CHAPTER 23

IT’S AN UNPOPULAR POSITION, I know, but I don’t like autumn. I’ve always been confused by the majority of people who take acute joy in digging their cozy sweaters out of the closet and ordering their first pumpkin-spiced latte of the season, as if they’re new mothers finally able to enjoy their first glass of wine in nine months. To me, the defining characteristic of fall is that it heralds winter’s imminent arrival. I like football, but I hate shorter days, cold nights, and all of the other elements that compose the elixir of sadness of the season. Fall sucks.

Yet, I will admit that if you have to tolerate the arrival of this seasonal harbinger of nature’s death, New England is just about the best place to put on your plaid shirt and give it the full, crisp embrace. When October 2015 arrived in New Hampshire, it was time for me to start monitoring Yankee Magazine’s online peak-foliage forecast map of New England. My wife laughs at me for this, but I like to follow along with the daily changes in the leaves’ colors, and I scoff at people who lower themselves to leaf-peeping in a “near-peak” area when a “peak” opportunity can be found just a twenty-minute drive northward.

It had been an unusually warm September in New Hampshire, which meant that the peak peeping time in each area of the state would be a couple of weeks later than usual. So at the end of the first week of October, there was still plenty of green mixed in with the psychedelic kaleidoscope of reds, oranges, and yellows that had begun to envelop southern New Hampshire.

Winter’s arrival in New Hampshire typically marked the final stage of the campaign when “real people”—who didn’t work in the state’s political industrial complex—typically started to pay close attention. But this particular race, by just about every measure, had been decidedly atypical. If the polls were to believed, Donald Trump was now running away from the rest of the Republican field both in New Hampshire and just about everywhere else. It remained possible, I thought, that Trump’s standing was mostly a function of low-information voters continuing to reward the loudest voice in the room because they didn’t know what else was out there yet. With his lead widening, that prospect seemed increasingly unlikely, but I wanted to see for myself whether there might be another candidate who was quietly gaining steam in a manner similar to the way John McCain had snuck up on his competition in 2000 and 2008. If any lucid Republican was going to stop Trump from running away with victory in the nation’s first primary, it looked like it’d have to be Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, or John Kasich, each of whom had been campaigning “the New Hampshire way” by trying to earn one vote at a time in diners, churches, businesses, and homes across the state. In my previous interactions with them, none of the three had struck me as particularly McCain-like, but they each also had their own unique strengths that might keep them in the game, if everything fell into place just the right way.

Trump’s success, I thought, must have been particularly frustrating to the man who possessed the second-loudest voice in the race, Christie, whose own political prospects appeared to be plunging as steadily as the temperatures were. Still, I continued to be impressed by how well the New Jersey governor played in the rooms of New Hampshire. During one particularly poignant soliloquy on treating drug addiction, which he made at Shooter’s Tavern in the lakes region outpost of Belmont, Christie was at his very best. First, he told the crowd that his mom had smoked cigarettes for most of her life, even long after she knew they were bad for her, and had failed time after time in her attempts to quit. When she was finally hospitalized for what would prove to be terminal lung cancer at the age of seventy-one, Christie said, no one suggested that it was her fault she’d gotten the disease. “Yet somehow,” Christie said, pacing the bar with his confident stride. “If it’s heroin or cocaine or alcohol, we say, ‘Ah, they decided it. They’re getting what they deserve.’”

Next, Christie moved on to relate the tear-jerking story of a high-achieving former law-school classmate who “had it all,” until he hurt his back running one day and was prescribed Percocet to help with the pain. Christie’s friend became addicted to the drug, initiating a downward spiral over the course of several years that led to the loss of his job, his home, his family, and eventually his life. “There but for the grace of God,” Christie said. “It can happen to anyone.”

The six and a half minutes of Christie’s speech on the topic, which our HuffPost video team shot and edited, subsequently generated more than 8 million views on Facebook. I hadn’t expected that kind of response, but maybe I should have. Christie, after all, had spoken in a deeply personal way about an issue that had taken precedence in the New Hampshire race but was still being under-covered by the national media. A poll conducted by WMUR—New Hampshire’s only network-affiliated news station—showed that the drug epidemic was the number-one concern of New Hampshire voters. With the heroin crisis continuing to spiral out of control, voters in the state deemed drugs to be more pressing than the economy, education, health care, foreign policy, and everything else. If you spent any significant time in the state, it wasn’t hard to see why. In Manchester, you could walk out of the Radisson Hotel on Elm Street on any given day and witness how bad the problem was. Homeless, strung-out people of all ages stumbled the streets in a daze, panhandling aggressively and discarding needles in public parking lots. And those were just the most visible addicts. The response to the Christie video captured the extent to which opioids had become a crisis among all races and in every American community—poor, middle class, and wealthy. That fall, Republican and Democratic presidential candidates alike had been talking about drug addiction with increasing regularity, but none had managed to capture the emerging consensus favoring treatment over incarceration better than Christie.

Two days after I got around to posting the clip of Christie’s speech, on a Tuesday afternoon, Rachel Maddow played the whole thing on her primetime MSNBC show. At the time it was airing, I was having a beer with a Bernie Sanders campaign staffer at Republic—a coffee, wine, and locally sourced restaurant that is the closest you can find to Brooklyn in New Hampshire—when my cell phone started blowing up. Over the next few days, our video was featured by countless other media organizations. It was just the kind of emotional “moment” that had long propelled campaigns in the Granite State, and Christie’s campaign knew it.

The New Jersey governor began talking about the video at the beginning of every appearance in the state. When I ran into him outside a debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Christie told me about the parents of a child who had been battling addiction. They’d seen the video and decided to drive four and a half hours from their home in Connecticut to attend one of his events. He also mentioned another couple who had lost a son to an overdose just a week earlier and had come to Hanover to comfort their daughter, who was a student at Dartmouth. While on campus, they came upon Christie and thanked him profusely for raising awareness of the issue, even though it was too late for their own family.

From a personal standpoint, it was rewarding to hear that the video was having a meaningful impact on people’s lives. It captured a moment that was deeply human and authentic, but would it make a lasting political difference for Christie? That was less clear. The New Jersey governor had been starting to tick up in the polls a bit in its aftermath, but he was still firmly planted in the single digits, while Trump continued to dominate the field without even once setting foot inside a place like Shooter’s Tavern, where campaigns in New Hampshire had traditionally been won.

The situation was at least as dire for Jeb Bush, who could no longer lay plausible claim to the front-runner status that had once been regarded as a near birthright. The week after attending Christie’s event at Shooter’s Tavern, I caught a midday Bush town-hall meeting at a medical supply center in Portsmouth, and the energy in that room was nonexistent. The event didn’t get off to an especially promising start when the company manager who introduced the candidate provided a Wikipedia-style review of Bush’s background, which included the bullet point that Bush played tennis while a student at Phillips Andover Academy and was the son and brother of former presidents. “Hey, he’s just like us!” was probably not a thought that crossed many of the minds of the employees in attendance. Although Bush was working as hard and sleeping as little as any candidate in the race, Trump’s portrayal of him as entitled and—more devastatingly—“low energy” had clearly resonated.

After his inauspicious introduction, the former Florida governor meandered his way into what passed as his stump speech, providing a laundry list of goals for a third Bush presidency that appeared more inconceivable by the second. As he told the crowd about his plans to embrace an energy revolution, decrease government regulations, and simplify the tax code, I saw more than a couple of people in the room fighting back a sudden bout of narcolepsy. I’m pretty sure that few would have noticed if he’d thrown in a “Yadda, yadda, yadda. You get the idea. I mean, whatever.” The slow-motion car crash dragged on for another forty-five minutes or so: I watched three people rise from their chairs and leave the event and found myself wondering why more members of the audience weren’t joining them. Bush, who often spoke about how “joyfully” he was campaigning, appeared to be entirely joyless. Not only did he fail to make clear his reasons that the people in the room should entrust him with the presidency, at no point throughout the entire event did he get around to asking them for their votes—a cardinal sin in New Hampshire, if there ever was one.

With neither Christie nor Bush appearing likely to coalesce the anti-Trump bloc—which still composed a clear majority of the New Hampshire Republican electorate—I decided to check in on an even more improbable savior for the GOP. What I found was not particularly encouraging. I linked up with John Kasich the next week on his newly minted campaign bus. Kasich, I had been assured by his staff, had been made aware of this arrangement, as the HuffPost video team waited for him to board. You wouldn’t have known it. When he stepped onto the bus, I greeted the Ohio governor in the traditional manner: with a handshake and a friendly smile. He, however, wasn’t interested in exchanging pleasantries. After offering his hand with the enthusiasm of someone who was about to have it chopped off, he brushed past me, ignored my crew entirely, sat down with a coffee in hand, and pulled out his iPad. Our cameras rolled for four minutes—during which Kasich said not a single word. Instead, he sat with his head in his hand and listened intently to a country tune that featured some hyper-literal lyrics about the love between a father and son.

Unsure of what else to do as the candidate continued his reverie, I began chatting quietly with his press secretary in the back of the bus. That was a mistake. The governor of Ohio glared at me as if I had screamed in his ear. “Shhhhh,” he snapped. It had been quite a long time since another adult shushed me, but I’d heard stories about Kasich’s legendary temper. I just hadn’t expected to bear witness to it as a reporter covering his campaign.

The bus first rolled to Woodstock, New Hampshire, a tourist trap of a town, where Kasich’s early morning crankiness was on display. As he strolled along the town’s main drag, he encountered a couple from Ohio, who shouted out excitedly in the direction of their governor. Kasich, in turn, offered a meek reply, sounding generally unimpressed. He was equally disengaged when, during a stop inside one of the shops, the deeply religious candidate wondered aloud why it was that people in far-flung mountain towns such as this one seemed to be “more in touch with God” than they were elsewhere in New Hampshire. “It’s because we’re in the mountains and we’re closer to him,” a shopper offered in response. Considering the context, I thought that this was a great answer. Kasich didn’t appear to agree. He barely acknowledged the woman’s response—a strange unwillingness to engage from a man who could, when he felt like it, demonstrate an Oprah-like interest in the spiritual health of other people. That was the deal with Kasich: when he wasn’t into it, he couldn’t fake it.

The rest of the morning, Kasich tried on an array of silly hats, considered and decided against buying a pair of wool mittens for his teenage daughter, and donned a leather jacket at the American Police Motorcycle Museum in Meredith, where—by now in much more buoyant humor—he regaled the assembled press with stories from his own motorcycle-riding days. “Live free or die,” the bad-to-the-bone governor said, recalling his own near-death misadventure. “That’s kind of how it is with the motorcycle.”

Through it all, Kasich was sometimes charming, often flippant, and always untroubled about the way he came across. When a local reporter asked him how he intended to distinguish himself from other Republican candidates in the race who had similar records and platforms, Kasich couldn’t hide his disdain for the premise. “You know, I’ve never heard that question before,” Kasich shot back, oozing with sarcasm.

“How about gun control?” another local reporter asked. This was a softball pitched right down the middle of the plate if there ever was one.

“Well, I’m not for it.”

He would not elaborate further.

We ended the day back at Beverly Bruce’s house in Center Tuftonboro—site of Lindsey Graham’s impromptu stand-up comedy routine from a few months back. In the interim, a Minnesota dentist had gained intense notoriety for killing the beloved Cecil the Lion while on a hunting trip in Africa. In deference to the fallout from that scandal, Bruce hosted this particular event not in her game room but in a separate barn. It drew a decent turnout, and Kasich was now on his best behavior. Just about everyone there, it seemed to me, seemed supportive of his message.

A week and a half later, the latest CBS/YouGov survey of likely New Hampshire primary voters came out. Trump: 38, Carson: 12, Bush: 8, Kasich: 5, Christie: 2. Nothing, it seemed, that Christie, Bush, and Kasich were doing on the ground in New Hampshire had registered in the least bit.