Democrats are engaged in a heated debate about the order of their presidential primaries, as a Times Magazine story by Ross Barkan explains.
President Biden and other top Democrats want South Carolina on top next year. State officials in New Hampshire insist on keeping the first place in their country and say they will simply move their primaries to South Carolina. The results are still unclear.
Holding the country’s first primaries certainly benefits a state greatly. Presidential candidates make repeated visits. So did political organizers and members of the media, filling hotels and restaurants. The voters of a state can shape the national discourse. No wonder New Hampshire is struggling so hard to keep a privilege it has had since the 1950s.
But there is also an inconvenient question to which New Hampshire officials have failed to provide a convincing answer: How has the rest of the country benefited from the state’s special status?
New England bias
Critics of New Hampshire often point to many things that make it unlike the rest of America. It is one of the whitest, highest-income, and most educated states in the country. It’s home to ski resorts, lake retreats, and boarding schools — but it’s not the only city with more than 125,000 residents.
New Hampshire defenders respond that its proximity allows for a purer version of politics. Candidates speak directly to voters at restaurants and at town meetings, rather than competing primarily through advertising. As in ancient Greece or the early United States, citizens could take the measure of those who wanted to represent them. I covered the New Hampshire elementary school, and I found it fascinating, too.
However, the results are less impressive. There is no evidence that New Hampshire voters have a talent for choosing a president that other Americans do not. If anything, the state’s record is worse than average, at least on the Democratic side:
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New Hampshire voted against each of the three previous Democratic presidents in their final winning nomination campaigns: Biden (fifth person!) in 2020, Barack Obama in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1992. It hasn’t been since Jimmy Carter, nearly 50 years ago, that a Democratic president last won the state.
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No two-term Democratic presidency has begun with a victory in New Hampshire. In 1992, Clinton finished in second place as a victory, calling himself a “back kid,” but he got less than 25 percent of the vote.
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The most obvious pattern is that New Hampshire prefers nearby Democrats, regardless of their ideology or national appeal. Every time a primary candidate from Massachusetts or neighboring Vermont has run for office in the past 35 years, that candidate has won in New Hampshire: Bernie Sanders in 2020 and 2016John Kerry in 2004, Paul Tsongas in 1992 and Michael Dukakis in 1988.
The closest thing to a substantive counter argument from New Hampshire officials is that their state is a swing state, unlike South Carolina, which has a solid Republican party. If New Hampshire stays ahead (as state law requires) and Biden skips the state primaries (as his aides have said he will), the primary campaign will be flooded. Criticism of him from both running Republican candidates and sideline candidates. Democrats challenge Biden like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson.
“The reality is that New Hampshire will hold the nation’s first primaries,” said Ray Buckley, chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, “and the only question is whether the president intends to put his name on the ballot. promissory note.”
If he’s not on the ballot, criticism of Biden could theoretically damage his image in the state and hurt his chances when the New Hampshirites vote in the general election. election next November. In a very close national election, New Hampshire could even decide the Electoral College outcome. But that prospect seems far-fetched. An incumbent president is subject to intense criticism during the other party’s public primaries, and most incumbents win re-election.
Ultimately, the main beneficiary of New Hampshire’s privileged primary status is New Hampshire, which explains why the state is fighting so hard to keep it. As Ross Barkan, author of the Times Magazine article, writes, “Democrats there insist that they have the right to go first.”
Related: Biden has his own self-interested motives in promoting South Carolina, Ross explains. The state – home to many working-class Black voters – has given Biden the lead in the Democratic party in 2020 following his defeats in New Hampshire and Iowa.
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