Republicans and Democrats Look at Future of New Hampshire Primary
By Thomas Rains
WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 9 – As the dust settles on the 2004 presidential race, some party insiders are turning back to where the campaigns began-New Hampshire-to look for ways to improve the primary process.
The Granite State’s first-in-the-nation primary status has been threatened in recent years by other states attempting to preempt it or overshadow it. Michigan tried after the 2000 election, and Delaware, New York and California have tried too. However, no state has succeeded.
The Democratic National Committee is planning a commission to study the effectiveness of holding the first primary in New Hampshire. And, with the loss of Sen. John Kerry, who had promised to help the state keep its place at the front of the line, the status is even more up in the air.
“On the Democratic side [committee] Chairman Terry McAuliffe had to dispense with a challenge from Michigan” after the 2000 elections, said Michael Chaney, president and chief executive officer of the New Hampshire Political Library.
The bipartisan, non-profit Political Library was established in 1997 by the late Gov. Hugh Gregg, father of Sen. Judd Gregg, as a way of helping to protect New Hampshire’s unique political status.
For Republicans, things will be the same in 2008.
The “Rules Committee for the [Republican National Committee] soundly reinstated rules for the Republican primary in 2008,” said Chaney, a delegate to the Republican National Convention last summer in New York. “They recognize tradition and history.”
In addition, President George W. Bush made it clear that he would protect the primary’s first-in-the-nation status.
“There are a number of people,” Chaney said, “who are already thinking about running.” At the Republican National Convention last summer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Arizona Sen. John McCain, New York Gov. George Pataki and others with rumored presidential aspirations spoke to the New Hampshire delegates over breakfast.
Since then, McCain has made stops in New Hampshire unrelated to his campaign visits for Bush.
In response to Michigan’s challenge, McAuliffe agreed to appoint a commission to examine the primary process after the 2004 general election but before the end of the year. According to Chaney, this commission would include Democratic committee members, academics and past candidates.
One argument against New Hampshire and Iowa-with its early caucuses- is that they do not represent a good cross section of the nation as a whole.
New Hampshire and Iowa’s populations are 95.1 percent and 92.6 percent Caucasian, respectively, while the population of the United States as a whole is only 69.1 percent Caucasian, according to The Almanac of American Politics . Some wonder if this would hinder African-American candidates with viable resumes in the future, such as Democratic freshman Illinois Sen. Barack Obama or J.C. Watts, former Republican congressman from Oklahoma.
Michigan’s population, on the other hand, is 78.6 percent Caucasian and New York is 62 percent, according to The Almanac .
Terry Shumaker, executive director of the New Hampshire branch of the National Education Association and a Political Library board member, argues that the Granite State is as representative as a state is going to be, even if the demographics do not match.
“We are urban and rural. We are agricultural and industrialized,” he said in a telephone interview. “No state is going to be completely representative.”
Rich Ashooh, however, claims this argument is just a frequently-used red herring. Ashooh, a vice president at BAE Systems, was a delegate to the Republican National Convention last summer in New York and is a board member at the Political Library.
“New Hampshire has never pretended to be representative of the nation,” Ashooh said in a telephone interview. He added: “If you take the early phase of the primary-caucus process in total, you start to get a pretty good representation of the nation.”
This early phase includes the Iowa caucuses before the New Hampshire primary and the South Carolina primary afterwards.
This early phase has become crowded in recent years due to “frontloading,” or other states moving their primary ahead on the calendar to receive more attention from candidates.
Kerry’s narrow, comeback victory in the Iowa caucuses gave him the momentum to win in New Hampshire’s primary a week later after being down in the polls by more than 30 points earlier in the campaign. He then virtually wrapped up the nomination before “Super Tuesday” just two months later when several large states around the country held their primaries on the same day. If the primaries had been spread out with more time in between each of the early ones, some say it would have given candidates such as John Edwards and Howard Dean a better chance to recover from their losses in New Hampshire and Iowa.
To solve the frontloading problem and give the candidates more time to campaign with less traveling, some have suggested a regional primary system that would group states together according to their region of the country for primaries at the same time. By doing this, candidates could focus on several states at one time.
Already things could be changing. California decided recently to return its primary back to June from March. Initially they moved up their primary in an attempt to attract the candidates there.
Currently Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a “true believer” in the New Hampshire primary according to Chaney, is pushing for western states to adopt a regional process, and the National Association of Secretaries of States also has advocated a regional system.
All of the regional primaries would come after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and the regions would rotate every four years, according to Chaney. This, he said, would fix the problem of frontloading in the primary calendar and would retain the “small rural character and political tradition” that allows for weeks of one-on-one campaigning to all the residents of the Granite State.
Ashooh and others argue that New Hampshire is important because it is different.
New Hampshire does not have one “single driving issue” that could “tip the scales” by good pandering by a candidate with plenty of money to spend on big-time advertising. For example, Ashooh added, candidates can do well in Iowa if they are strong on farming issues, while union worker issues play well in Michigan. But, in New Hampshire most of the major issues are of concern, but there is not a focus on one of them.
In fact, the New Hampshire Political Library prides itself on the fact that a small-time candidate can make a big name for himself in the Granite State without “big money and big media,” as Ashooh put it.
Howard Dean became a national figure because of media coverage of the New Hampshire primary, Ashooh said. “John McCain is a national icon, and it’s all because of New Hampshire. He was not a big money candidate. He was not personally wealthy.” he added.
“It is possible to run in New Hampshire for president with a minimal amount of resources and do well,” he said, while adding that this is not possible in larger states where television advertising can help candidates more than in New Hampshire.
“Participatory democracy is alive and well” in the Granite State, Shumaker said. “The New Hampshire primary is not to pick the winner,” he added, saying that it was about giving the candidates a chance to “work out the kinks” and “assemble a campaign team.”
“It’s like spring training,” Shumaker said of the campaigns preparing on the small stage of New Hampshire, “because if you do well, you’ll have to go national.”
“If the United States cherishes its tradition of giving anybody a shot at the presidency,” Ashooh said, it has to keep New Hampshire’s primary first in line because it allows for candidates who are not well-known nationally to reach out and meet the voters one-on-one.
This also means the candidates are scrutinized more thoroughly by the voters.
Literature for the Political Library describes the scene of a fresh presidential candidate preparing for a discussion of his “newly unveiled economic plan,” which “is apparently familiar to some in the audience, as he sees copies dog-eared from close readings.”
This may be a fictionalized setting, but according to Shumaker it rings true.
“A lot of successful candidates and unsuccessful candidates have said that they were better presidents and better candidates” because of the “retail” politicking required in the New Hampshire primary, he said.
Shumaker was the co-chair of then-Gov. Bill Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign in 1992 and said the would-be president was forced to develop his economic policy proposals more fully while campaigning there, and this helped him later in the national campaign.
