CHAPTER 5

THE PARTY WAS WELL under way inside Fagin’s Pub in Berlin, New Hampshire, on an extremity-immobilizing Saturday evening in January 2015. The following morning, I was slated to take part in an eleven-mile winter walk with an eclectic group of activists who were schlepping across the state on foot to promote campaign-finance reform. I still had another thirty miles of icy northbound highway to traverse before getting to my motel in the tiny northern New Hampshire outpost of Errol, but I needed a break, and so I stopped in at Fagin’s. As I rubbed my hands together in the entranceway to try to regain some feeling, the record player didn’t exactly screech to a halt, but the looks I received from the three local men sitting at the bar were impossible to misconstrue. “Who the hell are you?” they all wanted to know.

The ceiling lights were on full blast, illuminating the place like a supermarket, and it smelled like stale Miller Lite and used hockey equipment. I hovered for a few moments before selecting my seat, a bit concerned about what the consequences might be if I happened to have chosen a regular’s favorite stool. But Craig, the affable bartender (who also turned out to be the manager, cook, and unofficial peacekeeper), gave me a friendly nod to let me know that everything was going to be OK. He was taking a steady stream of drink orders from his three costumers, all of whom had come out to watch the New England Patriots take on the Baltimore Ravens in a key playoff game. I’d chosen Fagin’s to watch the game over the local Chinese joint—Wang’s Garden—and Berlin’s other watering hole, Millyard Lounge (“Trust me. You don’t want to go in there,” I had been told of the latter establishment).

Berlin [pronounced “BER-lin”] is the largest “city” in New Hampshire’s Great North Woods, with a population that eighty years ago topped out over 20,000 but has since declined to well under 10,000. The North Country, for short, is the expansive, heavily forested region north of the White Mountains and extending all the way up to the Canadian border. This is not the land of busy ski resorts and picturesque snow-capped peaks that lies just to the south. It is instead mile upon mile of dark, impenetrable woods with a few tiny hamlets sprinkled in. Most of the people who live in the region were born there, and job opportunities generally hover somewhere between scarce and nonexistent. With the paper mill that once served as Berlin’s economic backbone now long gone, poverty was rampant and despair palpable in the North Country’s hub. At the time when I visited, per capita income in Berlin (approximately $22,000 per year) was only about two-thirds that of the state average (approximately$34,000 per year).

Eager to make an obvious outsider feel more comfortable, Craig poured me a Guinness and told me a bit about the history of the bar. It had been around for about a half century and had once been three stories high during its heyday before a fire had downsized it to one. As Craig told me all of this, I glanced around at the ten empty tables, silent juke box, and handwritten “Wall of Shame” behind the bar, which called out the people by name who had failed to pay their bar tabs.

The place was decked out in the typical New Hampshire sports bar manner, with Boston athletic memorabilia from wall to wall. But there was also a Montreal Canadiens jersey mixed in with the Bruins, Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots gear. Berlin is roughly halfway between Boston and Montreal, and I was curious about allegiances, so I struck up a conversation with Ted (this is the one and only time in this book that I’ve taken the liberty to change someone’s real name), the man sitting to my right. Ted’s complexion was the color of the snow that was piled up along the sides of the road, and his cheeks were candy-apple red. He leaned in close when he spoke, and his breath confirmed that he had already consumed more than a couple of adult beverages by the time I’d arrived. He would enjoy several more before I left.

“It’s about half and half,” Ted said of Berlin residents’ allegiance to the Boston and Montreal hockey teams. Suddenly, his gaze drifted back to the big TV screen behind the bar.

“What the fuck!” Ted shouted, as if his foot had just been run over by a semi-trailer truck. What had actually happened was that the Ravens had picked up a routine first down. “Sorry,” he added. Ted was really into the game.

“These fuckin’ guys,” he continued. “Get the fuck in there, you fucks! He fuckin’ kicked him! Sorry.”

I was no stranger to sports-bar dwellers who use the word “fuck” about as often as teenagers employ “like,” so his language didn’t particularly faze me. Nonetheless, Ted apologized after every “fuck” outburst, as if he’d surprised himself by letting another one slip. And still, throughout the night, he continued to throw in a “fuck” or “fuckin’” every five or six words.

In New England sports-fan parlance, fuck can mean everything from good, bad, yes, or no—it’s all about the context. Usually, though, it meant nothing at all. It’s just a filler word to toss in for emphasis, or in place of “um.” This was Ted’s favorite rendering of the word, that is, “These fuckin’ guys, man. These fuckin’ guys.”

In between fucks, Ted managed to convey that he’d been working for the fire department in Nashua for about a decade. Nashua is not near Berlin. In fact, there is no place in New Hampshire further from Berlin than Nashua—a two-and-a-half hour drive on a good day through the White Mountains and straight down a long stretch of state-owned liquor stores and Dunkin’ Donuts branches that span I-93. How was a five-hour commute every workday for ten years tolerable? When I asked him why he didn’t just move to the southern part of the state to be closer to his job, Ted answered, “The economy.”

He didn’t elaborate, other than to say this: “Most of the fuckin’ guys I work with at the station fuckin’ come up here to hunt and fish and everything. This is my town.” Although many of his neighbors had fled, Ted was hanging onto Berlin—at least the idea of the place that existed in his mind.

I knew that at this time of night, my dining options anywhere north of here would be nonexistent (it was, after all, nearing 8:00 p.m.), so I decided to make my riskiest move of the evening and try out Fagin’s menu. I asked Craig to run through my options. The obvious choice was pizza, which he characterized as “pretty good.” But in a moment of blind risk-taking, I decided to go with the chicken fingers. Ted, on the other hand, wasn’t about to confuse his system with the intake of solid food. He slammed another beer before providing some more color commentary on how the game was being officiated. “That’s fuckin’ abuse right there! He fuckin’ kneed him! Sorry.”

As part of an effort to calm him down a bit, I tried to change the subject to politics. Having lived in New Hampshire his whole life, Ted had seen plenty of candidates come and go over the years. “It’s an open presidency, so you’ll get fuckin’ everybody up here,” he said in summing up his assessment of the race. “Which is cool.”

The chicken fingers turned out to be pretty good, and so did the conversation. Craig, who was drinking coffee, offered some observations about how candidates benefited or suffered from circumstances and national moods that were well beyond their control. Ted expressed his agreement. Or as he put it, “Fuckin’.” Throughout this discussion, I was unable to decipher which political party either man belonged to. New Hampshire is a place where people have lots of opinions about lots of things but take great pride in being removed from typical notions of ideology. “I vote for the person, not the party,” is something you hear a lot.

As the Patriots began to mount a big second-half comeback, Ted began to make his own transition from “harmless, somewhat brain-dead drunk” to “deeply incoherent, teetering on the edge of a meltdown drunk.” And his ability to stay focused on the game waned accordingly. He missed the biggest moment—a Patriots trick play that led to a game-tying touchdown pass—when he was in the bathroom. He wasn’t happy about that.

“I was in the fuckin’ bathroom,” he reminded us, after being told upon his return what he’d just missed. “Fuck!”

Eventually, Ted’s sober and acutely embarrassed twenty-year-old son arrived at the bar with the obvious intention of giving his dad a safe ride home. That the son had been in a similar position on previous occasions was clear enough from the way he expertly handled his father’s repeated entreaties that he wasn’t in need of any assistance. Ted was happy just where he was, sitting there next to me. “He’s a fuckin’ Patriots fan,” he told his son at least five times, gesturing toward me with affection.

After watching the Patriots hang on for a big comeback win, I declined repeated offers of a tequila shot from Ted, double-checked with Ted’s son to make sure that he was OK to drive his dad home, and then made my way out—but not before Ted left me with some memorable parting words: “This fuckin’ election, man. It’s gonna be crazy. You watch. People are mad as fuck.” Donald Trump was still five months away from announcing his candidacy, Bernie Sanders more than three months from getting in. At the time, none of the earnest practitioners of journalism were talking about either man as a viable contender. And they weren’t talking about how sick of it all people like Ted were, either.

People were mad as fuck.

In geographic terms, the town of Errol is about thirty miles from the Quebec border. In practical terms, it is right in the middle of nowhere. Boasting fewer than three hundred residents, Errol sits at the junction of two roads that wind through the surrounding wilderness like asphalt-covered threads in a giant thorn bush. Errol’s remoteness is its draw. Depending on the season, outdoorspeople come from all over the region to snowmobile, fish, hunt, boat, hike, kayak, and try their luck at spotting a moose. That last activity, however, has become increasingly challenging in recent years, as the moose population in northern New England has plummeted.

I arrived at the sensibly named Errol Motel just before 9:00 p.m.—the hour at which I had a few days earlier notified the inn’s proprietor he could expect me (there was no online booking). The room he pointed me toward was clean and comfortable, but it was also freezing, because the manager had forgotten to turn on the heat before I arrived. When he called to apologize for the oversight, I told him it wasn’t a big deal and that I’d be fine. I donned the long underwear and heavy sweatshirt that I hadn’t planned to break out until the next morning, and all was well, as the room heated up slowly. I highly recommend the Errol Motel as a cozy lodging option if you’re ever in the area to do some snowshoeing or need to dispose of a corpse. Just remember to bring your own shampoo and soap because the motel doesn’t provide it.

By the time the sun came up the next morning, the temperature was on its way up into the double-digits. This development was a distinct blessing, considering that a cold spell the week before had left thermostats in the area bottoming out at–22°F. There hadn’t been much precipitation in the days leading up to my visit, but this being January in northern New Hampshire, the motel parking lot was caked in a solid blanket of snow and ice. I made it out by throwing my rental car into drive and then quickly back into reverse. With a four-hour walk ahead of me, I was determined to find some breakfast, hoping that I wouldn’t have to hunt for it myself.

I’d been prepared to consider myself lucky if I could get my hands on a pack of Skittles at the gas station. But it turned out that downtown Errol provided everything a traveler could possibly ask for in a place of its size: a general store, a post office, and a couple of restaurants. And, oh yeah, an international airport. Sure, the single-engine planes that skipped across the Canadian border on ten-minute flights probably weren’t capable of whisking locals off to weekends in Bermuda, but no one could claim that Errol International Airport wasn’t as advertised.

The Northern Exposure Restaurant was the obvious choice over The Hawg Trawf. Northern New Hampshire barbeque is a suspect proposition under even the most ideal circumstances, and at 7:30 a.m., with a long day of walking ahead of me, I figured it’d be akin to committing seppuku without the sword. After downing several cups of coffee and carb-loading on a tall stack of excellent blueberry pancakes, I made my way to the starting point of the walk, which was at Dixville Notch. A “notch” is basically a mountain pass. Dixville Notch—an unincorporated place that usually boasts somewhere in the neighborhood of ten full-time residents—is famous for its role in the New Hampshire primary, not its geological characteristics. Every four years since 1960, the residents of Dixville Notch have gathered shortly before midnight inside the Ballot Room of the Balsams Grand Resort Hotel—one of the North Country’s several opulent nineteenth-century hotels—where they cast their ballots at the stroke of midnight. The votes are then tallied in front of the assembled media, and the results are reported on throughout Primary Day, giving Dixville Notch’s winner a little attention boost as the voting continues in the rest of the state. The process is then repeated during the general election.

The tradition had lost some steam in recent cycles, as a couple of additional New Hampshire enclaves had gotten in on the act, and the Balsams was currently closed for renovations. But there were plans to reopen the place for the 2016 midnight vote, and the hotel’s symbolic significance made it a good launching point for this particular band of long-distance walkers, which called itself the New Hampshire Rebellion.

Formed the previous year by Harvard professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig—who went on to run his own two-month campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination—the New Hampshire Rebellion was designed to draw attention to its pet issue: reducing the influence of money in politics. The group intended to highlight its cause by walking the length of the state at the most inhospitable time of the year. Hence, here I was. In my own experience as a political reporter, it was difficult to escape the conclusion that money was indeed at the root of most of what was wrong with the American political system. As such, I was attracted to the group’s high-minded goal and was curious to find out how serious they really were about achieving it, even if it meant spending a few hours lacking the ability to feel my face and toes.

The concept of the multi-day winter walk was inspired by Doris Haddock, who went by the nickname “Granny D.” Born in Laconia, New Hampshire, Granny D set off on foot on January 1, 1999, from Pasadena, California, to raise awareness for campaign-finance reform. When she started her walk, Granny D was eighty-eight. By the time she arrived in Washington, DC, fourteen months later, she was ninety. I planned to be the same age, thirty-one, at the end of my walk that I was at the start of it. In fact, I intended to participate only in Day One of what would be a ten-day New Hampshire Rebellion venture to Concord. The eleven-mile southbound hike along Route 26 on this particular day would be one that Granny D probably could have moonwalked in her sleep.

I hitched a ride to the starting point at Dixville Notch with one of the group’s participants—a friendly attorney from Massachusetts named Bill, who had gotten involved in the walk after having done some legal work for Lessig’s various groups. In chatting with Bill, I acquired my first hint that I had been grossly mistaken in my assumptions about what the participants in the walk would be like. In my mind, I’d been picturing a lot of deodorant-rationing patchouli aficionados, who would be glad to tell you what the real crime is, even if you hadn’t asked. This perception had been, in part, a reflection of the overall tenor of the flurry of reply-all group e-mails I’d received at a rate of about a half dozen per day in the days preceding the walk. Among the most memorable had been a missive containing the lyrics to a self-penned song (intended to be read, the sender explained, to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands”):

If worried ’bout our Congress, take a walk

If money’s legal bribery, take a walk

When Congress aids the donors,

And the people are the losers

Our Democracy’s in trouble

Take a walk.

After reading that, I was afraid. Once I started the walk, there’d be no way of bailing on these deeply sincere people and their rhythmic clapping and original song lyrics. But I’d already come this far, and Bill was setting my mind at ease.

Bill and I arrived at a parking lot just off the highway where we met the thirty-three other walkers who were taking part in that day’s trek back to Errol. Some of them were planning to complete the full ten-day venture to Concord, but others were joining me in taking the more selective approach. When I mentioned to one of the walkers that the sub-zero temperatures of the previous week would have made our impending march a lot more uncomfortable, he told me about the first day of the group’s walk from the previous year, which had been marked by the kind of drenching, cold rain that makes a person long for solid precipitation.

Before we took our first step, we first were given a safety talk from a young woman named Xanni, who was a former student of Lessig’s at Harvard. Xanni told us that an RV stocked with food and first aid supplies would be following close behind the group at all times. “The signal that you need to get in the car is thumbs down,” she added. I wondered about this. Was the walk really going to be so difficult that our ability to say something along the lines of, “I just broke my ankle and need to get in the car, please” would be rendered impossible? Would we all be so out of breath that the use of hand signals would be our only recourse? I didn’t ask.

It was at this time that I noticed that many of my fellow participants were carrying homemade signs that said things like “Money Out Of Politics” and “How Are Your Interests Being Represented By Congress?” I wondered how many people were going to see those signs all the way up here. Again, I didn’t ask. Several of my fellow walkers were already jogging in place to try to keep warm. One of them, a guy from Concord named Dan, was wearing the kind of sneakers that people typically put on to go for a quick jog on the treadmill, instead of the thick-soled boots I’d assumed would be required for those who wanted to make it out of this with the skin on the bottoms of their feet intact. So Dan won’t have toes by the end of the walk, I thought to myself. If anyone else was concerned about the imminent demise of Dan’s toes, though, they didn’t let on.

After a brief pep talk from Lessig, we took our first steps onto Route 26. Within a minute or so, a man at the front of the pack produced a wooden flute from his satchel and started playing it, Pied Piper–style. It was pretty weird but also surprisingly energizing. I began to set my pace to the pro-campaign-finance reform flautist’s rhythm. I was skeptical, however, that I was marching to the tune of impending reform. In spite of the best efforts of people like Granny D, John McCain, and Russ Feingold, American politics had never been more dependent on big money. In the 2012 presidential race, the general election campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and their aligned outside groups spent over $1 billion each. There are a lot of problems that result from so much cash infusing our political system. To put it in simple terms, we had become a country where the whims of a malevolent but politically minded billionaire were far more important to electoral outcomes than the votes of a few million people in California or Texas. Since 2010, when the Supreme Court essentially removed the already cracked-opened floodgates of unencumbered political money in its Citizens United v. FEC decision, the problem had gotten worse with each subsequent campaign. Smart lawyers and consultants were always figuring out new ways to bring more money into the scam, while enriching themselves in the process and leaving the best interests of run-of-the-mill voters increasingly disposable.

The amount of time that the average candidate had to take out of his or her day to raise ever-increasing amounts of money, rather than thinking about policy, had become a national scandal in and of itself. And when candidates were victorious, they would instantly become beholden to the few groups and individuals who made their wins possible. All of this isn’t to say that politicians didn’t have good intentions. Many of them did. Just about all of them, though—the ones who get elected, at least—had become increasingly comfortable with working within this toxic system. President Obama, for instance, began his run in national politics as a leading voice in decrying the corrupting influence of big money, but then he went on to raise more of it than any politician in history, mostly through the indirect channels that Citizens United had helped to facilitate. A well-intentioned challenge to this system coming from a flautist and a couple dozen of his buddies on a hike through the New Hampshire wilderness seemed a bit far-fetched to me. Still, I wanted them to prove me wrong. I was eager to hear their plan and to believe that it could work in the same way that I wanted to believe that the Easter Bunny was real when I was a skeptical but optimistic seven-year-old.

And so we walked. It was easygoing at first. The layers I wore kept me warm, my boots proved sturdy, and the flautist stayed in tune. A couple of miles into it, I struck up a conversation with another man named Bill. He was in his sixties and hailed from the nearby town of Columbia, New Hampshire (population 750). This Bill, who wore his beard lumberjack-thick, according to local custom, was soft-spoken and to the point. He told me that he moved his family to the northern New Hampshire hinterlands in 1970, in order to “get out of the rat race.” My fellow twenty-first-century urbanites might be surprised to learn that the desire to escape city life for an extreme, rural alternative was a common motivation at a time before mass gentrification. But Bill made this choice for his family when you still had to walk more than five blocks to get a decent locally sourced bean curd roll in downtown Toledo. Back to nature. That was the idea.

I told Bill that I planned to spend much of the next year in New Hampshire. When I had mentioned this intention to people previously, their responses had typically fallen somewhere in the range of “Oh, that’s nice” to “Why?” Bill’s reaction, though, was markedly different. “You can use my land to camp any time you want,” he replied, without a moment’s hesitation. My long-term New Hampshire housing prospects were, in fact, unclear, so I hesitated to dismiss the offer out of hand. But as nice as he was, Bill seemed like the kind of guy who might mistake me on a foggy morning for a tasty looking wild turkey and take a shot at me. I was carefully noncommittal but thanked him for his offer.

Eager to change the subject, I asked Bill what had motivated him to join the New Hampshire Rebellion walk. “I think anything you believe in, you have to act on,” he said. “I just think you have to put your body on the line. There’s not much I can do. I’m not eloquent. But I can walk.” Actually, I found this sentiment to be far more eloquent than the typical drivel I was used to hearing from politicians.

During the entirety of the four-hour walk along the side of the only road connecting Dixville Notch and Errol, no more than two-dozen cars passed our group. I counted four of them that honked their horns in what was either a universal signal of solidarity or the New Hampshire way of saying, “Get off the road, so that I don’t run your asses over.” Just before we reached Errol International Airport, about halfway to our destination, we passed one of the few homes along our route. Suddenly, a middle-aged woman stormed out of her driveway and bolted toward us, as if we were coming to rob the place. “What the hell are you doing?” she shouted. “There’s Canadian truckers that come here and don’t stop.”

There was a long pause until one brave woman stepped forward. “We’re fighting to make our government accountable to you, rather than big donors,” she said.

The homeowner appeared puzzled about what to make of that comment. But she remained certain about our impending fate. “Someone’s gonna get killed,” she said. “I guarantee it.”

An impending death now promised to us, we continued on our way. Over the course of the next couple of hours, I engaged in some more chitchat and eavesdropped on an extended conversation that three of the walkers were having about cosmology. “I have a friend at MIT, and one of his theories is that the universe actually is mathematics,” one of the participants said to the other two. OK, these were not a bunch of rubes out for a stroll because they had nothing better to do. But still, the question remained: Why? What were they hoping to achieve in risking their promised demises at the hands of some surly truck driver named Pierre, who had been swilling spiked maple syrup all the way from Quebec City?

One of the participants in the cosmology discussion stood out to me because he was the only person of color participating in the walk. With 96 percent of its residents of the Caucasian persuasion, New Hampshire is the third-whitest state in the country, behind only neighboring Maine and Vermont. New Hampshire’s racial homogeny is one of the most persuasive arguments against its special status on the presidential primary calendar, and it’s rare to attend a big political event in New Hampshire, either on the Republican or Democratic side, with more than a few black or brown faces in the crowd. But as soon as I began talking to him, it became abundantly clear that Addy Simwerayi’s ethnic background was one of the least interesting things about the cherubic-faced twenty-three-year-old.

Addy was born and grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), where his father was a political activist whose own pet issue was a topic of more immediate concern than campaign-finance reform. In the Congo at the time, rebel groups had developed a practice by which they would kidnap vulnerable young boys to become their child soldiers and young women to be their slaves. To combat this custom, Addy recalled, his father started a program to educate orphans and widows on preventive measures at a local church. These efforts did not particularly please the leaders of the rebel groups.

It was around 8:00 p.m. on a warm night in the year 2000 when they came for him. Several rebels burst into the house, and Addy, then nine years old, hid under the bed with his mother and six siblings. The home invaders beat Addy’s father, hacked at his neck with machetes, and left him for dead. Somehow, Addy’s father survived the ordeal and recovered from his gruesome injuries after receiving treatment from his cousin, who was a doctor. Then, as he did every year, Addy’s father applied that fall for a US visa lottery and ended up winning the golden ticket out of the Congo for himself and his family. He even happened to have a friend who lived in Hooksett, New Hampshire, who offered to house them all.

The hitch was that Addy’s father didn’t have enough money to pay the international plane fares for nine people. So he and his wife first came to Hooksett themselves, in order to begin the process of getting situated in the United States, while Addy and his siblings stayed behind under the care of their grandmother and aunt. Things were calm for a while. Addy’s aunt made a living for the family buying crops on farms and reselling them in the city for a modest profit. But Addy’s aunt also carried the political-activist gene. One day, when she was on her daily bus trip out to a farm, she stood up and began preaching to her fellow passengers about the atrocities that were being committed by the rebel group that had nearly killed her brother. She urged them to fight back. One man on the bus, it turned out, was the wrong person to try to convince, and he had a cell phone on him. A few minutes after Addy’s aunt began making her case, a group of rebels erected a crude barricade to block the bus’s passage. In events that were later related to Addy, several members of the rebel group then jumped on board. In front of her fellow passengers, one of the assailants took a knife to Addy’s aunt’s face and cut off her lips. She died three days later.

Addy recalled these traumas to me in the straightforward manner of someone who has told his story many times before. Rhetorical flourishes were not required. With their grandmother the only adult left at home, Addy and his siblings next endured repeated, uninvited visits to their house from unknown men who had heard that their parents were in America and assumed that made the whole family rich. “Where’s the money?” Addy recalled one of the men shouting during one particular home invasion. “You have American dollars!” This went on and on—every night carrying the possibility of unspeakable trauma.

Meanwhile, after a brief interlude in Uganda, Addy’s parents met a professor at the University of New Hampshire—an advantageous connection that set the gears in motion for the entire family to move to the state. Addy and his siblings touched down in the United States on September 11, 2004. A congressman was there to greet them, and a limousine chauffeured them from the airport. “I’m like, what is this?” Addy recalled. “And we got in there and they had these muffins. I’d never had muffins before, so I puked.” He laughed at the memory. “Then they gave me a mint, which I’d never had before, and that just didn’t make me feel better.”

Addy had his first experience with snow a couple of months later and began to make the kind of life transition that most people can only imagine. The family soon found a permanent home in Manchester, where Addy eventually enrolled in Central High School. He adjusted well, but his youngest brother proved to be less adaptive and was sent back to the Congo to attend boarding school there.

After graduating from high school, Addy completed an internship with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)—the Quaker-affiliated social-justice group with which he was employed when I met him on the walk. Addy said that he had first become interested in AFSC because the organization offered free pizza at its meetings every Thursday. But he soon found that he shared his father and his aunt’s penchant for advocating for social justice. Addy traveled to Washington with the group to protest the Iraq War and became involved in community-building organizations closer to home. On one of candidate Barack Obama’s early visits to New Hampshire in 2007, Addy was among the young people chosen to join the Illinois senator for lunch. He realized even then what a particular privilege it was for someone who was interested in politics and policy to live in the nation’s first primary state. “Having that kind of opportunity is something unique to New Hampshire,” he said.

After attending Manchester Community College, Addy took on a full-time position with AFSC and became somewhat of a renaissance man of the millennial generation. With an interest in music and entertainment, he had in his spare time begun working as a producer for a teenage hip-hop artist. He also took up script writing during his downtime. Addy planned to return to the Congo one day to start a socially conscious business enterprise, but until it came time to take over the world, more or less, he remained focused on what was going on in New Hampshire.

Addy didn’t sound as passionate about campaign finance as some of the more committed members of this particular group. Like me, he was only walking one day. He was more interested in prison reform. But his enthusiasm for “changing the narrative” of the presidential campaign was palpable. He and the other members of his group planned to conduct research on the candidates, ask them questions at their events in the months leading up to Primary Day, and document their responses. In short, Addy wanted to change things. And he didn’t know any way to do that, other than by lending his voice—and his feet—to a cause. In the context of the upcoming presidential campaign, this particular liberal-leaning activist had a sensible idea of how to cut through the clutter: by focusing on the more accessible long-shot candidates, rather than the front-runners, who tend to be much less accessible and heavily guarded in their public comments. He figured that it would prove difficult to have a real conversation with Hillary Clinton—widely considered the anointed Democratic nominee-in-waiting—but the Socialist senator from Vermont whom not many people had even heard of at this point? He could work with someone like that.

“We’re hoping that someone like Bernie Sanders can rise up and get that voice, and that’s going to push [Clinton] to talk about these issues,” he told me. It’s difficult to overstate how prescient this comment was. Sanders was still more than three months from entering the race. Few people thought he’d actually run, and even fewer believed he had any shot at all at even becoming relevant, if he did. Addy, however, saw things differently.

A few days after the walk, I ran into Addy at a Rand Paul event in Manchester, where he asked the soon-to-be official presidential candidate a question about the militarization of local police forces. The entire exchange with the Kentucky senator took little more than a minute, and none of the reporters who were on hand wrote about it. Nonetheless, I tried to take a step back and think about how unlikely it was that this interaction could even happen at all. There’s something wonderful about a process that allows a kid from the Congo to stand face-to-face with a man who might become the next president of the United States and grill him on the topic of his own choosing. Addy embodied what was best about the New Hampshire primary.

We kept walking. At about mile seven or eight of the walk, I spoke for a bit with Lessig, who was near the front of the pack. I found him to be solemn and direct. He didn’t have much time for the hints of skepticism that he probably detected in my voice when I asked him how this one group might realistically have an impact on the New Hampshire presidential primary—and by extension—the future of American politics. If the New Hampshire Rebellion could activate 50,000 or so voters who care about campaign-finance reform in this one state, he told me, it would be political malpractice for one of the dozen or so contenders in the field to not to make it a pet issue. There was some logic in that argument, I had to admit. Still, I remained skeptical that the issue would rise to the top of the heap in a political and media environment that much preferred to focus on the things that raise partisan ideologues’ collective blood pressure. Campaign-finance reform just didn’t fit the bill, or so I thought.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about Addy. Maybe it was possible that determined individuals like him really could help to cut through the clutter and take the conversation directly to the candidates. Lessig was sure that they could. For the next few months, he told me, the New Hampshire Rebellion would train more people like Addy to ask pointed questions of presidential candidates at town hall meetings around the state. The one that they wanted to hammer home repeatedly was this: “What are you going to do to fix the system of corruption in American politics?” They would also ask other questions that the media were mostly ignoring, and they would repeat them until New Hampshire voters—and then the campaigns themselves—had to start paying more attention. It was a movement to show whether ideas, not money, still won presidential primaries—democratic activism in its most basic form. You didn’t need a cable news show, or even a microphone, to engage in it. You just had to have the courage of your convictions. And you also had to be in New Hampshire, where the tone would be set for the rest of the country.