008
Before Romney arrived to hold a town-hallstyle meeting Friday night in Tilton, the Democratic National Committee called a news conference featuring a worker who had been laid off after Romney’s Bain Capital bought the company. Before Saturday night’s debate in Manchester, Democratic National Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz showed up at the Saint Anselm College site with New Hampshire Democratic chairman Ray Buckley to bash Romney’s record as governor.
One reason the Obama campaign has done so much to interject itself in Iowa and New Hampshire is because strategists had discovered, to their surprise, how useful the primary fights were for them four years ago.
“Ultimately, I think it turned out to have a positive impact, although as we were working our way through the process, the Obama camp and the Hillary camp questioned whether it would be,” recalls Jim Demers, Obama’s New Hampshire state chairman in 2008. “It really did make Barack Obama a better candidate, and it allowed for campaign organizations to stay active and continue aggressively working at a time when things usually quiet down.”
Messina questions whether the Republican candidates will reap similar benefits, saying they have focused more on airing TV ads and less on establishing ground operations. Still, almost every evening newscast and morning newspaper in the state is dominated these days by Republican candidates’ dire warnings that the country has gone off-course under Obama.
At the NBC Meet the Press debate Sunday morning in Concord, Perry called Obama “a socialist” who wants “a more powerful, more centralized, more consuming and costly federal government.” At the ABC debate Saturday night in Goffstown, Romney said Obama had “no experience in leadership” and was presiding over “a failed presidency” that was making the economic recovery more tepid and leaving the nation less secure.
David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston, which has been polling daily here, says the GOP primary is “a dress rehearsal . . . for the general election.”
The impact may be modest, but in swing states, the smallest of margins can decide the outcome.
At a Queen City Rotary Club breakfast last week, Ann Butenhof, 53, an attorney in Manchester, said she voted for Obama four years ago and plans to vote for him again.
Santorum is arriving to address the group — the latest in a string of presidential hopefuls who have been here — and she worries that their presence in the state for the primary is giving the Republicans an edge over the president. “Because nobody is running against Obama in the Democratic side, there’s nobody talking about the Democratic agenda,” she frets.
Bill Hoeker, 40, a business consultant from Manchester, is a Republican who hasn’t settled on a candidate.
“Romney’s entitled, Newt can’t get out of his own way, and the rest I don’t know anything about,” he says, but he’s pretty sure the primary battle will help Republicans in the fall: “We get all amped up,” he says.