While critics of New Hampshire's first-inthe-nation presidential primary have
had no success in dislodging the Granite State from its place at the front
of the line, they have had something to smile about in recent years. For
decades, New Hampshire boasted of its ability to choose presidents; no
candidate had been elected president without first weathering a New England
winter and emerging victorious in New Hampshire. The first blemish on that
clean slate appeared in 1992, when Bill Clinton finished second to former
Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas in the Democratic primary, yet went on to
win his party's nomination and ultimately the presidency. Advocates of the
primary (and there are many) chalked this up to Tsongas's supposed status as
a “favorite son” candidate. A second blemish on New Hampshire's record
appeared in 2000, however, when George W. Bush suffered an 18-point loss to
John McCain, yet recovered to win his party's nomination and the presidency.
Disparagers of New Hampshire's quadrennial status (and there are many)
doubtless took these “failures” in prediction as more ammunition for their
argument that New Hampshire is too small and demographically
unrepresentative a state to have so much influence in winnowing out
candidates in the presidential nomination process.
Looking ahead to the 2004 Democratic primaries (and making the apparently
safe assumption, at this writing, that no serious candidate will emerge to
challenge President Bush for the GOP nomination), New Hampshire again is
front and center in the so-called invisible primary, the period of time
between the last presidential election and the first contests for the
nomination in the next election cycle. Prospective candidates for the
Democratic nomination already have made several visits to the Granite State
(and to Iowa, where caucuses will be held a week before the New Hampshire
primary), contributed money to state Democratic candidates, and put staffers
on the ground to work for state candidates in 2002, in order to learn the
political terrain for 2004.
All of these presidential hopefuls, of course, enter New Hampshire with the
assumption that a good showing there in the winter of 2004 will translate
into “momentum,” rocketing a campaign to victories in later primaries and
eventually to the nomination. Gauging how much of a bump a candidate gets
from New Hampshire, however, often seems more of an art than an exact
science. In 1972, George McGovern won just 37% of the vote and lost the New
Hampshire presidential primary by nine points to Edmund Muskie, yet Muskie
faltered and McGovern surged in later contests. In 1992, Clinton managed
just 24% of the vote in New Hampshire, yet pronounced himself the “Comeback
Kid” and trounced Tsongas in later primaries. In 2000, Bill Bradley lost in
New Hampshire by just four points to a sitting vice president—and had
absolutely nothing to show for his efforts in terms of “momentum” in later
primaries, which Gore won handily.
It is doubtlessly true that the varying amounts of momentum each of the above
candidates received had something to do with the “expectations” of success
for each candidate, markers laid down by the national political media.
Bradley's 45% showing, for example, did not seem so impressive after polls
released five months earlier had him dead-even with Gore. Clinton's
second-place finish, however, looked mighty indeed after revelations of
sexual scandal and draft-dodging had apparently put his campaign on life
support. From the “expectations” perspective, the only thing important about
New Hampshire's voting returns is that they are the first actual results
received, after months of media speculation about the prospects of various
candidates. From this perspective, the only interesting question about the
actual New Hampshire vote is how the results fit the media's “over/under,”
that is, whether the candidate has exceeded media expectations, met
expectations, or failed to meet expectations.
This article, rather than focusing on media expectations as the key to
momentum, instead concentrates on the “fundamentals” of the New Hampshire
Democratic primary vote in 1988, 1992, and 2000 as key predictors of success
in subsequent presidential primaries. (This is something akin to picking
stocks based on old-fashioned measures of value such as price-earnings
ratios, as opposed to buying whichever stocks have the best buzz from
various brokers on CNBC.) By focusing on how well candidates did with
particular segments of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote, such as
the working-class and the liberal elite, we can see which candidates showed
“sound fundamentals”—that is, evidence of a broad-based coalition composed
of both the liberal elite and the working-class base—and which candidates
showed “weak fundamentals,” or support from just one faction of the party,
with little evidence of the ability to build a coalition among the
Democratic Party electorate. During the last three Democratic Party cycles,
it has been the “coalition candidate,” not the candidate of a particular
faction, who has proceeded to win the nomination.
The Demographics of New Hampshire's Democratic Primary
Electorate
New Hampshire's place at the beginning of the presidential primary
calendar has long been dismissed as an unfortunate eccentricity of the
nomination process. “New Hampshire is said to be too small, too remote,
too atypical to be seriously regarded as a national political
barometer,” wrote Jules Witcover in his book on the 1976 presidential
election (Witcover 1977, 222). The reporter went on, however, to
question that conventional wisdom on the Granite State:
Except
for an uncommonly small percentage of blacks, however, New
Hampshire is not all that unlike many other states. Contrary to
the impression given by picture postcards of snowy covered
bridges and white church steeples, the state is heavily
industrial, and growing more so each year as plants and
bluecollar workers push northward from Boston and the eastern
Massachusetts complex. From Manchester and Nashua south and over
to the seacoast, where most of the state's population works and
lives, New Hampshire hums with the rhythms of machine and manual
labor, and with considerable white-collar energy as well. (Witcover 1977, 222)
Another piece of conventional wisdom on New Hampshire was its
conservatism, an ideological factor that crossed party lines.
Manchester, the largest city in the state and host of longclosed textile
mills, was acknowledged to be the center of working-class conservatism.
Its newspaper, the Union Leader, was notorious for the
blistering editorials of its publisher, William Loeb; in 1972, negative
stories on the wife of Edmund Muskie during the primary season drove the
senator to a fiery (some say teary) defense of his spouse in front of
the newspaper's offices. As late as 1984, Democratic candidates were
sizing up the state's electorate as moderate-to-conservative (Buell 2000).
Recent exit-poll surveys of New Hampshire Democrats, however, give cause
for significant correction of their conservative image. According to a
comprehensive review of primary exit polling by Emmett Buell (2000,
111–118), only 17% of New Hampshire voters in the 1984 Democratic
primary described themselves as conservatives—a smaller percentage than
was found in Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, and New Jersey,
for instance. Self-described moderates were a majority of the primary
vote that year. In 1992, only 14% of all voters casting ballots in the
Democratic primary described themselves as conservatives; that figure
dropped to 7% among strong party identifiers. In contrast, six of ten
strong party identifiers described themselves as liberal, and that label
was adopted by 43% of all Democratic primary voters. Moderates were also
quite prominent, representing 32% of strong party identifiers, 50% of
independents, and 42% of all primary voters.
Exit-polling from the most recent primary reinforced the profile of New
Hampshire as a liberal-to-moderate state for Democrats. An outright
majority of Democratic primary voters identified themselves as liberals,
38% as moderates, and just 8% as conservative. Independents remained a
significant factor, representing three of ten primary voters. The
primary electorate is also noteworthy for its large number of upscale
voters, both well-educated and well-off financially.
Where's the Vote Going? Turnout Trends in New Hampshire Cities
and Collar Communities
What storms lie ahead in the 2004 New Hampshire Democratic presidential
primary? Long-range forecasts are notoriously inaccurate, especially
with the roster of potential contestants so unsettled. One factor that
may be forecast with some accuracy is the balance of power between the
two main blocs of Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire: wealthy,
highly educated elites, and traditional working-class constituencies. In
order to offer a glimpse of the demographic trends that will shape the
2004 Democratic presidential primary, I examined the Democratic primary
turnout from 1976 to 2000 (in eight-year increments) in four major New
Hampshire cities—Manchester, Nashua, Concord, and Portsmouth—and
compared it to the turnout in the “collar” suburban communities
surrounding these cities.
In all four cases, the ratio of city turnout to collarcommunity turnout
has decreased since 1976. The most striking shifts in turnout appeared
in the cases of the Manchester and Nashua metropolitan areas, where
turnout in the collar communities exploded while turnout in the cities
remained stagnant or experienced smaller growth. Smaller shifts from
city to collar town occurred in Concord and Portsmouth and their
environs. All in all, it may fairly be claimed that as New Hampshire has
become more prosperous and more suburban over the past quarter-century,
so have Democratic presidential primary voters.
Predictors for Success: Coalition Candidates vs. Factional
Candidates
What, then, can New Hampshire primary voting patterns tell us about a
presidential candidate's potential for success in subsequent nomination
contests? Political analyst Rhodes Cook has claimed that results in the
Granite State offer a first, often de-finitive, look at how candidates
will do among three constituencies: suburban voters; college towns; and
the mill towns where the remnants of New Hampshire's blue-collar
population live.
In the following section, I build on Cook's analysis by using Census
Bureau data to target towns and city wards where these three
constituencies are most prominent. (For the purpose of this analysis, I
have collapsed college-town areas and well-to-do suburbs into “elite
communities,” as opposed to “working-class communities.”) In order to
target these specific areas, I examined each town and city ward in New
Hampshire for the following indicators of socioeconomic status:
percentage of adults with at least a college education; percentage of
adults in blue-collar and white-collar occupations; and median family
income1
To ascertain which towns and
wards qualified as “working-class communities” or “elite
communities,” the author used the latest information available
from the Census Bureau. As of this writing in August 2002, the
Census Bureau had not yet released New Hampshire's 2000
“long-form” data, which includes measures of socioeconomic
status such as educational attainment, median family income, and
occupational status. Therefore, 1990 data was used. Towns and
city wards with educational attainment and occupational status
levels significantly below the national average were classified
as “working-class” communities, and conversely, towns and city
wards with levels significantly above national averages were
classified as “elite” communities. Median family income also was
considered as a factor, albeit not as significant as the first
two variables.
Determining the socioeconomic status of New
Hampshire's city wards proved especially difficult, because
Census data is not provided for these units, as they are for
towns. Therefore, the following procedure was followed: 1)
Census block groups belonging to a particular ward were
identified, using the 2000 Census maps available online at
http://www2.census.gov/plmap/pl_blk/st33_NewHampshire;
2) Demographic data on these block groups were obtained from
1990 Census records, and 3) Blockgroup data were compiled and
aggregated to provide an approximate demographic profile of the
city ward.
This procedure was not without its
difficulties, which the author will identify here. First, while
the 1990 Census data are reasonably close in time to the 1988
and 1992 New Hampshire primaries, they are far away in time from
the 2000 primary. Data from 1990 was the best available,
however, while waiting for the release of 2000 data. Second, the
2000 Census maps take into account the redrawing of city wards
in the early 1990s. Thus, for purposes of analyzing the 1988 and
1992 New Hampshire returns, the author made the assumption that
only minor changes in city ward lines were made in the early
1990s—in other words, that no ward was changed so drastically
that it would lose its status as an elite or working-class ward.
An exception to that case was made for the city of Concord,
which shifted from eight wards to ten in the early 1990s; in
this case, information was obtained on wards from the city's
Community Development Department.
Once lists of “elite
communities” and “working-class communities” were set,
2 For a list of the specific towns and wards
classified as elite and working-class, contact the author at
dscala@anselm.edu, or consult the appendices to
his forthcoming book, Stormy Weather: The New Hampshire
Primary and Presidential Politics (Palgrave McMillan,
December 2003).
the Democratic primary vote results
were compiled for both sets of communities.
The results offer a comprehensive view of how candidates for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, 1992, and 2000 did among two
important party constituencies in New Hampshire. Candidates are listed
by their statewide vote, from highest to lowest, followed by their vote
totals and percentages in elite communities and working-class
communities.
After the vote totals were listed, a candidate's percentage of the vote
in elite communities was divided by a candidate's percentage of the vote
in working-class communities. The result is the candidate's “elite
factor.” The higher the candidate's elite factor was above 1.00, the
better he did among elite communities, compared to his support in
working-class communities. The lower the candidate's elite factor below
1.00, the better the candidate fared among working-class communities,
compared to his support in elite communities.
The closer a candidate's elite factor was to 1.00, the more even the
candidate's performance in elite communities and in working-class
communities—and thus, a candidate was better able to forge a coalition
among different factions of the Democratic Party, than a candidate with
an elite-factor score high above or significantly below 1.00.
Findings
Candidates for the presidential nomination of their party (as well as the
media that cover them) often approach New Hampshire as the dispenser of
that magical elixir known as “momentum.” In the frantic process of
“winnowing” that begins with the Iowa caucuses and ends with New
Hampshire and its immediate aftermath, pundits often draw a
cause-andeffect relationship between a candidate's ability to exceed the
expectations of conventional media wisdom, and his potential to convert
performance in these first two contests into success in subsequent
primaries. Excessive focus on the mediaexpectations game leads to a
narrow reading of the vote totals, with a lack of serious thought about
what those votes represent in terms of core party constituencies.
Shifting the focus to the “core fundamentals” of a candidate's
performance in the New Hampshire primary—that is, how the candidate
performed among “elite communities” and “workingclass
communities”—offers a perspective that tempers “irrational exuberance”
regarding the significance of a strong candidate performance in New
Hampshire. Concentrating on the core fundamentals of a candidate's
support also puts perspective on the effects of “media spin” on a
candidate's performance.
Put simply: Candidates who are competitive in New Hampshire, and
display “coalition” or “crossover” potential there (appealing both
to elite voters and working-class voters), are much more likely to
win the Democratic Party's nomination than candidates who only
appeal to one faction.
Twenty years ago, Nelson Polsby, in his pioneering work on the
primary-centered nomination process, made the case that candidates for a
presidential nomination must try to mobilize factions, rather than build
coalitions, in order to win. “The task of a presidential hopeful,
threading a path through the minefield of successive primary elections,
is not to win a majority but rather to survive,” he argued (Polsby
1983). In order to survive, a candidate must achieve as high a ranking
as possible among his competitors. To accomplish this, one must win an
early primary, in order to gain exposure and media attention as a
“contender,” and to raise more money to compete in subsequent contests.
A win in an early state might depend on defeating a rival by just
several thousand votes, as it did for Jimmy Carter in the 1976 New
Hampshire primary. Therefore, a candidate should try to distinguish
himself from his competitors, build organizations, and get more of his
supporters out to vote—all while hoping that his rivals wind up
competing for the same share of the vote in a particular wing of the
party. Again, such a strategy worked for Carter in 1976; early on, most
of his rivals were fighting to be the candidate of the liberal wing of
the party, while Carter had the conservative wing mainly to himself in
Iowa and New Hampshire.
In 1988, 1992, and 2000, however, the eventual nominee of the Democratic
Party was the candidate who did the best job of building coalitions in
New Hampshire, not the one who mobilized a particular faction. In 1988,
Michael Dukakis was the only candidate to draw equally well from both
elite and workingclass communities, defeating two “faction” candidates,
Richard Gephardt (who did very well among working-class communities,
considerably worse among elite communities) and Paul Simon (strong
performance among elite communities, weak performance among
working-class communities). Al Gore, who aborted his 1988 New Hampshire
campaign to pursue a Southern strategy, showed some potential for
achieving crossover status, but only received 7% of the overall vote.
Dukakis, the coalition candidate in New Hampshire, proved to have much
more staying power in the primaries than either of his factional
rivals.
The 1992 primary cycle provides the most compelling evidence that the
ability to form coalitions in New Hampshire is a good predictor of
success in subsequent primaries. In 1992, Bill Clinton succeeded in
disproving the maxim that every president must first win the New
Hampshire primary; despite finishing second to Paul Tsongas in New
Hampshire, Clinton succeeded in winning the Democratic Party's
nomination and eventually the presidency. (Jerry Brown also drew equally
well from both elite and working-class communities, but like Gore,
received under 10% of the statewide vote.) Again, looking at the core
fundamentals of Clinton's and Tsongas's respective votes in New
Hampshire casts doubt on the conventional analysis of the 1992 primary.
One piece of conventional wisdom was that Tsongas won the primary
because of his “favorite son” status as a Massachusetts senator who
hailed from Lowell, right next to the border between the two states.
Geography played some part in Tsongas's success, but a comparison of his
core fundamentals with those of another Massachusetts candidate, Michael
Dukakis, indicates that the two had very different bases of support.
While Dukakis drew support almost equally well from elite communities
and working-class communities, Tsongas's base came mainly from elite
communities.
Another piece of conventional wisdom on that New Hampshire primary is
that Clinton stole the night (and the allimportant momentum) from
Tsongas, by getting on the airwaves first with his declaration that New
Hampshire had made him the “Comeback Kid.” Again, a look at the
fundamentals of Clinton's vote indicates that he actually had good
reason to be confident that evening, regardless of when he got on the
air: he had drawn well from both elite and working-class communities, an
early indication that his vote-getting potential in subsequent primaries
would be much greater than Tsongas's.
The last New Hampshire primary studied here, the 2000 contest between
Gore and Bradley, provides one last piece of evidence for the potential
of candidates who prove their ability to form coalitions in New
Hampshire. One of the great “what ifs” in New Hampshire primary history
concerns the future potential of the Bradley campaign, if only it had
managed to turn a few thousand more votes its way in the Granite State.
Again, this “what if” scenario is based on the expectations game:
Bradley had been running even with Gore in New Hampshire polls as early
as Labor Day 1999, therefore nothing less than a win in New Hampshire
would meet or exceed media expectations. In a variation on this,
Bradley's strong second place in New Hampshire was overshadowed by John
McCain's stunning first-place finish; in effect, McCain became the
insurgent of the 2000 primary cycle, sucking all the media oxygen out of
Bradley's campaign.
No doubt a Bradley victory in New Hampshire would likely have given his
campaign a much-needed second wind. A look at the fundamentals of
Bradley's vote, however, compared to the broad base of Gore's support,
indicates that the insurgent's campaign was based on the support of the
elite faction of the party, not a coalition. As a result, even a narrow
Bradley victory in New Hampshire would not have overcome his relatively
poor fundamentals, compared to those of his rival.
Several possible explanations exist for why coalition candidates, not
factional candidates, have been more successful of late. One is the
front-loading of numerous primaries increasingly early in the schedule,
close to Iowa and New Hampshire. As a result, candidates do not have the
luxury of beginning the primary cycle with the support of just one
faction of the party, with the hope of adding other factions later in
the process. Coupled with front-loading is the need to raise large
amounts of money (at least 20 million dollars, conventional wisdom
dictates) before the primaries even begin; in a front-loaded process, an
insurgent candidate can no longer “live off the land,” counting on upset
victories to bring more funds into campaign coffers, in order to fight
and win another day. Perhaps the need to raise large amounts of money
early forces a candidate to appeal to diverse interests in the party.
The recent success of coalition candidates in New Hampshire may be
supporting evidence for the hypothesis that party leaders have recovered
their ability to control presidential nominations, despite the vagaries
of the primary process; one would expect party leaders to coordinate
their efforts on behalf of a candidate who appeals to various factions
of the party (Cohen et al. 2001).
Whatever the case, while a victory in New Hampshire can no longer be
declared essential to ascending to the presidency, a strong case can
still be made that a candidate must perform well in the Granite State to
be a serious contender. An examination of recent New Hampshire primary
results, however, indicates that one must be careful how strength of
performance is measured. In 2004, New Hampshire again could be a
hothouse for candidates who appeal to the party's elite, such as Bradley
and Tsongas; but campaigns which grow well in Granite State soil often
wither when exposed to the harsher voting environment of subsequent
primary states, where the socioeconomic status of the average primary
voter is most likely significantly lower (Brownstein
1999). In contrast, candidates that do not necessarily finish
first in New Hampshire, but build a broad base of support, could do much
better than expected in subsequent primaries.
