CHAPTER 3

IN THE LEAD-UP TO the 1984 primary, Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle embarked on a personal crusade against New Hampshire. His grievances were familiar. Barnicle thought it ridiculous that one small state enjoyed such a privileged status on the presidential primary calendar. But it was the manner in which he made his case that resonated. Although the word troll was still decades from entering the common lexicon, Barnicle—a distinguished man of letters from urbane Massachusetts—set out to do as much damage as he could to the rubes to the north. As social commentary, Barnicle’s columns had the sophistication and subtlety of an uppercut to the chin. His first anti–Granite State column carried the headline “Truly a State to Laugh At” and included the knee-slapping observation that New Hampshire residents “take two hours to watch ‘60 Minutes’ on television.” In Barnicle’s telling, New Hampshire was “the igloo capital of the world” with “more pine cones than people” and “a truck stop, not a state,” whose “public people have the social conscience of a subway rail.”

He went on like this for years. My German-born aunt, who had been a Bedford, New Hampshire, resident for decades, threatened to cancel her subscription to the Globe after Barnicle published his 1994 piece “Vermont vs. New Hampshire.” In that column, Barnicle had observed that in contrast to the untainted and altruistic citizens of Vermont, New Hampshire was home to thousands of former Massachusetts residents who “moved in out of pure selfishness, to avoid taxes or doing anything that might help a neighbor.” In a column published shortly before the 1996 primary, Barnicle suggested that Michael Jackson would be at home in New Hampshire “because he is both white and slow.” He made predictions about the primary’s future, too. “Unfortunately, it’s more than likely this will be the last time New Hampshire will play an inflated role in presidential elections on the flimsy grounds that it holds the nation’s first primary,” Barnicle wrote. “By the year 2000, everyone will be inter-active as well as on line and voters will select candidates in a national primary at half-time of the Rose Bowl.” Barnicle didn’t survive long enough at the Globe to see his prediction about the New Hampshire primary’s demise fail to come true. In 1998, he resigned amid charges that he had plagiarized lines from George Carlin in one column and made up characters in another. Suffice it to say, few tears were shed in New Hampshire when Barnicle exited. It wasn’t that Barnicle had it all wrong. Although New Hampshire offers plenty of great hiking, skiing, and good restaurants, it was also the place where J. D. Salinger decamped when he decided that twentieth-century civilization just wasn’t for him. For most of the country, this image of the state as an ideal hiding place for government-loathing curmudgeons and weird, mountain-dwelling hermits persists. Where, after all, did meth kingpin Walter White go when he needed to move off the grid in the last season of Breaking Bad? New Hampshire. They’d never be able to find him there!

Although it offers no shortage of far-flung outposts where people can live in isolation, New Hampshire is also the twenty-first most densely populated state in the union. Granted, there is still no state income or sales tax, and yes, in large stretches of the state, you’re far more likely to spot a deer than you are a person of color. But over time, New Hampshire has become less true to the backwoods caricature that Barnicle presented in his columns and more like a multifaceted slice of America that offers at least a little bit of almost everything you’ll find elsewhere.

For starters, New Hampshire’s political identity has shifted. Between 1948 and 1988, Lyndon Johnson was the one and only Democratic presidential candidate backed by New Hampshire in a general election. The subsequent flip has been dramatic. Starting in 1992, the only time a Republican White House contender beat a Democrat in New Hampshire was in 2000, when George W. Bush eked out a 7,211-vote victory over Al Gore—a narrow triumph that gave the Republican the four electoral votes he needed to make the Florida recount relevant and ultimately win the presidency. And Bush likely would have lost New Hampshire had Green Party candidate Ralph Nader not been on the ballot (Nader won 4 percent of the vote in the state). New Hampshire remains a swing state, but one that has tilted increasingly leftward over the last decade.

Despite this change, “Live Free or Die”—the memorable state motto—still carries real meaning in New Hampshire’s collective consciousness. There is a libertarian streak that continues to run deep. Take motorcycle safety. It’s not that motorcycle helmets are unheard of in New Hampshire. From November to April, almost all bikers from Londonderry to Laconia wear them. They’d be crazy not to, because in the winter months, helmets keep riders’ heads from becoming snow cones. But in warmer weather, motorcycle helmets are roughly as scarce on the highways of the Granite State as New York Yankees T-shirts are in its sports bars. Two other states have no motorcycle helmet laws, even for minors. But I’ve spent a lot of time in Illinois and Iowa and have noticed that the majority of riders in those Midwestern states don’t flaunt the real possibility of their brain matter being sprayed across traffic lanes as a lifestyle statement. In New Hampshire, many people are earnest enough about “Live Free or Die” to behave as if either option were just fine with them.

Even the newcomers tend to take the motto seriously. In the last four decades of the twentieth century, New Hampshire’s population growth soared, as residents from more highly taxed nearby states were drawn to its relatively low cost of living compared to southern New England. These were the “selfish” people of Mike Barnicle’s telling. Much of this influx came from residents of Massachusetts who settled in New Hampshire population centers just across the border, for example, in Nashua—the second-largest city in the state, behind Manchester. The draw was straightforward: in southern New Hampshire cities like Nashua, you could keep more of your paycheck and still get to Logan Airport in under an hour. And best of all, you’d never be more than a stone’s throw away from Dunkin’ Donuts.

Dunkin’ Donuts is to New Hampshire what Starbucks is to the rest of the country. In Nashua alone, there are no less than fourteen Dunkin’ Donuts locations. Fourteen in a city of fewer than 90,000 people! It’s impossible to keep an accurate statewide count of branches, as they’re continuing to expand so quickly, but the number is well over two hundred. One or two locations probably sprang up since you started reading this book. By contrast, according to the company’s online store-locator map, there are only twenty-six Starbucks locations in the state—and most of those arrived recently. New Hampshire is still a place where many people can’t bring themselves to say words like venti, soy, or extra foam with a straight face. To its core, it’s a Dunkin’ Donuts kind of state: functional and satisfying enough, without being annoying about it.

When circumstances go awry, Dunkin’ Donuts is the one thing that keeps the people of New Hampshire from sinking into apocalyptic meltdown. In late October 2011, I was in the state covering that year’s presidential campaign when New Hampshire was jolted by a freak autumn snowstorm. This particular nor’easter was notable, even in a state where four or five inches is considered a dusting. “Snowtober,” as it became known, dropped about two feet of snow on the southern part of the state, causing even the ever-image-conscious presidential candidates to cancel their events. After the storm had died down, I ventured from the hotel where I was staying to one of the three dozen or so Dunkin’ Donuts locations in the greater Manchester area, when I was greeted by a scene that might have doubled as a B story in an episode of The Walking Dead. Car after car was pulling into the familiar parking lot, stopping for a few long seconds, and then backing away slowly. It was as if they could scarcely compute what they were seeing: the electricity was out, which meant no Dunkin’ Donuts.

I was able to catch a glimpse of one driver’s face as the realization of what was happening swept over him. It was like seeing a man who’d just lost his wife, his job, and a kidney, all in the same day. It took him a solid twenty seconds before he found the courage to shift into reverse, amid palpable despair. Where would he go now? What would he do when he got there? How did one even go about the day without being fueled by a medium regular four sugars and a splash of skim milk? This was a bad scene that could become ugly. Thankfully, the power came back on relatively quickly. What did people in New Hampshire do in the meantime without Dunkin’ Donuts to fuel them? Mostly, they stayed in their bedrooms. Nine months after Snowtober, Southern New Hampshire Medical Center reported a surge in births.

Although you’re never far from one no matter where you are in the state, Dunkin’ Donuts storefronts are most common in the four most populated of New Hampshire’s ten counties, which carve out the south-central and southeastern portion of the state. Moving up clockwise from the Massachusetts border, they are Hillsborough County (the most populous county, which is flanked by Nashua at 6 o’clock and Manchester at 12 o’clock), Merrimack County to the north (home of New Hampshire’s capital city of Concord), Strafford County to the east (whose county seat of Dover is home to the University of New Hampshire [UNH]), and Rockingham County, which is tucked into the far southeastern corner of the state (home of the picturesque, historic seaport of Portsmouth and most of the rocky slice of New Hampshire seacoast). These four counties compose about 74 percent of New Hampshire’s population and are where presidential candidates spend the majority of their time, but none of their “cities” feel particularly urban.

Manchester, which sits twenty miles to the north of Nashua along the east bank of the Merrimack River, is home to a little more than 100,000 people. Out-of-towners often characterize it as “blue-collar,” but in reality, it’s the kind of place where you stand out if your shirt features any collar at all. Gritty. Working class. Tough. All of those words apply. In recent years, however, there has been a proliferation of high-tech companies and other signs of gentrification that include non–Dunkin’ Donuts coffee shops with such luxuries as cushioned seating and power outlets, as well as several nice restaurants. The mills that were once the city’s lifeblood have since been turned into office space and loft apartments. During primary season every four years, national journalists descend en masse on the Radisson and the nearby Hilton Garden Inn and make use of their expense accounts and Beltway egos, lending further ammunition to the impression that the city remains one in transition. But the fact of the matter is that Manchester, New Hampshire, remains at its core a place where you can easily get into a bar fight if you step on the wrong guy’s foot. It’s officially nicknamed the “Queen City,” but no one calls it that. “Manch-Vegas” is its most popular nickname, but “Manch-ganistan” is its most evocative one.

If the Radisson and Hilton Garden Inn are the unofficial residences of the New Hampshire primary, the New Hampshire Institute of Politics (NHIOP) at St. Anselm College is its workplace. The NHIOP’s confines consist of a nondescript auditorium, a TV studio, a few classrooms and offices, and a café stand. Its central role in the presidential campaign is showcased in its hallways and interior walls, which are decked out in a vast collection of photographs from primaries past. Most of the collection captures the typical candidate-of-the-people image that White House contenders in New Hampshire have always sought to project. The black-and-white photo of John F. Kennedy petting a donkey during the 1960 campaign is typical. My favorite piece on display, though, is a vintage poster from the 1968 campaign that features a psychedelic rendering of George Romney’s craggy face plastered onto a background that looks more like a notice for a Grateful Dead concert in Haight-Ashbury than it does an ad for the teetotaling Republican governor of Michigan. As the poster demonstrates, even in no-frills New Hampshire a healthy dose of quirkiness has long been a central facet of running for president. Candidates have to find a way to create some flavor of interest, especially if they’re as plain vanilla as George Romney or Ohio senator Rob Portman.

If you close your eyes and conjure up the first image that comes to mind after reading the words “US senator,” that upper-middle-aged white guy with the nice hair that you’re envisioning probably looks a lot like Rob Portman. In the summer of 2014, like a lot of senators do at some point in their careers, Portman was thinking a little bit about running for president. At a time when the nation’s first viable female presidential candidate was almost universally regarded as the front-runner to succeed the first black president, the senator from Ohio didn’t exactly scream “solution!” to the Republican Party’s challenge of expanding upon its old white-guy base in diverse parts of the country. Still, it was clear that the man who had made it onto Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential shortlist in 2012 wouldn’t be crazy to harbor some national ambitions. His résumé certainly suggested that he could be presidential material. He had won his Senate seat in 2010 by an eighteen-point landslide, beating his Democratic opponent in all but six of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties. Well respected by other senators as an amiable colleague, thoughtful on policy, and an effective legislator, in theory, Portman was offering a brand of mainline, center-right Republicanism, likely to be a decent fit for a wide swath of the New Hampshire GOP electorate. Before being elected to the Senate in 2010, Portman was director of the Office of Management and Budget and US trade representative under George W. Bush’s administration. And before that, he was Ohio’s Second District congressman for a dozen years. He was smart, well spoken, and handsome in a nonthreatening way. And it didn’t hurt that he hailed from one of the country’s largest swing states. In sum, he had pretty much all of the ingredients that the recipe book calls for when baking presidential cake.

But Portman was also known for being two things that rarely portend success at the highest level of American politics: he was an exceptionally nice guy, and he was boring. Considering Iowa Republicans’ long-established penchant for charismatic hard-right conservatives, if Portman joined the race, New Hampshire would be the place where someone with his bland but competent pedigree would have to stake his ground.

Portman was scheduled to test out what might become his campaign message in New Hampshire with a speech at the NHIOP on August 26, 2014, and I decided to see what he had to offer. I had met him once before, during his 2010 Senate campaign in Ohio, and the strongest impression he left with me at the time was that he was jarringly normal. This was memorable to me because politicians at Portman’s level are almost never normal. They may be perfectly agreeable—though many of them aren’t—but they almost invariably come across as peculiarly off-putting in a way that can be difficult to pin down. They’re just not people you’d want to hang out with in a normal social setting. Like most creatures of Washington, DC, they’re usually looking for the next person to talk to at the cocktail party, and there tends to be an ulterior motive behind their every utterance. But Portman, with his honest smile, natural ease, and sincere interest in learning more about the people around him, was different. He embodied the archetype of the affable dad every kid from the suburbs has encountered at one time or another during a visit to a friend’s house. This dad always seems to be mowing the lawn or tending the garden, but he’s up for shooting some hoops, too. “Hey, buddy,” he’d probably say if you stopped by his place unannounced on a Saturday afternoon. “There’s some root beer in the fridge, if you’re thirsty. I’m gonna run down to the hardware store. Dinner’s at 6:30, and guess what? It’s taco night! How’re your mom and dad doing, by the way?”

The night before Portman’s big introduction at the NHIOP, I ran into him at O Steaks and Seafood just down the street from the statehouse in Concord. Portman entered the restaurant exuding that indefinable politician’s glow, which should have been a signal for the other diners to at least turn their heads. None did. In fact, no one seemed to know who he was, even though many of them presumably worked in and around politics. I reintroduced myself to Portman. He didn’t remember me from four years prior but made no effort to pretend that he did, which was refreshing.

“How many people live in New Hampshire?” he asked after I told him about the book I was working on. His tone was one of genuine curiosity. I told him I thought it was around a million—selling the state short by about 300,000 residents. Portman thought that was “cool”—a place where handshakes in politics were more important than ad buys—much different than how it works in Ohio. Portman took a seat at a separate table and ordered a local IPA. Just one, though.

When I arrived at the NHIOP event the next morning, Portman was already there, chatting with some of the “local business leaders” and New Hampshire politicos who tend to be willing to take time out of their days to come out for events like this even when the primary is still more than seventeen months away. With his salt-and-pepper hair parted neatly, his navy-blue suit and red-striped tie exactly in place, Portman looked like a man who would be cast to play the president of the United States in a 1990s romantic comedy film. It was, however, harder for me to imagine him as the real thing.

In the months before the race actually begins, all aspiring presidential contenders express varying levels of coyness about their possible candidacies. “I’m not making a decision on that yet” and “I’m focused right now on the midterms” are typical responses to The Question. The idea is to make it look like you don’t want it too badly, even though everyone knows you do. But when Portman took the stage at the NHIOP on this morning, I could tell right off the bat that his situation was different. His wasn’t feigned tentativeness; it was real apprehension. Portman didn’t do any proverbial winking and nodding at all as he made his way through his dry remarks, which covered a range of issues, in a voice that barely registered above a loud whisper. He didn’t allude, even in the vaguest of ways, to harboring presidential ambitions of any kind. During the Q-and-A session that followed his unmemorable speech, no one in the audience even asked him if he was considering it.

I was sure that Portman’s aspirations were high and his work ethic strong, but I doubted that he had the shamelessness or the single-minded determination required to run for president. The person I saw in front of me was a calm, competent, and capable man who spoke with some conviction about “the one indispensable economy” and other such phrases that people who regularly appear on C-Span use. There was only one part of Portman’s profile that I thought might lift him from the ranks of “just another boring Republican.” The previous year, Portman announced that he had changed his previous opposition to same-sex marriage after his twenty-one-year-old son came out as gay. In making the switch, Portman had become the most prominent Republican elected official in the country to support marriage equality. If there was anywhere in the country where a GOP candidate could run on a pro-gay marriage platform, it was in largely secular New Hampshire.

Portman, however, didn’t bring up the issue at all during his speech. After he concluded his remarks, he spent a few minutes signing dozens of decorative wooden eggs—one of those quaint New Hampshire traditions that every prospective candidate who speaks at a “Politics and Eggs” event completes. Next, he stood for a short interview with NH1—a new statewide TV news network that had not yet launched officially. In the middle of taping the interview, the cameraman suddenly stopped the young, on-air reporter in mid-sentence and stepped into his own shot to adjust Portman’s tie. “We can’t have wires showing,” the cameraman lectured the reporter, as a man who could become the next president looked on. “That’s very important.”

When I finally got the chance to sit down with the would-be candidate for a few minutes, I asked him right away about the gay-marriage issue. “I don’t look at it politically,” Portman told me. “As you know, I didn’t make the decision based on polls or politics. I made the decision on a very personal basis, having never really thought deeply about it, to be frank.”

I believed him. Portman said that since he’d made his conversion on the issue public, people had been approaching him at least once a week and “sometimes every day” to extend their gratitude or share their own stories about those in their lives who had struggled with their sexual identities. As he told me all of this, delving more deeply into what happened next after he broke so completely from Republican orthodoxy on the issue, Portman came across as unusually at ease and reflective. For him, indeed, this had nothing to do with politics.

“Yesterday, it is a young man who is very involved in the [Republican] Party, and I don’t want to get him in an uncomfortable situation, but this person’s view is ‘Should I be involved in this party or not?’” Portman recalled, elucidating for me the real-life impact of his public expression of support for gay marriage. “And what he says is that because of me, he’s willing to stick it out. Sometimes it’s much more personal. It’s about the fact that a young man or a young woman now can speak to his or her parents about it in a way they couldn’t before because it opened up a dialogue with their family. On the opposite side of the issue, I hear from others who are disappointed, and that’s to be expected. It still is an issue where there are big differences within our party.”

Here was a thoughtful, nuanced, and intrinsically human reaction to one of the trickiest issues that the Republican Party was grappling with at the time. Portman’s words lacked any of the focus-group-tested, sound-bite-ready talking points that I was used to hearing from people who wanted to be president. How it would play out on the presidential stage in the midst of a tough Republican primary campaign was unclear, but I was eager to find out. I never got the chance. About three months later, Portman announced that he would not run for president in 2016, choosing instead to focus on his Senate reelection bid.

As a practical political calculation, Portman’s decision proved to be a sound one. Someone of his pedigree and bearing, it turned out, had zero chance of winning the 2016 Republican presidential nomination—not even with a strong showing in New Hampshire. Rob Portman would have had no interest in engaging in the raw demagoguery, embarrassing pandering, and middle-school insult exchanging that would become a fixture of the most viable GOP contenders’ daily interactions with one another on the campaign trail. If similarly sober-minded and competent contenders such as John Kasich, Jeb Bush, and Lindsey Graham had internalized what Portman seemed to suspect about what it would take to win in 2016, they, too, might have avoided a lot of unnecessary exasperation leading up to Primary Day and beyond. Then again, if the grown-ups in the room had all decided to sit this one out, as Portman did, perhaps the established norms of respectability and decorum would have come crashing down even more spectacularly.