CHAPTER 26

IN DECEMBER, THE HUFFPOST video crew and I took up lodging at a five-bedroom house in the rural outpost of Chichester—a heavily forested jurisdiction just a few miles outside of Concord. As advertised on Airbnb, the place was indeed located in a “quiet, secluded spot” atop a hill and at the end of a dirt road not noteworthy enough to earn the attention of Google Maps. It suited our particular news coverage needs well, and it also would have been a great setting for a horror film. The old wooden floors creaked with every step, and complementing the wood-burning fireplace was a wide variety of what looked to be centuries-old furniture, including a cradle that appeared to be an ideal spot for a ghost baby to take a nap.

We left our spooky new home to drive up to the ski town of Waterville Valley to catch a Trump rally. We would have to be sneaky about it, because Trump’s campaign was continuing its blackballing of the Huffington Post. This punishment, however, turned into a blessing, as it forced us to stray from the so-called press pen and enter all of Trump’s events as members of the general public, where we were free to roam among the chest-thumping masses. Meanwhile, the reporters who identified themselves as such were confined like cattle, once Trump took the stage. This accommodation, which all of the major networks had agreed to abide by, was emblematic of the utterly shameful capitulation that the TV news industry had been making to the Trump campaign for months. As long as he remained a ratings bonanza, Trump was more or less allowed to dictate terms to the networks that often carried his speeches live, and would remain uninterrupted by anyone holding him to account for the near-constant stream of half-truths and lies that he spewed. There were a lot of good reporters covering Trump aggressively on the ground. But to many of their bosses, it was far more important to be on good terms with Hope Hicks and future paid CNN contributor Corey Lewandowski—the operatives who made the decisions about who “Mr. Trump” would grant exclusive interviews to—than it was to hold a mendacious demagogue to account.

Thanks to El Niño and in stark contrast to the record-breaking snowfall of the previous winter, it had been unusually mild in New Hampshire, with temperatures regularly above freezing. On this particular evening, snow would have been preferable to the cold and driving rain inundating the area. When we arrived at the indoor soccer field at the White Mountain Athletic Club, about half of the 1,000 or so chairs that had been set up were empty. I began to wonder if the weather would keep the crowds away this time. As volunteers passed out “Trump For President” signs, there was a distinct lack of spark in the air. I took a seat near the front and soon noticed that the college-aged kid sitting next to me was using Tinder, the mobile dating app. As I watched him swipe left more often than right, rejecting photo after photo, it occurred to me that the Republican primary fight in New Hampshire had become a real-life version of the popular app. GOP voters in New Hampshire, for the time being at least, weren’t shy about their lack of interest in personal qualities like experience and judgment. Instead, they wanted to be hit in the head with the goods, even if they hated themselves a bit for it. Donald Trump was the perfect candidate for the Tinder generation, unskillfully spray-tanned and self-obsessed. He would probably end up being a disappointment in the end, but hey, at least he wouldn’t be boring.

As it turned out, Trump’s speech that night was—by his standards, at least—rather tame. He sounded more like a traditional candidate than he usually did, pandering when it came to New Hampshire’s role in the process (“There is something beautiful about tradition.”), and was particularly unimaginative in his attacks on his rivals (“Jeb Bush loves Common Core. How do you love Common Core? You can’t love Common Core.”). There were none of the usual outbursts about Obama’s Muslim/Kenyan/anti-American leanings. Trump even included an offbeat and extensive anti-alcohol harangue at the end of his speech that drew nothing but silence from the crowd, and he seemed to be running through the motions when he came to the part in which he expounded on the virtues of his border wall.

“Someday you know what it’s going to be called, right? The Trump Wall,” he said of the fabulous barrier that would one day protect the nation’s southern border and maybe cure cancer, too. “We have to make it beautiful. We have to make it beautiful. We have to make it beautiful.” The lameness of this particular event belied Trump’s comfortable first-place standing in New Hampshire. You couldn’t argue with the success the guy was having, even at times when his shtick seemed to be wearing thin. The story remained Trump versus everyone else, and everyone else was losing big league, as the front-runner might say.

For the Democrats, the state of the race was more complicated. Although Clinton led Sanders by large margins just about everywhere else in the country, she was still running behind him in New Hampshire. In spite of the obvious historic potential of her candidacy, Clinton was struggling mightily to inspire younger Democratic women to get excited about the possibility of the first female president—a deficiency that her campaign had made it a priority to address. I attended one particular Clinton event at Southern New Hampshire University where she spoke to a midday crowd about women’s economic empowerment—a subject that could scarcely be any more squarely in her wheelhouse. The event took an uncomfortable turn, however, when the candidate received the following question from a college-age woman in the crowd: “Secretary Clinton, you recently came out to say that all rape victims should be believed. But would you say that Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones should be believed as well?”

Hearing the names of three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual misdeeds over the years probably caused a few Clinton staffers’ blood pressure to spike dramatically, but the veteran performer didn’t even flinch. “Well, I would say that everyone should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence,” Clinton shot back with a confident smile. As much as she was struggling to generate a lot of enthusiasm among the voters who should have been in her wheelhouse, Clinton knew how to rise to the occasion in moments when less experienced political hands might easily have faltered.

Although her core supporters were far less rabid than Sanders’s young legions, Clinton also knew how to fire up a crowd. At an evening town-hall meeting in Amherst, near the Massachusetts border, the energy that emanated from 1,000 or so people who packed the elementary-school gym was electric from start to finish. In fighting form, Clinton seized the opportunity to rip into Trump for his “shameless and dangerous idea” of banning Muslims from traveling to the United States and deployed to great effect the truism that the simplest attack is often the most effective one when she noted that the Republican front-runner was “trafficking in paranoia.” Just in case Trump ended up fading from the scene, as many people were still expecting him to do, Clinton wasn’t shy about making a case of guilt by association. “We’re not only dealing with one inflammatory demagogue,” Clinton said. “We’re dealing with a party in danger of losing its way.” Clinton said nary a word about her Democratic opponent, but Sanders was becoming more difficult for her to ignore with each passing day.

The following week, I arranged to spend the day trailing the Vermont senator as he campaigned across the seacoast region. My first impression upon spending time up close with him was that I’d never met a candidate who had less tolerance for anything that slowed him down. New Hampshire voters often have a tendency to get a bit long-winded when there’s a microphone put in front of them, and for the most part, candidates indulge their non sequiturs and extended soliloquys. Not Sanders. He seemed incapable of even trying to pretend to have patience for anyone who was wasting his time. “Good. Good,” he’d say in the middle of each New Hampshire voter’s long-winded question. The subtext was, “I get it. I know exactly what you’re going to say next, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t already have a canned answer lined up here to answer you. I’m in a hurry, and I’m feeling crabby, so come on. Let’s get this over with and move on. Good. Good.”

Sanders’s aversion to wasting time with voters’ endless digressions paled in comparison to his searing abhorrence for reporters’ questions about political process. A tried-and-true ideologue, he wanted to talk about policy and nothing else, and every moment he spent on process was a moment lost to a discussion about the disappearing middle class and the millionaires and billionaires who were ruining everything for everyone else. And God help you if he was ready to go and you weren’t, as I would soon find out.

The Sanders campaign had blocked out twenty minutes for my interview with him at The Friendly Toast—a whimsically decorated and mouthwatering breakfast spot in downtown Portsmouth. My crew and I arrived there more than an hour early, in order to make sure we had plenty of time to set up. As we were doing so, the campaign let me know that Sanders would be making an unscheduled appearance at Portsmouth Book and Bar, a hip little coffee and beer-serving bookshop just a short walk from the Friendly Toast. So I headed there with Jon, where we watched Sanders address a small crowd of fired-up supporters. We left a couple of minutes early to finish setting up for our interview at The Friendly Toast, which was scheduled for 1:45 p.m. The problem, as it turned out, was that Sanders was running ahead of schedule, and unlike us, he was driving to the event, not walking—and he was in no mood to wait around.

At the moment I stepped back into the restaurant, I received a two-word text message from my colleague Marielle: “He’s here.” Uh-oh. I made my way as quickly as I could to the back of the restaurant and saw that though we did have one camera set up on a tripod, our second cameraman and our audio technician had not yet arrived back on site. I approached Sanders’s New Hampshire press secretary, Karthik Ganapathy, who was chatting nervously with Julia Barnes, the campaign’s state director. I could make out just one snippet of their conversation, and it wasn’t especially reassuring: “Oh, he’s not going to like this.”

I tapped Karthik on the shoulder. “You said 1:45!”

“I know,” he replied apologetically. “But we’re running early.”

“Well, we need some time to set—”

Before the words had finished leaving my mouth, the door to the men’s room swung open, and a hunched-over septuagenarian with professorial glasses and an untamed coil of white hair emerged at a pace that suggested he was running late for his office hours. “OK,” Sanders said. “Let’s get going.”

With the implicit understanding that asking him to wait for a few more minutes was out of the question, I said hello and pointed vaguely in the direction of where we wanted him to sit. Sanders lumbered over to the booth in front of our one camera that was already set up, as the other two members of our crew scrambled to get into place. Fortunately, the persnickety candidate was unhappy with the booth. “I don’t like this,” he said. “It’s too low.” He didn’t add, “What’s the deal with booths these days, anyway? Most are too low, like this one. But then some are so high, my feet barely even touch the ground. How hard is it to get a booth that’s the right height?” I was fairly certain that was what he was thinking.

I knew enough about the man’s sources of irritation at this point not to waste any time trying to kill any initial awkwardness by warming over the conversation with small talk. Fortunately, the video crew somehow managed to get everything set up speedily. As Sanders settled into a chair of agreeable height, I dove right into the interview. In a campaign where perceived authenticity appeared to be the single-most-important quality that a candidate could have, Sanders’s utter lack of guile was what stood out most, but he also left no doubt that he’d been around the block, too. When I asked him a fairly innocuous question that I thought might reveal something interesting about the man (“Who is your favorite Republican in Congress?”), Sanders not only refused to take the bait. He scolded the fisherman.

“You want me to destroy somebody’s good reputation,” he told me in a lecturing voice that was so earnest, I at first thought he was joking. “You want me to have a situation where his opponent will be running thirty-second ads against him. You know what? For that reason, I’m not going to give you the answer.”

“Oh, man,” was all I could muster in response.

“No, I mean, that’s the reality,” Sanders continued. “I have friends who I have worked with and who I like, but if I say that, that becomes then a thirty-second ad against that person. That’s the reality. So I’ll spare that person.” I couldn’t argue the point. He was right, and that was sad. Sanders had absolutely no interest in trying to become the proverbial “Guy You Want to Have a Beer With,” it was safe to say, which was exactly why his young devotees appreciated him so much on a personal level: he wasn’t trying to make you like him. Instead, he was just going to level with you.

The biggest news hook out of the interview came when I asked Sanders whether he had begun to think about what it would actually be like to become president of the United States. “Have I started writing my inauguration speech, as opposed to the speech I have to give tomorrow?” he responded. I waited for him to scold me for asking such a preposterous question. Instead, he took his answer in a far different direction than what I’d expected from his setup. “Look. The answer is yes. It is a very sobering thing to be thinking about oneself as president of the United States and the enormous responsibilities that go with that.”

If Hillary Clinton had said something like that, it would have been considered a significant gaffe—presumptuous and disrespectful to her opponent. Coming from Sanders, though, it sounded more endearing than arrogant. Aw, he actually thinks he can win! After our interview concluded, Sanders shook hands with several people who were eating in the restaurant—a rare example of a bit of old-school retail campaigning for a man who was regularly drawing thousands of people at his rallies but had little use for glad-handing.

“You have great, smiling eyes,” one woman who was sitting at the bar told the candidate, whose eyes might more accurately have been described as glowering, if you’d asked me.

“Wow,” Sanders replied. “That’s the first time somebody has said that.” He agreed to stop for a selfie and then was quickly out the door, still running ahead of schedule.

One candidate who was never in that kind of a hurry was Lindsey Graham. On a Saturday morning in mid-December, I arrived at Spare Time bowling in Manchester to meet him. It was one of those modern joints with strobe lights, music, and a distinct lack of the cigarette odor that permeated the candlepin bowling alleys of my own youth. I was coming from an event across town and arrived fifteen minutes late. Lindsey Graham was right on time, of course, and when I walked in, he was standing patiently beside one of the lanes with a couple of aides, eager to bowl but not in the least bit irritated about my tardiness. I greeted him with a fist bump and paid for our lane, embarrassed enough about making a senator wait around for me that I didn’t notice when the woman who was operating our scoreboard listed Graham as “Senator Grant.”

“Story of my life,” Graham deadpanned. “The most poetic thing about this campaign!”

Eager to get past this rough start, I made a beeline for the bar and ordered myself a beer and Graham a Riesling. There aren’t a lot of US senators who would allow a reporter to document them drinking a foreign white wine at a bowling alley, but Graham would never even think to pretend to be a Bud Lite bottle kind of guy. We laced up our shoes, and from his very first shot, he was clearly having a blast. In between knocking down pins, Graham began taking gratuitous potshots at some of his enemies, including Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and the world’s most feared international terrorist organization. “This is the grand plan for ISIL, just mow ’em down,” he said just after picking up a spare.

Graham beat me pretty easily in our first game. The man who’d grown up in a bar had played this game before, it was clear, and he was a lot better than me. Regardless, after I finished my first beer, my confidence was up, so I challenged him to a bet for the second game. If he won, I’d buy him a steak dinner. If I won, he’d agree to crash a Trump rally. Graham agreed to my terms immediately and enthusiastically.

After falling behind early, I managed to eke out a narrow victory. We shook hands, and as I saw the roguish smile creep across the senator’s face, I wondered whether he’d thrown the game intentionally, just so he’d have an excuse to mess with Trump one last time. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to collect my winnings. After failing to generate even the slightest bit of false hope, and no longer able to fund his shoestring campaign, Lindsey Graham dropped out of the race on December 21. Through his final days on the trail, he gobbled up every last crumb of the experience that is campaigning for president in New Hampshire.