GIVEN OUR STRONG SHOWING in Iowa, we wanted a rally for Bernie when he got to New Hampshire—at 4:00 a.m. Ever the miracle worker, Julia Barnes pulled it off.
Most of us on the plane from Iowa, including Bernie, got very little sleep. We were all running on fumes. Julia and her team had set up a rally in a parking lot across the street from the hotel where we were staying. Sure enough, there was a crowd of people holding Bernie signs. It was a very cold February New England night. Bernie climbed onto the back of a pickup truck. A noticeably tired Julia handed him the mic. Bernie gave a short speech and the crowd went crazy. It was a great visual that really captured the excitement that our people were feeling after Iowa. And it was a testament to the strength of our New Hampshire operation that they could pull it off with such little notice.
I spent relatively little time in New Hampshire prior to the last week before the primary. In part that was because there was a sense that we had a good understanding of New Hampshire generally because of its proximity to Vermont. In addition, the polling there had been considerably more positive for us than in any other early state. Bernie, on the other hand, spent a lot of time there, and with great results.
Given how well we were doing in New Hampshire, the campaign staff began to discuss whether it would be possible for Bernie to campaign in New Hampshire for a couple of days right after the Iowa caucus, then visit Nevada and/or South Carolina for two days before returning to finish out the weekend and the following Monday back in New Hampshire before primary day. We never got to try that, because suddenly the set-in-stone Democratic debate schedule was not so set-in-stone after all. Realizing that they had huge ground to make up in New Hampshire before the first vote was cast in Iowa, the Clinton campaign called for another debate in New Hampshire during the week between the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. The Clinton campaign was no doubt looking to repeat the events of 2008, when Hillary Clinton used the debate right before the New Hampshire primary to erase the lead that Barack Obama had built up there.
We weren’t all that enthusiastic about the idea. First, we thought that Bernie might be able to do some extra campaigning outside of New Hampshire, and that it wouldn’t be possible if debate prep had to take place. Second, debates are freewheeling environments, and we needed to win in New Hampshire. What benefit was there compared to the risk? Which leads to the third concern—the principle of the thing. When Bernie and Martin O’Malley had called for more debates the summer before the Clinton campaign, the DNC had stuck to the cramped debate schedule they had previously concocted. Why give Hillary Clinton a chance to make up ground when she had opposed a more expansive debate schedule earlier? (We didn’t know at this time that in fact the DNC’s debate schedule had been dictated by the Clinton campaign.)
We kicked it around internally. O’Malley quickly agreed, but he would ultimately not participate; he dropped out after the February 1 Iowa caucus. Then MSNBC delivered a blow. They agreed to host the debate before we’d even agreed and set it for Thursday, February 4. This was the only time during the entire campaign season that a network set a date and basically dared anyone not to show up. Later in the campaign, when we were trying to force a debate in New York (which we ended up getting) and get the promised debate in California (which the Clinton campaign backed out of), I used the example of New Hampshire to suggest to various networks that they just go ahead and schedule the debate and dare Clinton not to go. None of them had the guts to do it.
Once MSNBC publicly set the date before getting the agreement of all the campaigns, they no longer were merely reporting on the race. They had injected themselves as a participant—and squarely on the side of Hillary Clinton. Soon after the MSNBC announcement, we started hearing from our New Hampshire operation that there was a lot of negative buzz in Granite State political circles about our unwillingness to confirm our attendance. Hillary Clinton wanted to use the debate to try to fight back from a double-digit deficit in New Hampshire. If we didn’t attend, she might get exactly what she wanted.
The question, then, was not whether we participated, but what we could get out of participating. As reported in the Union Leader on January 28, 2016, we would agree to the MSNBC blackmail (we didn’t call it that at the time, but that’s what it was) if the Clinton campaign would agree to add three additional debates to the calendar. One in March in Michigan, one in April in New York, and one in May in California. If Hillary Clinton wanted to debate, then so be it.
As reported in that same article, Clinton campaign spokesperson Brian Fallon responded to our offer this way: “We have always been willing to add additional debates beyond the six that had been scheduled and look forward to starting discussions on scheduling debates in April and May.” Maybe he wasn’t privy to the emails between his campaign and the DNC rigging the debate schedule in the first place.
The Clinton campaign dragged its feet on the locations for the later debates. They finally agreed to Michigan but were adamantly against New York. We held out on giving final approval for the February 4 debate. As late as February 2, 2016, The Hill was reporting that we still had not confirmed our attendance because the Clinton campaign would not agree to a New York debate. To this day, I do not understand why they fought so hard against debating in New York. It was completely favorable ground for them. Hillary Clinton had been elected twice statewide to the U.S. Senate from New York. It was a closed primary, so no independents would be voting, and young people would be underrepresented.
As we neared the time for the debate in New Hampshire, it became clear that we would have to participate without the guarantee of a future debate in New York. They had given in on having the March debate in Michigan and seemingly the May debate in California. We would have to fight about New York later. On February 3, one day before the debate, Bernie confirmed on Morning Joe that he would attend.
And what of the DNC’s strict rule against candidates participating in a debate other than the six announced in mid-2015? No problem. Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz “sanctioned” all four—the February 4 debate and the three additional we proposed. What had been impossible the summer before—expanding the number of debates—was suddenly done with a snap of the fingers.
As for the February 4 debate itself, it really did not break any new ground. Bernie was especially careful to avoid anything that looked like a personal attack. There would be no repeat of President Obama’s “You’re likable enough, Hillary” before the New Hampshire primary in 2008. The New York Times debate analysis by Nick Confessore, Maggie Haberman, and Alan Rappeport pointed out that Hillary Clinton tried to goad Bernie into attacking her on the issue of her financial support from big money interests. It would have been easy to land some points—the night before, at a CNN forum, Hillary Clinton had explained that the reason she took more than $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs was because they offered it. But Bernie was too smart to fall for that one. He withheld the easy points to play for the win on the following Tuesday.
All the Sturm und Drang around scheduling the additional debate in New Hampshire netted the Clinton campaign zero benefit other than to keep us from sending Bernie to Nevada or South Carolina. On the other hand, we had secured three more debates in the following months. A pretty good trade.
Our campaign was housed in an aging Hampton Inn in Bow, New Hampshire. It was centrally located in the state, with easy access to most roads, so it did have that going for it. It was packed with headquarters staff who all had to share three small conference rooms. But one of the most memorable moments of the campaign happened there. Julian Mulvey, Tad and Mark’s partner at DML (he’s the “M”), was creating a series of five-minute videos for the campaign focusing on people of color. They were meant to tell the stories of real people in a more expansive way than is normally the case with thirty-second ads. We had given DML tremendous creative license, because we didn’t want a run-of-the-mill product. Though much media attention was given to other ads they created, to me this series of five-minute ads represented their most powerful work.
While we were in New Hampshire, DML had just completed one of the ads. It featured Erica Garner, whose father, Eric Garner, had been choked to death by police on camera on the street in New York City. His crime was allegedly selling loose cigarettes. Mark Longabaugh started the video on his laptop as we all gathered around. I was sitting right next to Jane Sanders, and a large group of staff hovered behind us. The video focused on Erica Garner and her relationship with her young daughter, the death of her father, and her involvement in the Black Lives Matter protest movement. The video captured her real personal loss and her determination to fight back both to bring justice for her father’s murder and also for her daughter’s and her community’s future.
As I watched the video and listened to her voice, her honesty overwhelmed me. Tears started streaming down my face. I looked over at Jane Sanders. Tears were streaming down her face. Symone Sanders was crying. And as I looked around at the rest of the staff, I understood what the expression “not a dry eye in the house” really meant. In the heat of the do-or-die New Hampshire primary, polls and debates and votes all became irrelevant for that all too brief moment.
While the polling in New Hampshire showed us winning, the margin was all over the map. The RealClearPolitics average of the polling for the week before the primary had Bernie up 13.3 points. But some of those polls had his lead only in single digits. The CNN/WMUR poll was the outlier, showing a 26-point lead. In 2008, Barack Obama had lost his single-digit lead over Hillary Clinton. If it could happen to him, it could happen to us. The importance of winning New Hampshire to the subsequent viability of the campaign cannot be overstated. Lose there and the race would continue, but we would have been fatally wounded. We all felt it, including Bernie.
On the Saturday before the primary, Bernie picked up the phone and called our pollster, Ben Tulchin, for the first time. “I’m a nervous guy. So what’s the real story, Ben?” Ben reassured him. Our tracking had Bernie with a 21-point lead that had been maintained all week.
As Tulchin explained, the results of polling in New Hampshire were heavily driven by the assumptions the pollster made about who was going to vote in the New Hampshire primary—in particular, how many independents would participate in the Democratic primary. In the past, independent voters had comprised one-third to one-half of all Democratic primary voters in the Granite State. Bernie was winning that segment of the electorate by a 3-to-1 margin. If a pollster assumed only a third of voters would be independents, then one got a very different result than if one assumed, as Tulchin did and as the exit polling confirmed was the case, that independents would comprise 40 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary voters.
But that 40 percent number, despite turning out to be right, was an educated judgment, not a crystal ball. The wild card was the Trump candidacy. Despite his loss in Iowa to Senator Ted Cruz, Trump was running strong in New Hampshire. In the 2000 primary season, Republican John McCain had drawn many independents, sapping support for Bill Bradley in the Democratic primary, to the benefit of Vice President Al Gore. We were concerned that this phenomenon could repeat itself in 2016. In the end, Bernie’s 22.7 percent margin of victory matched our tracking polls from the final week before the vote. Clinton’s total was under 40 percent. We had won and won big. The result in Iowa was confirmed. We had the momentum.
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A few words on the independent voters who are so important to the open primary process in New Hampshire and elsewhere, and the impact of excluding them from participating in the Democratic nominating contest in many states, including New York and Florida. Independent voters, according to a Gallup report on January 11, 2016, comprise 42 percent of all voters, while Democrats are 29 percent and Republicans are 26 percent. Democrats (and Republicans) need independent, or nonaligned, voters to win the White House. That is why success in a state like New Hampshire, which has a high percentage of independent voters participating in both parties’ primaries, is an excellent indicator of strength in the general election. A failure to appeal to independents can spell real trouble in November. That is one reason why closed Democratic presidential primary contests (where only registered Democrats can participate) are bad. Candidates need to be tested in the primary season not only with core Democratic voters but also with independents in terms of general election viability.
In addition, Gallup’s research puts the lie to the notion that independents are nonaligned. Most voters initially identifying as independent in fact lean toward one or the other party. Of the 42 percent of voters who identify as independent, 16 percent of that group lean toward the Democratic Party (putting Democrats plus Democratically aligned voters at 45 percent) and 16 percent lean toward the Republican Party (putting Republicans plus Republican-aligned voters at 42 percent), leaving only 10 percent who are truly nonaligned.
When Democrats close their primaries, they are excluding the Democratically aligned voters who comprise over 35 percent of its base of support. This hits young people particularly hard. As Gallup research has shown, while as a group they are far likelier to vote Democratic, they are also much more likely to be registered as independents (in the neighborhood of half). So closed primaries exclude over a third of base Democratic supporters and disproportionately push away young voters—the future of the party. That’s a recipe over time for creating a Democratic Party that is older and much, much smaller.
And among young people, recent research suggests closed primaries may lock out a disproportionately higher percentage of young voters of color from the Democratic nominating process. According to the Pew Research Center data from 2014, 54 percent of millennials do not identify as either Democrats or Republicans. The number is highest among Latinos (59 percent), followed by whites (53 percent) and African Americans (43 percent).
The percentage of millennials overall who are independents but identify as Democratic-leaning is 27.5 percent. Only about 23 percent of white millennials fall into that category. But over 31 percent of African American and Hispanic millennials do. If you add in the number of millennial independents who are either Democratic-leaning or truly independent (that is, not Republican- or Democratic-leaning), the percentage of African American millennials who could be locked out of the Democratic primary process by a completely closed primary system would be almost 37 percent. The percentage of Latinos is almost 42 percent. That’s no way to build a diverse party in the future.
The generational divide in terms of the percentage of voters who are Democratic-leaning independents is the widest among black voters. The percentage of African American millennials who identify as Democratic-leaning independents is twice that of those aged fifty-nine and above. It is hard to imagine any other context in which disenfranchising a disproportionate number of young people of color would be tolerated.
When looking at the impact of closed primaries across all age groups, Latino voters are particularly disadvantaged. The Pew research shows that Democratic-leaning independents make up a higher percentage of older Latino voters than in other racial groups. Over 20 percent of Latinos fifty-nine or older fall in that category and would be excluded under a closed primary.
How long will the millions and millions of voters who loyally vote for Democratic candidates in general election contests tolerate being barred from helping to choose the nominee of the party?
Finally, closing primaries to Democratically aligned voters means that members of the voting base who are otherwise identically situated are treated differently depending on where they live. Suppose you have a voter who consistently votes Democratic, gives money to Democratic candidates, and even volunteers for Democratic campaigns. If that voter lives in Virginia or Vermont, where there is no party registration, she can vote in the Democratic nominating process. If she lives in New York or Florida or Arizona, the fact that she doesn’t have a little piece of cardboard in her wallet from the Democratic Party—and in that sense is the same as the voter in Virginia—means she is locked out of the process. So much for the principle of one person, one vote.
Closed primaries, then, produce weaker candidates and a weaker party; exclude base Democratic voters, especially younger ones; and disenfranchise people in selected states. So why do they exist? Well, they are good for allowing party bosses to more closely control who gets nominated and who runs the state party apparatus. It’s not much more complicated than that. Opening the nominating process everywhere to nonaligned voters, who as a group constitute fully a third of the voters inclined to vote Democratic in a general election, is a priority for those of us who want the Democratic Party to be bigger, more successful, and more inclusive.
From a practical standpoint, reforming closed primaries may not be something the Democratic Party can do by fiat. The same is true of other, much-needed reforms, such as same-day registration and eliminating additional forms of voter disenfranchisement. These rules are put in place by state governments. Court challenges by the party to state-imposed closed primaries may yield positive results. But the Democratic Party does have complete control over how much representation each state has at the Democratic National Convention. The party can, for example, create incentives for states to do the right thing by awarding bonus delegates to the convention. By contrast, because caucuses are Democratic Party events, reforms to these contests can be mandated by the national party.