The New Hampshire primary always shifts me out of scholarly political-scientist mode and into political-news-junkie mode. And when I say ‘always’ I mean ‘always.’ I remember uninformed arguments on Portsmouth playgrounds during the 1980 campaign, when I was eight. By the time of the ’84 Hart-Mondale race I was fully a part of the culture: Meet lots of candidates, argue with them about your own pet issues, carefully consider your own preference (mine was for Hart) even if for some arbitrary reason (e.g. being twelve years old) one isn’t eligible to vote. Indeed, lots of the New Hampshirites I knew had clearly articulable preferences in both parties’ primaries, though they could only vote in one. I argued about drugs with Pete DuPont and national service with Dick Gephardt. I don’t study American politics or elections, but growing up around the New Hampshire primary surely pushed me toward political science in the first place.
New Hampshirites like to think that our primary is decisive or nearly so. Only one Democrat (Clinton ’92) and one Republican (Bush ’00) have won the White House without winning the N.H. primary since the primary system began. No one has won his party’s nomination without coming in first or second in the Granite State.
But the odd truth about the New Hampshire primary is that it doesn’t pick Presidents anymore. It doesn’t even pick nominees. What it does is put a good scare into the eventual nominee.
Consider: In 1984 Gary Hart beat Walter Mondale. In ’88 George H.W. Bush–a sitting vice-president–only managed a nine-point win over Bob Dole. In 1992, as a sitting president, he only beat Pat Buchanan by 16 in a two-man race; and Bill Clinton lost to Paul Tsongas (though narrowly enough that he was able to anoint himself “The Comeback Kid”). In 1996 Buchanan actually beat Dole, and in 2000 John McCain beat George W. Bush, prompting the panicked demagoguery of the South Carolina campaign. Eventual nominees: Mondale, Bush, Bush, Clinton, Dole, and Bush, respectively.
The `good scare’ doesn’t always translate into `losing.’ HW did win each of his two primaries. And last night (as in 1992) there wasn’t a clear establishment man, something I’ll return to below. So it’s difficult to be quite sure whether the pattern still holds, or who the scarer and scaree were last night if it does. Was last night as close as the upstart governor will ever get to beating the patrician Senator? Or was it the last chance to stop the guy who (let’s not forget) still has vastly more money and union power than anyone else in the race, advantages that will matter more and more as the campaign moves past Iowa and New Hampshire?
The `good scare’ pattern might mean one or more of the following.
1) Nominations are won with the usual institutions of support: lots of money, lots of endorsements, powerful interest group support, and so on. The New Hampshire primary is the moment in the campaign when a candidate whose strength lies elsewhere–say, in a personal connection with voters, or in charisma, or in wonkishness–to shine. Relatedly, New Hampshire voters just get cantankerous about anyone whose nomination seems determined by forces outside voters’ control, or anyone who seems to be taking the nomination for granted. So they punish such candidates, but then those larger forces reassert themselves and the establishment candidates win. It seems to me that this is the theory that plays to Dean’s advantage; he still has commanding institutional resources. His loss in New Hampshire was the last moment that his resources could be outweighed by other things.
2) New Hampshire is an unrepresentative, idiosyncratic state, and voters elsewhere just aren’t interested in the qualities that New Hampshire voters are. The previous theory is about the difference between voters and the establishment or powerful interest groups, and identifies New Hampshire as the voters’ chance to take a stand. This theory is that New Hampshire’s voters are different from voters elsewhere. The two obviously have different normative consequences; in one case, the goal should be to make the rest of the process more like the New Hampshire primary, while in the other the goal should probably be to dethrone New Hampshire from its privileged role.
I also think they have different consequences for our understanding of the race. Dean acquired his longstanding front-runner status in large part on the basis of his standing in the New Hampshire polls, and even after his collapse he played better in New Hampshire than in Iowa. I think this theory would tell us that New Hampshire voters were idiosyncratic in their taste for their cranky next-door neighbor, and that he will now fade quickly. But I also find this theory less persuasive than the first. Hart and McCain, to pick the two clearest examples, got buried by their opponents’ resources, not by their intrinsic popularity. Anti-tax New Hampshire was probably ripe country for Buchanan in 1992, because of HW’s violation of his tax pledge; but in ’92 and `96 he had a more natural base in the protectionist states of the midwest and the immigration-fearing ones of the south and west. His failure to go further in either year (much as it pains me to admit this) wasn’t because of any nationwide unpopularity of his ideas among Republican primary voters.
3) The establishment candidates change after the scare they get in New Hampshire; they stop taking the voters for granted, rise to the challenge posed by the upstart, and emerge as stronger candidates for it. I think this might well be true of, for example, W. in 2000 (where `stronger’ only means `more effective on the campaign trail, with a willingness to win ugly’). But I have a hard time seeing it as true this year. If Kerry turns out to be the nominee, then-as Noam Scheiber has argued-Dean won’t really have done the work of making Kerry a better candidate. If Dean is to pull out a victory now, he will certainly have to become a more effective candidate; but I just don’t see that happening.
4) New Hampshire voters just really hate Bushes and Doles. After all, they could barely bring themselves to vote for W. in the general election, despite the state’s substantial Republican advantage in registration. In all five contested Republican primaries dating back to 1980, the establishment candidate who got embarrassed was a Bush or a Dole. If that’s all there is to the `good scare’ pattern, then nothing follows for this year’s Democrats.
Drawing implications for this year’s race is oddly difficult. Of course, this year’s race is odd. The standard list of character types is missing some exemplars this year, and there aren’t any absurdly implausible candidates among the leaders. There’s no one in the Pete DuPont/ Paul Tsongas/ Bruce Babbitt role of the charismaless earnest policy wonk filled with running entirely on the strength of serious thoughts about making government better, not at all on resume or character claims (except insofar as the wonkishness is itself the character message). The 1996 (though not the 2000) incarnation of Steve Forbes had this sort of campaign, too. These guys never went anywhere in the long term. But they simultaneously helped to elevate the intellectual tone of the early stages of the primary season and to provide inadvertent entertainment through the haplessness of their candidacies.
The utter-nutcase role previously played by Pat Robertson, Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer, Bob Dornan, and Jerry Brown is only inadequately filled by Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton. Sharpton’s too smooth. He’s a tremendously effective speaker. He’s not the candidate most likely to say something utterly bizarre in a debate; he’s among the least, as he knows what he’s doing with words. (That only makes some of the things he’s done with words worse.) And Kucinich is too invisible, making much less of a public impression than nutcases past. Similarly, Howard Dean, angry though he may be, is no Pat Buchanan.
But the
role of the Establishment Candidate–occupied by Mondale, Bush pere and fils, Gore, and Dole–is also not quite filled. Lieberman should be the heir apparent, according to traditional rules. A year ago John Kerry was assumed to have a lock on the role. But Howard Dean now has the money, the union support, and the endorsements, while the Clintonite establishment is split between Clark and Edwards.
New Hampshire traditionally provides the campaign’s darkest hour for the establishment candidate who goes on to win the nomination. This makes it a little surprising that the state has managed to hold onto its primary; it can’t be much beloved in either party’s headquarters. If Dean somehow pulls out a victory in the coming weeks based on his resource bank, the pattern will hold. If not, maybe that will show that New Hampshire’s voters became a little less idiosyncratic this year, and thereby undid the Dean phenomenon they had done so much to create.
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