After wandering in at least two circumnavigations of part of downtown Manchester, New Hampshire, I ended up in Hooksett for the night. I remembered along the way that exactly ten years ago I was in Manchester in the final days of the all-important New Hampshire presidential primary. And that got me thinking about the debate over the Granite State’s special place in the process.
As part of the Claremont McKenna College Washington, DC, Semester Program, they took us to Manchester for those final few days. We met with editorial staff at the Manchester Union Leader and attended a comedy show emceed by Tony Snow, but spent most of our time volunteering for the candidate of our choice.
I jumped around on-stage at a rally, participated in a literature drop, helped organize get-out-the-vote teams, and went without sleep for about 40 hours. It was great–and eye opening.
List many people, I had harbored doubts about New Hampshire’s preeminent role in the presidential candidate selection process. Watching it first hand convinced me that, as arbitrary as it may be to let the Granite State go first, the nation wins more than it loses.
New Hampshire is a low population state, with about 1.3 million people total. While this is nearly the same as Maine and twice as many as Vermont, New Hampshire has a much higher population density than either of those states (New Hampshire has 137.8 persons per square mile, also higher than the national population density of 79.6 persons per square mile). And it isn’t dominated by an outside media market (though Boston media does bleed in).
New Hampshire is a good state for campaigning, especially the “retail” variety–that hand shaking and chit chatting found almost nowhere else along the presidential campaign trail. According to the New Hampshirites I talked with a decade ago, most voters in a presidential primary have met not just one but several of the candidates. All this makes New Hampshire the most personal stop along that presidential trail, a unique testing ground or “gut check” or “dose of reality” for people all-too-prone to believe their own press and fawning supporters.
So can a political process that owes its existence to arbitrary causes, that wasn’t designed with anything like the national interest in mind, really be “the right” process? That question divides the men from the boys, the statesmen from the reformers, those who accept the limitations inherent in human nature from the French Revolution’s bitter enders. If it works, it it produces beneficial effects, then it’s the right process until someone can show, not that they have better intentions, but that their reform will produce better results in the hard-edged world of politics and–that bane of all reformers–people.
There’s more on my trip and my day in Augusta at SaveOurStates.com.
