CHAPTER 10

THE PERSON WHO KNOWS more about the New Hampshire primary and its history than anyone who has walked the earth has a name: Bill Gardner. For more than four decades, Gardner has kept his state at the top of the national political conversation—a singular achievement that has no counterpart in Iowa or anywhere else. Gardner was first elected in an upset victory as New Hampshire’s secretary of state in 1976 at the age of twenty-eight. His comprehensive knowledge goes back to the events leading up to 1920, which he’s glad to share, in the most minute detail, with just about anyone who enters his modest second-floor office inside the statehouse in Concord. The man isn’t just an amateur historian. He’s a walking, talking encyclopedia of New Hampshire politics.

Before ascending to the job, Gardner was a Democratic state representative, but the equal regard with which New Hampshire politicos from both parties hold him reveals how vital he is to the state. To put it simply, everyone in New Hampshire likes Bill Gardner. A gentle soul with the low-key demeanor of a librarian, he has the attention for detail of an accountant and the single-minded determination of the eponymous character from the movie Rudy. Gardner’s personal bible is the New Hampshire Manual for the General Court—a guidebook on state law—where his own version of the Ten Commandments is summarized in RSA Section 653:9, which mandates that New Hampshire’s presidential primary election “shall be held on the second Tuesday in March or on a date selected by the secretary of state which is 7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election.” Under Gardner’s interpretation, a “similar election” has meant another state’s primary—an understanding of the statute that has allowed Iowa to hold its caucuses first without complaint from New Hampshire.

As codified by those words, Gardner’s chief responsibility has been to set the date of the primary every four years and do absolutely anything it takes to make sure that New Hampshire goes before any “similar election.” It hasn’t been easy. During every presidential election cycle since he has been in office, one or more states—often with the overt backing of the RNC or the DNC, or both—has tried to usurp the established process and find a way to knock New Hampshire out of its prime position. These efforts have been conducted with varying degrees of seriousness. Whether in 1969 (seven years before Gardner had assumed office), when a young Nevada assemblyman named Harry Reid tried to put a bill through that state’s legislature to leapfrog New Hampshire, or in 2014, when the Utah statehouse briefly tried to schedule its 2016 presidential primary a week before New Hampshire’s, the challengers to New Hampshire’s throne have failed every time.

“You can plant saplings on the main street of a city, but they never grow right because they’re artificial,” Gardner summed up his case against allowing new states to take over New Hampshire’s traditional role. “In the woods, they grow right because they begin with a seed that germinates, and they grow stronger over time, and they become a tree. But they don’t become that tree when they’re planted artificially.”

Gardner oversees a primary election process that still uses paper ballots, so it is perhaps not entirely shocking that he doesn’t even have a computer in his personal office. It is there in the statehouse that the candidates themselves typically show up to pay the $1,000 fee and sign the paperwork that allows their names to be placed on the primary ballot. After they complete that administrative paperwork, they can typically look forward to an earnest conversation with the secretary of state about the importance of New Hampshire, why New Hampshire has earned its role in the process, and whatever New Hampshire–related anecdotes happen to be on his mind that day. For Gardner, face-to-face interaction has always been the coin of the realm. Once he gets going on a story, it’s nearly impossible to interrupt him, and it’s best not to try.

Gardner is keenly attuned to New Hampshire’s reputation for clinging to an undeserved sense of entitlement. He’s well aware of the charges of arrogance and undemocratic privilege masquerading as quaint tradition. But rather than seeking some kind of compromise, he’ll argue the merits of the state’s special status to the death: how New Hampshire has earned its spot at the head of the table through a century of experience; how the state is the last bastion of hope for the presidential underdog, particularly in the post–Citizens United era, when the candidate with the most money would otherwise triumph every time. “It gives the little guy a chance,” he told me in summing up the case. “You don’t have to have the most money or the most fame to have a chance here.”

More than any other line of attack, Gardner has fretted in recent years over the accusation that New Hampshire’s pale-white electorate, which doesn’t look anything like an increasingly diverse America, makes it particularly unsuitable to be leadoff batter in the game of picking presidents in the twenty-first century. In responding to that particular criticism, Gardner will often concede the point that his state is not a hotbed for diversity, before he points to the past to call into question the extent to which that matters. John Hale, the nineteenth-century senator who took an early stand against slavery, was a New Hampshire guy, Gardner will point out, as was civil rights leader Jonathan Daniels, who was murdered in Alabama in 1965 while saving the life of a seventeen-year-old African American activist. But in spite of these interesting historical notes, it is readily apparent that this particular case against New Hampshire is the one that nags at him the most.

During his lengthy tenure, Gardner has clashed with national figures from both parties. Most recently, RNC chairman Reince Priebus in 2015 said ominously that Iowa and New Hampshire shouldn’t “get too comfortable.” But over the decades, more often than not, it has been prominent Democrats—including Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Howard Dean, and others—who have been most vocal and persistent in challenging New Hampshire’s status.

In October 1983, Nancy Pelosi—who was then the chair of the compliance and review committee for the DNC—led a delegation to New Hampshire to express national Democrats’ concerns that the early primary date that Gardner had set for the 1984 primary was in violation of Democratic Party rules. Actually, she wasn’t so much “expressing concerns” as she was demanding that Gardner—and by extension, New Hampshire—back down and hold its primary on the same day that neighboring Vermont (of all places!) held its contest. Gardner took the meeting with Pelosi and explained politely to her that he was obligated by state law to schedule New Hampshire’s primary before Vermont had its own contest.

“You just can’t do this,” Gardner recalls Pelosi telling him.

“Well,” he replied in his matter-of-fact way. “I have to do this.”

Although New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation status had been in effect for more than six decades at that point, Gardner’s defiance was not what Pelosi had expected when she flew across the country to confront a mere state-level official, whom she’d been told was a fellow Democrat and would bend to her will. When she was leaving his office, as Gardner remembers it, she turned back to him to offer some memorable parting words.

“You know, you probably think you have a political future ahead of you,” she told Gardner. “If you do this, you will not be elected again because the people of your state will know that it was because of you that they were not able to be a part of the Democratic National Convention.”

On the off chance that threat not to seat New Hampshire’s delegates at the DNC proved not to have its intended effect, Pelosi next sat down with the state’s newly elected Republican governor, John H. Sununu, who would go on to become President George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff later in the decade. Pelosi told Sununu that he was going to have to straighten out this Gardner guy. Sununu’s response: he couldn’t do it. The authority didn’t rest with him. Pelosi left in a huff.

Gardner, meanwhile, firmed up the date for the 1984 New Hampshire primary: February 28, exactly one week before Vermont’s primary. Pelosi and her fellow national Democrats, however, weren’t prepared to give up just yet. The day before Granite State voters went to the polls, the DNC put out a press release that characterized that year’s New Hampshire primary as an illegitimate event, even though the candidates themselves had campaigned there and the media continued to ascribe tremendous importance to it.

This last desperate gambit on Pelosi’s part had no effect, either. On the morning of the primary, the New York Times reported, “Walter F. Mondale now holds the most commanding lead ever recorded this early in a presidential nomination campaign by a non-incumbent, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.” That survey had former Vice President Mondale at 57 percent, civil rights activist Jesse Jackson at 8 percent, astronaut-turned-Ohio-senator John Glenn at 7 percent, and little-known Colorado senator Gary Hart at 7 percent. If it had the opportunity to do it over again, the New York Times might have characterized the race a bit differently. As a driving snowstorm blanketed New Hampshire, Hart pulled off what remains among the most shocking upsets in the history of the primary. And he did it rather easily, defeating second-place Mondale by 9 points. Hart’s unexpected New Hampshire triumph turned the Democratic race upside down, but the former vice president was able to hold off the insurgent to secure the nomination in the end.

A couple of weeks before the DNC gathered that July in Pelosi’s hometown of San Francisco to nominate Mondale and New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro to the Democratic presidential ticket, the delegation from New Hampshire received a message from party officials: we didn’t really mean it. The New Hampshire delegates were all seated at the convention, and Bill Gardner had won again. In every presidential election cycle since, one or more states have explored the possibility of trying to roll Bill Gardner—stubbornly quixotic efforts that, in the aggregate, amount to something close to the definition of political insanity.