CHAPTER 1

AS A POLITICAL REPORTER who abhors the cynical nature of modern presidential campaigns, I’ve at times considered a career change. Maybe I’d find myself surrounded by less duplicitous characters, I’ve sometimes thought, if I joined the bank-robbing trade. Or perhaps I could work in a more civilized environment, if I were to become a poisonous-snake wrangler. So why then did I decide to immerse myself even further in the largely distasteful world of presidential politics by writing a book about it in the summer of 2014? In short, it’s because I’ve long thought of New Hampshire as a small but essential island of virtue and discernment adrift in the vast sea of contemptibility that consumes our public life every four years.

The inaugural New Hampshire presidential primary took place in 1916, and the state has held the nation’s first such contest every four years since 1920. But that historically singular role is only part of the reason that New Hampshire is special. New Hampshirites engage in politics with the all-encompassing zeal that residents of other states dedicate to football or church. One reason for this passion is that a tremendously high percentage of New Hampshire’s citizens are themselves elected officials. Composed of 424 members, the General Court of New Hampshire is the largest state legislature in the country. With about 3,000 New Hampshire residents for every legislator, the equivalent level of participation in California would require a statehouse of 12,780 lawmakers in Sacramento. New Hampshire legislators are paid a hundred bucks a year and receive no perks of any apparent psychological or material value. Suffice it to say, they don’t do it for the recognition. And when presidential primary season rolls around, the grip that the campaign maintains over this tiny state is impossible to escape, even for those who might prefer to do so. The people of New Hampshire know how important their votes are, and they act accordingly.

But isn’t it that way in Iowa, too? Why not write about the Hawkeye State—the real kickoff to the presidential election? Since 1972, the Iowa caucuses have been first on the calendar, beating New Hampshire to the punch every time. Without Iowa, there would have been no President Barack Obama, and the state has its own quirky political culture—one that’s well worth exploring. On a personal level, I love Iowa. The Iowa State Fair is perhaps the only place on earth where fried butter on a stick is considered a reasonable lunch option, and if the people there were any nicer, you’d wonder if the tap water was laced with ecstasy. But as far as the political culture goes, Iowa is just not the same as New Hampshire.

There’s a reason New Hampshire tends to garner equal time, more or less, from the candidates and the media in the lead-up to the voting every four years, even though the nation’s first primary falls after the Iowa caucuses. The perception, earned over many decades, is that New Hampshire is the sober adult in the room left to clean up the mess that the unruly children of Iowa often make. Although it’s an oversimplification, like many stereotypes this one is founded in some truth. For one thing, the process in Iowa is intentionally exclusive, as the caucuses can take a couple of hours out of a voter’s day. The process in Iowa is also far more susceptible to shenanigans. In 2012, I sat inside a Republican caucus site outside of Des Moines and watched a little old lady shuffle from caucus-goer to caucus-goer, collecting crinkled up pieces of scrap paper and dropping them into a bucket. These were what passed for secure ballots, and though I didn’t see her lose any of them, it didn’t strike me as a particularly error-proof method of conducting a presidential election. And if you care at all about the sanctity of the secret ballot, you don’t even want to hear about how the Iowa Democrats do it. Participants in the Democratic caucuses have to announce their votes publicly by standing in a designated area where they try to cajole supporters of other candidates to join them. Then, caucus-goers whose preferred candidate doesn’t receive at least 15 percent of their precinct’s vote are shit out of luck—barred entirely from having their support for their candidate of choice recorded. Once that little bit of disenfranchisement is complete, the backers of the candidates who did meet the so-called viability threshold resume their temporary roles of unscrupulous flea-market vendors, trying to convince the loser-backers to come over to their side. It’s madness. Compelling madness for political reporters, no doubt, but madness nonetheless.

New Hampshire conducts its primary in a more straightforward way: campaigns cut a check to the state for a thousand bucks and then Democrats vote in one primary, Republicans in another, and independents can choose to participate in either one. The polls close, the votes are tallied, and the results are announced. It’s a streamlined process that makes sense. The difference between New Hampshire and Iowa is like the difference between an Olympic wrestling match and a World Wrestling Entertainment fight.

In 2016, more than 358,000 people participated in the Iowa caucuses, including a record-shattering 186,932 Republicans. But amid this unusually robust turnout, that still meant that only about 17 percent of Iowa’s more than 2 million registered voters bothered to show up on Caucus Day. In New Hampshire, by contrast, 542,433 people cast ballots in the 2016 primary—the highest number ever, and an overall turnout rate of 52.4 percent of its voting-eligible population. No other state saw a majority of qualified voters participate in its primary or caucus in 2016, with the average turnout around the country at about 30 percent. Yet again, New Hampshire’s level of participation was higher than in any other state, all without such conveniences as early voting or vote-by-mail that residents elsewhere enjoy.

There’s an earnestness that permeates the political culture in New Hampshire that is unlike what exists in Iowa or, for that matter, in South Carolina or Nevada—the other so-called carve-out states whose residents get to vote for president before anyone else, according to the rules of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). All of the carve-out states employ a permanent class of “operatives” from both parties, who do their best business in the run-up to each presidential year. The result is a nice little racket, in which a few people who are widely deemed to possess valuable local political knowledge make a whole lot of money. But in New Hampshire, it’s a racket with a soul. Sure, there are some Granite State grifters who pose as knowledgeable consultants but are just looking for an opportunity to buy a summer home, thanks to the generosity of candidates who overestimate their value. But the good ones tend to lend their services to the person they think would be the best president, rather than the one they can most easily play for a sucker.

In 1988, New Hampshire governor John H. Sununu summed up the pervading attitude in the Granite State, which has since proven inaccurate several times over: “The people of Iowa pick corn; the people of New Hampshire pick presidents.” That was indeed true between 1952 and 1988—a period when no one was elected president without first winning the New Hampshire primary. But even though every president elected since then had lost the New Hampshire primary on the way to winning the White House, New Hampshire’s singular mystique largely remained intact when I set out to write this book. The New Hampshire primary has long epitomized how presidential elections should work—local, immersive, and discerning. Throughout its history, no other state has provided the level of up-close engagement that New Hampshire voters have long demanded and in turn received from the candidates. In Michigan, White House hopefuls do photo-ops at auto plants. In Florida, they hold massive rallies at retirement facilities. In New Hampshire, relatively little is staged—at least not traditionally. This is a state where candidates have almost always had to spend most of their time having real conversations and actually learning from voters.

Still, given its recent track record in failing to “pick presidents,” I wanted to ascertain whether New Hampshire’s stellar reputation really was so deserved. Was the primary still a smart way to begin the process of picking a president in earnest? And perhaps just as important, was it ever? I sought to find answers to these questions by embarking on a personal journey across the state over the year and a half leading up to the 2016 New Hampshire primary.

As much as the people and tools of the trade have changed over the decades, the fundamental nature of running a presidential campaign in New Hampshire has remained largely the same. The anecdotes I’ve chosen to feature come in part from secondary sources, but they rely most heavily on the interviews that I conducted with a couple of dozen people who were on the front lines of past New Hampshire campaigns and were generous enough to share their recollections with me. Throughout the narrative, I’ve included a hodgepodge of some of the most memorable moments from the 1972 campaign onward. Some of the scenes I’ve chosen to highlight are historically significant in their own right. Others are less momentous on their face than they are instructive of the essence of the New Hampshire primary itself and the people who have lived it. Comprehensive histories of the primary have been written, and so have academic studies. This book is neither.

In conducting research and experiencing the 2016 campaign in New Hampshire firsthand, I was continually surprised and often moved by the extent to which the primary has remained a singular force of participatory democracy in its purest form. That it has remained so in spite of its many inherent flaws—which were perhaps more pronounced during its 2016 iteration than at any other time in its history—is an achievement worthy of exploration and reflection, especially during a time when so many other facets of the American political system seem to have malfunctioned so thoroughly.

To be frank, I embarked on this project harboring a distinct pro–New Hampshire bias. During my reporting on the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, I’d already found that there is nothing in American politics that quite matches the sentimental feeling you get when driving along a dark, winding New Hampshire road in the dead of winter and pulling up to a candlelit, eighteenth-century meetinghouse where thirty people are waiting inside to hear from someone who wants to be their president. Maybe they’ve gathered to listen intently to an obscure former governor from a far-flung state, someone who entered the race with dreams of Air Force One but spent the previous night on an uncomfortable mattress at a motel in Franconia. Still, it’s not the candidates who make New Hampshire unique. It’s the people of the state who turn out for these kinds of events before anyone else is really paying attention and who conduct the process like the important high-level job interview it should be. Put it this way: For the most part, I’ve found that Iowa caucus-goers tend to ask candidates questions. New Hampshire primary voters, on the other hand, demand answers.

As much as that image of the old New England meetinghouse and its earnest inhabitants struck a chord with me, I liked to think that I could tell the difference between quaint and antiquated. I didn’t want to end up making the case for New Hampshire based solely on nostalgia. This is a state where 94 percent of the population is white, and the largest city is home to only 110,000 people. To question why such a particular place should hold such outsized sway over an increasingly diverse and urbanized country was reasonable. Accumulated experience and tradition are important, but so are such concepts as fairness and the need to adjust to modernity. New Hampshire would have to prove to me that it deserved to keep the vital role that it had maintained over the previous century.