CHAPTER 30

FROM THE MOMENT I arrived just before the festivities began, nothing about Jeb Bush’s primary night party at Manchester Community College on February 9, 2016, was tense. There was a cash bar, some political reporters tweeting about early returns in bellwether towns, and a bunch of Bush supporters trying their hardest to care about whether their candidate would finish in third, fourth, or fifth place. For Jeb, it was over, as it had been for a long time. It all felt like a formality—a Tuesday-night awards banquet for the lone senior graduating from the high school volleyball team. There would be speeches. There would be polite applause. There would even be gag gifts—in this case, cheap paper fans that said, “Jeb! Number One Fan.” This was February in New Hampshire—no one wanted a paper fan, but his supporters pretended that they did. That’s what people do when they’re going through the motions.

On some level though, Jeb still believed. The man who had a $100-million head start over every other candidate in the race had underwhelmed to such an extent that “better than expected” now meant anything above 10 percent in New Hampshire. But as long as he beat Rubio, he still had some hope to win his “lane” of becoming the establishment-friendly Republican in the race. The problem for Jeb, and everyone else not named Donald Trump, was that “lanes” didn’t really exist—not in 2016, at least. It was just Trump versus Everyone Else, and Everyone Else couldn’t get it together.

Unlike most states, which report election results by county, New Hampshire announces the vote totals in each of its 221 towns and thirteen cities. Sure enough, Trump was winning just about everywhere, and by big margins. Just a few minutes after I started poring through the numbers, I glanced up at the wall-mounted TV inside the multipurpose conference room and saw that CNN was already declaring victory for Trump. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, was demolishing the expectations that had been set for a solid victory of his own. He would go on to defeat Hillary Clinton by twenty-two points. Though this result had not been unexpected, it was truly astonishing from the standpoint of where the Democratic race in New Hampshire had begun.

I was still slumped in my green chair, attempting to discern in what order the candidates would finish behind Trump, when Ryan Williams, a Republican operative whom I’d known for a long time, approached. A former aide to Mitt Romney in both of his presidential campaigns, Ryan had deep New Hampshire ties. He gave me a nod and reached for his phone, which he’d been charging in the outlet next to my chair. Then he read aloud the text message he’d just received from a prominent New Hampshire Republican figure, whose name I told Ryan I’d omit from this book, in order to protect the innocent.

Here, in its entirety, is what the text message said: “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

That’s when it really hit me. As expected as the Republican primary results had been, this was a truly historic moment for the country. Donald Trump had won the New Hampshire primary. He’d won easily, in fact, and so had Bernie Sanders—albeit with a far more uplifting posture. In tandem, their victories signaled a massive change in American politics. When it came to Trump, the Republican “establishment”—whatever that meant at this point—had first laughed at him, then dismissed him, then opposed him, and then tried to figure out a way to deal with the plurality of GOP voters who had backed him. They’d failed in every effort. The traditional power brokers who had always maintained order within the GOP had proven themselves irrelevant. And on the Democratic side, even though his New Hampshire victory would mark the high point of Bernie Sanders’s campaign, the ramifications of his win when it came to affecting the eventual nominee’s ideological positioning and governing agenda were equally profound. New Hampshire was the first real sign of how weak a Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would end up becoming.

Later that night, I caught up with the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham backstage at Bush’s event, where he greeted me, of course, with a fist bump. I reminded my favorite former candidate about something he’d said a few weeks earlier: that having to choose between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz (the surprisingly strong third-place finisher in New Hampshire) would be the equivalent of picking between being poisoned or shot. So which did he prefer now? Graham thought about it for a moment. “Well, you’re still dead,” he said, upon consideration. “I guess one is slow. One is quick. In my case, I’d rather just have it done.”

Like pretty much all of his Senate colleagues, Graham loathed Cruz, but he detested Trump. Although he was always willing to talk, I could tell that Graham wasn’t eager to continue this particular conversation, given the circumstances of the moment. He wanted to get back to talking to Jeb, who was—in his typically endearing manner—jumping up and down and waving at me from his position at the other end of the room backstage. So I said good-bye to Lindsey, offering one more parting fist bump. “It gets better for Jeb in South Carolina,” Graham assured me. Uh-huh.

“This campaign is not dead,” Bush declared from the stage a few minutes later, to cheers from his mostly ambivalent supporters. Actually, it was. Bush had, after all, convinced only about 11 percent of the New Hampshire Republican primary electorate to vote for him—31,310 people in all—not quite one-third of the votes that Trump had gotten. And the terrain was looking even worse on the horizon.

Trump’s monumental win, executed with a message that was as brazenly mendacious and manipulative as anything in modern political history, had taken place in the state that was supposed to be the sober anecdote to Crazy Uncle Iowa. Had I just been suckered into spending all of this time venerating an American political institution that didn’t deserve its high station? I felt sick. Then I started thinking back to the beginning.

It was then that I realized the broader context in which Trump’s New Hampshire victory has to be considered. It wasn’t an accident or a coincidence that two of the unlikeliest victors in the history of the New Hampshire primary—Trump and Bernie Sanders—pulled off their feats in the same year. Over the primary’s history, New Hampshire voters have often sought to send a message that Washington was failing them. But in 2016, that message was delivered via bullhorn pressed directly against the party leadership’s eardrums. Whenever I struck up conversations with people in New Hampshire in the weeks leading up to Primary Day and asked them whom they planned to vote for, one of the most common answers I received in response was this: “I’m not sure. Either Bernie or Trump.” That a demagogue with some neo-fascist tendencies and a proud democratic socialist were often culling from the same crop of voters in New Hampshire should tell you everything you need to know about the level of people’s frustration with the political system in 2016. Trump and Sanders may have been diametrically opposed when it came to their fundamental philosophies, but they were more or less the same when it came to their overriding message (the system is rigged against you) and delivery method (loud and aggressive old men who were skilled at making the case for radical change and weren’t interested in making new friends).

“You’re getting this wrong.” This was the underlying message that the voters of New Hampshire sent to the people who controlled the levers of political power in 2016, and there is no doubt that it was received. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton began sounding more and more like Bernie Sanders with each passing week after the primary, emphasizing that she was right there with him on issues of systematic economic inequality, even if she continued to have some trouble playing this role authentically. Ultimately, she could never make the case as persuasively as he had.

In 2016, New Hampshire voters did what they’ve been doing for the last century. As usual, they turned out in large numbers (a record-breaking 287,653 people voted in the Republican primary and 254,780 in the Democratic primary) and with the earnestness with which they have always approached the task. On the GOP side, 35 percent of them voted for a man I consider to be a disgrace. But Trump’s 2016 success doesn’t invalidate the underlying principles that have made the New Hampshire primary work for a century. Trump may not have campaigned “the New Hampshire way.” He didn’t pretend to care about looking into people’s eyes and answering all their questions in their living rooms. But as New Hampshire radio host Arnie Arnesen pointed out to me, he’d already gone one stage further: he’d been in their living rooms for years, by way of their TV sets. Trump was a unique candidate and thankfully, we’re unlikely to see another quite like him. In marking his ascent as someone who could actually win the presidency, New Hampshire once again proved itself as a belwether of the national mood.

Is New Hampshire a good way of beginning the process of picking presidents? Yes, I think that it is. At the very least, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it’s the worst method, except for all of the others. A national primary would be more purely democratic, but there is no doubt that this method would make it even easier for well-funded front-runners to triumph without giving the proverbial “little guy” (i.e., Bernie Sanders) any shot at all. As the last half century of presidential campaigns have demonstrated time and again, money is important for running successfully in New Hampshire, but it’s not nearly as central to victory as it is in bigger states with more expensive media markets. And that’s why the idea of implementing a rotating system for determining states’ positions on the calendar each cycle also falls short of what we have now.

As we’ve seen with the introduction of new early voting states, such as Nevada, where only a tiny slice of the electorate bothers to show up on Caucus Day, there is something to be said for the accumulated expertise and habit that New Hampshire has developed in going first for so long. New Hampshire voters really do take their roles in the process more seriously than voters do just about anywhere else. They pay attention. And perhaps far more important, they make the candidates pay attention. As Steve Duprey put it to me, “It’s good for them to be humbled, and New Hampshire does it.”

There is a sense of community in New Hampshire that doesn’t exist anymore in a lot of places in the United States, and during primary season, that community centers around politics. New Hampshire voters have real conversations with each other about the candidates, and not just on Facebook and Twitter. John H. Sununu describes the dynamic as “social media without the electronics.” It’s still that way in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Will the New Hampshire primary survive? There are some powerful forces lined up against it. Bill Gardner won’t be secretary of state forever, prominent national leaders from both parties have spoken out against it, and state law isn’t bulletproof in the face of national outrage drummed up effectively. When I asked him before the 2016 primary whether he feared that New Hampshire might one day lose its cherished first-in-the-nation status, Gardner didn’t feign certainty. “I’m always concerned about it,” he said. But the primary should survive. The 2016 campaign confirmed its worth.