Why New Hampshire Will Pick the President

They stand in the intersection, drenched by what is left of a hurricane that blew itself out a thousand miles to the south. If you want to stand in the divided political heart of the country, stand with them there, on a little feeder road that leads onto the campus of Daniel Webster College in Nashua, the remnants of a great storm soaking through your shoes, and watch them work the intersection, both sides, in a political year that has been a tempest from the moment it began.

Senator John Edwards is coming to the college for a town-hall type meeting, the sixth time this year that the campus has hosted a national candidate. Founded in 1965, the college is 12 years younger than John Edwards, but political people know how to find it now. The minivans with the "Kerry/Edwards" bumper stickers roll placidly through the intersection and up into a parking lot, where they disgorge similarly festooned passengers, who have to walk back to the event through a noisy claque of people waving "Bush/Cheney" signs and brandishing flip-flop sandals, a less-than-sly reference to a favored meme of Republicans. A dialogue ensues.

"Where are all the Kerry signs?" asks a woman in a poncho.

"Al Qaeda's got them," replies a man in a floppy hat, to the general hilarity of his fellows. This prompts a lengthy exegesis on the military service (or lack thereof) of President George W. Bush on the part of yet another passing Kerry supporter.

"He's a deserter!" he concludes. This occasions an instantaneous rebuttal from the back of the Bush crowd.

"Scumbag!"

And so it goes -- democracy, that is -- on one wet morning in New Hampshire, a place that seems as split down the middle as the rest of the country, a battleground in our own backyard.

More than ever before, New Hampshire is being courted. It's been wooed with television ads. It's been romanced by surrogates, all come to whisper or to shout their blandishments into the state's willing ears. John F. Kerry's daughter in Exeter one week, talking about college tuition, and George W. Bush's wife in Manchester two weeks later, talking about health care. Vice President Dick Cheney was in Nashua two days before the crowd gathered at the tiny intersection. Now comes the fellow looking to take his place.

"People are looking at it like this is rock-ribbed Republican New Hampshire," explains Warren B. Rudman, a Republican and a former US senator from New Hampshire. "With the growth of the state, the state has become more independent and more centrist and, in a way, more Democratic. That shouldn't come as any great shock to anyone. People who suddenly say what's happened to rock-ribbed Republican New Hampshire are ignoring history. This is a very competitive state." However, it was the last presidential election in which New Hampshire became the country's perfect fractal.

The post-mortem on the 2000 presidential election is ongoing; in fact, it can be argued that the most extensive element of that post-mortem is the 2004 presidential election. There are the eternal arguments about hanging chads and voter fraud in Florida and the endless, bitter recriminations over why Bill Clinton was left off the bus in vital states like Arkansas and Tennessee. Withal, the fact remains that, had George Bush not edged Al Gore in New Hampshire by a thin 7,211 votes (out of more than a half-million votes cast), none of the rest of it would have mattered. New Hampshire's paltry four electoral votes would have swung the election to the Democrats and rendered irrelevant all the other states entangled in that ungodly snarl, including Florida, Arkansas, and the bedraggled state of political journalism. The question that was fought out in Miami would have been settled in Manchester.

And that's where it may well be settled this year. "The country is very much divided, and it hasn't changed much in the last four years," says Jayne Millerick, the chairwoman of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee. "We're looking at a situation that could be as close as it was last time.

"One thing it has done is put a lot of focus on us, and we've had the resources we need to connect with more people in New Hampshire. Because they know how close the election is, maybe they volunteer a couple of hours and vote."

"We did a town hall with Senator Kerry," says Nick Clemons, a field organizer for the Democratic ticket, "and it was clear that the fact that New Hampshire is a battleground state has extended people's interest. Usually, you'd have the primary, and then it was Republican time. This year, we can't get enough bumper stickers or T-shirts."

However much of an anachronism you believe the Electoral College to be, it works splendidly as a magnifying glass. By making a place like New Hampshire, with its 1.3 million people, into a battleground as important as, say, Missouri, a state with more than four times the population, the Electoral College lends national import to every one of New Hampshire's parochial political concerns. Demographic changes in the state's southern tier, down by Massachusetts, become important to people in Jacksonville, Florida, and Little Rock, Arkansas. If the Republican governor is in trouble, which he is, it has to be seen in the light of its effect at the very top of the ballot. If there's a bizarre court case involving dirty tricks at a get-out-the-vote phone bank, which there is, that becomes a national story. It is the Electoral College that creates the battlegrounds, and it is the battlegrounds that create their own unique internal imperatives.

In a battleground, people will walk for you, even through a steady drizzle. The crowd along the road disperses. Deep in the heart of the campus, they've put up a sound system outside the gymnasium in which Edwards is speaking, because there weren't enough seats in the place for everyone who had showed up, and there are people outside, huddled under an awning, listening to what he has to say.

"I've spent almost a year talking to people in New Hampshire, and I always like to come back here and find out from New Hampshire what's going on in the real world," says John Edwards, his huckleberry accent echoing through the brick buildings around the quadrangle and off into the pine forest beyond.

WE IN MASSACHUSETTS only like to pretend we are political renegades. In reality, we're as regular as the tides. What else can be said of a state that believes that electing Mitt Romney, and Bill Weld before him, as governor is an act of heedless nonconformity, while all the while returning a Democratic Legislature as uniform as that battalion of terra-cotta soldiers they buried with the Chinese emperor? On the presidential level, even our conspicuous McGovernite eccentricity in 1972 demonstrates nothing more than our complete predictability. In fact, compared with New Hampshire, Massachusetts always is the safest bet on the board.

There are those people who believe that, outside of exit polling and Fred Barnes, the worst thing television ever did to American politics was to create the red-state/blue-state paradigm that has come to define this presidential election as thoroughly as it illustrated the last one. It even has created a new subset this time around. Inspired by the big box of Crayolas they used as children, pollsters now talk about "purple" states, in which are mixed "red" voters and "blue" voters -- Republicans and Democrats, respectively. It is these several states that will decide the election this year, and there is not one of them that has purpled so noticeably as has New Hampshire. Almost 38 percent of the state's voters are registered as independents. The governor and the entire New Hampshire congressional delegation are Republicans, but Clinton carried the state twice, in 1992 and 1996.

And it is typical of New Hampshire that both Clinton's 1992 victory and Gore's narrow loss last time depended vitally on the presence of viable third-party candidates. Twelve years ago, Ross Perot took a whopping 23 percent of the vote, bleeding enough support away from incumbent George H.W. Bush that Clinton was able to win the state with less than 40 percent. In 2000, it was Ralph Nader who pulled more than enough votes to make up the slim margin by which Bush beat Gore (and he's on the ballot again this November). Couple those results with off-the-reservation primary wins by people like Gary Hart (over eventual Democratic nominee Walter F. Mondale in 1984), Patrick J. Buchanan (over eventual Republican nominee Bob Dole in 1996), and John McCain (over eventual president George W. Bush in 2000), and there is a pattern of nonconformity with very deep roots, and the taproot of it all is the unique place held by the New Hampshire primary.

Every four years, the presidential primary season is what New Hampshire has, the way Massachusetts has the Freedom Trail. We have Bunker Hill and the Old North Church. New Hampshire has the Wayfarer Inn and the Lions Club. It has long since passed from being merely a political exercise into being a cultural icon. This has created in New Hampshire a political culture that not only takes itself very seriously but also takes very seriously the act of taking itself very seriously. Given the state's sudden national importance in the general election, the fervor with which voters in New Hampshire approach their primary now carries over into the fall.

"I have had a number of pollsters and pundits tell me that they view New Hampshire voters as the most educated voters about politics in the country," says Rudman. And even if it isn't true, people in New Hampshire plainly believe it is, hence the ferocious defense they muster any time there is a threat by either party to diminish the importance of the New Hampshire primary. In the past 10 years, any attempt at diluting New Hampshire's impact has been thwarted by both Republican and Democratic governors. Just last year, New Hampshire and Michigan got into a stare down when the latter threatened to hold its caucuses on the same date as the New Hampshire primary. Michigan blinked.

Over the past decade, profound demographic changes have occurred in New Hampshire, and all of them wrought changes in the prevailing political order. In the early 1990s, for example, the real estate market crashed. That not only was politically damaging to the Republican establishment, it also brought people flocking in over the border from Massachusetts. According to the 2000 Census, 50 percent of the people living in New Hampshire were not born there. It would be logical to think that many of these new residents make up the 38 percent of the New Hampshire electorate that describes itself as "undeclared," an odd amalgam that includes libertarian conservative economics and fairly progressive views on most of the hot-button social issues, New Hampshire having fewer of the kind of fundamentalist Christians who organize around the latter issues elsewhere. The single most important issue in New Hampshire remains "taking the pledge" against a state income tax. Once you've taken the pledge, you're somewhat liberated in that almost any opinion you espouse on almost any other issue will find an audience.

"They lean, in presidential races, one way or the other," explains Arnie Arnesen, a former gubernatorial candidate and now a popular radio talk-show host. "Because taxes are off the table, as long as you sound like a Democrat and fiscally act like a Republican, you're simply smashing to us."

"We have fiscal conservatives who are socially more liberal," explains Dick Bennett, president of the American Research Group, a Manchester-based political polling firm. "The transformation began 10 or 12 years ago. It split, and the advantage really depended upon the candidate." At the same time, he says, "the Democrats were becoming more liberal and the Republicans were becoming more conservative. They both were becoming, like, if you don't agree on every issue, you're not one of us.

"In addition, there isn't a lot of [party] loyalty anymore. There's no control, nobody saying, `Well, it isn't your turn, but if you wait, we promise you that you can run.'"

All of this was in play in January, when a spirited Democratic primary debate brought seven candidates through the state, including the eventual nominee, Kerry, his eventual running mate, Edwards, and several attractive also-rans, including retired General Wesley K. Clark and former governor Howard Dean, the onetime front-runner from across the border in Vermont. Even the eventual primary losers found themselves with overflow crowds at their various campaign appearances. One Edwards event at the Merrimack Ten Pin Center grew so large and unruly that the woman renting bowling shoes at the place first got snarky over the public address system and then called the police. Not all of the people who swamped these events were necessarily registered Democrats. Almost any politician can find an audience within the fluid New Hampshire electorate, and because Al Gore did not understand this, he's not the president of the United States today.

In 2000, Gore lost New Hampshire -- and, therefore, the election -- because, late in the campaign, with its New Hampshire operation screaming for resources, the Gore people simply wrote the state off. "We had a large field staff here, working for the entire Democratic ticket," recalls field organizer Clemons. "But there never was the air-cover with the broadcast media significant enough to match what the Bush people had here." However, the critical mistake the Gore people made was the one of which Rudman spoke -- thinking that there would be no substantial following in "rock-ribbed, Republican" New Hampshire for Ralph Nader. This crucial miscalculation cost Gore the better part of 22,198 votes, thousands more than he would have needed to swing the state and win the White House. This is not a mistake that either party plans to make again. This year, nothing is so trivial in New Hampshire as to be unimportant. No mistake is a minor one. No scandal is too small. Everyone's eye is on every sparrow.

THE SUITE IS COOL and comfortable, just what the Republican Governors Association wanted in New York at Madison Square Garden, so its members could chill out from the hard work of renominating George W. Bush, who used to be one of their own. This is luxury-box politics, and Craig Benson is in his element here, kidding around with Mike Huckabee from Arkansas and talking about the campaign he's in to stay governor of New Hampshire. "I'm a risk taker," Benson says. "I've always been one."

In many ways, Benson is both the prototypical postmodern pol and the typical New Hampshire wild card. He was elected in 2002 as a neophyte -- a high-tech, buccaneer millionaire who financed his own campaign. (Benson's signature company, Cabletron Systems, was considered to be a shark tank, even by the formidable standards of high-tech corporate Darwinism. Benson left Cabletron in 1999 with a fortune estimated by Forbes one year later at $920 million.) He won the most expensive gubernatorial election in the state's history. Since then, Benson has become a lightning rod. He never quite mended fences from a bruising primary battle two years ago, and what is seen to be his peremptory management style not only has alienated legislators of both parties but also has managed to embroil him in an embarrassing legal wrangle that seems unlikely to disappear any time soon. Benson has become such a polarizing figure that more than a few political leaders are wondering whether or not Benson's unpopularity will be sufficient to pull down the rest of the Republican ticket, including the former Republican governor who will appear at its top.

"The problem for the Republican ticket is that there's no loyalty to the guy," says pollster Bennett. "He had 424 legislators going home and complaining about him. I think he's a drag on the ticket.

"You know, the guy's a bomb thrower. He appeals to those voters who don't like government because they believe it doesn't do anything right. The problem Benson has is that, as governor, this hasn't worked."

A defiant and embattled governor is not the least of the problems facing New Hampshire's Republicans, as they fight to deliver their state against a campaign waged by a senator from neighboring Massachusetts. For example, there is the Great Phone Bank Caper of 2002. In July, Chuck McGee, the former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, pleaded guilty in federal court for his part in an elaborate dirty-tricks plot during the US senatorial race between Governor Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, and Representative John E. Sununu, a Republican. According to McGee, he helped conspire to jam the get-out-the-vote phone lines at the Democratic Party offices and the Manchester firefighters union. Even worse for the Bush campaign, McGee also has told prosecutors that he had encouragement from higher up in the GOP food chain. New Hampshire is now buzzing with speculation as to which prominent official of the president's campaign may get dragged into this case.

"It's just one of the dumbest things they could have done," says a New Hampshire political observer. "It just alienated the local people who have to do all the work for you, and now, with McGee in court, they're going to shy away from working with whoever the Bush campaign has coming in."

"Hey," says Benson, "I got hurt by that, too, because those firefighters had endorsed me."

In addition to the McGee case, there seems to have been a vigorous, if unlikely, flirtation between New Hampshire Republicans and Ralph Nader, whose presence on the ballot helped Bush carry the state four years ago. In August, it was revealed that a Republican consulting firm had been working to collect signatures to get Nader on the New Hampshire ballot and that the Nader petitions had been gathered at a picnic honoring President Bush on August 6. The GOP's protestations of innocence were not helped by the fact that one of the names on the Nader petition was that of Jayne Millerick, the party's state chairwoman.

"Ballot access is ballot access," explains Millerick. "I can't speak for the whole party, but I can tell you what I believe to be true."

Both of these are microcosms of a close national campaign. Given the ill feeling that still attaches to the 2000 election, it is more than likely that accusations of political chicanery on the order of the alleged phone-bank jamming probably will fly thick and fast elsewhere as this campaign accelerates toward a conclusion. And Republicans for Nader is unquestionably a national phenomenon, most notably in Florida. However, the problems with Craig Benson and the former attorney general are New Hampshire's alone.

In May, New Hampshire attorney general Peter Heed was accused of inappropriately touching a state employee named Cheryl Reid while she was dancing with her boyfriend at a domestic-violence conference at Mount Washington Hotel. In June, Heed resigned. However, an investigation by the Sullivan County attorney, Peter Hathaway, not only cleared Heed of any criminal wrong-doing -- while remaining agnostic on whether or not Heed had simply acted badly -- but also recommended that an investigation be conducted into whether Benson and his state safety commissioner improperly interfered in Hathaway's investigation in such a way as to force Heed out of office before the end of the investigation.

The affair has transformed itself from sockless idiocy on a lounge's dance floor into a kind of referendum on the management style that served Benson well as a cut-throat CEO but which rarely translates into effective politics, in which the voters keep reelecting people even a CEO governor can't simply fire. One of Benson's 2002 contributors, a Manchester lawyer named Kenneth C. Brown, now represents Heed. And Brown is backing John Lynch, the Democratic candidate running to replace Benson. If Brown's evolution is in any way typical of the rest of the state, then Craig Benson could turn out to be the best friend John Kerry ever had. And both sides know it.

The problem for the Republicans, says pollster Bennett, is that Benson doesn't have any coattails, and "basically, the Republicans need every advantage they can get, and they're not getting it from him."

In fact, Lynch is almost Benson's mirror image -- a businessman-candidate running for office for the first time. He also is a perfect prototype of how the New Hampshire electorate has changed. He was born in Waltham and moved north. He's a Democrat who already has taken the pledge against the state income tax, and he also clearly sees the gubernatorial race in New Hampshire as a possibly integral part of the larger national event.

"People are taking their vote very, very seriously this time around," says Lynch. "They're very focused on the national ticket -- and they really believe that every vote counts." He adds, "I think they're really looking for integrity." Of course, right before the primary, a mysterious letter appeared in which his campaign purportedly announced "Independents for Lynch," a group that does not exist and that the candidate did not create. The letter claimed that Lynch supports same-sex marriage and that Lynch would veto a ban on partial-birth abortions. A round of denunciations and denials flew back and forth between the Republicans and the Democrats, but a few days later, Craig Benson's campaign put out a statement suggesting that candidates for governor "finally release" their positions on several of the issues specifically mentioned in the letter. The governor's spokespeople scoffed at the notion that there was any connection.

What was once said of New Orleans is now true of New Hampshire. Battleground states are marvelous environments for coincidence.

AND IT NEVER STOPS. You could see it moving forward in a ballroom of the Barclay, a respectable old pile in midtown Manhattan, where the New Hampshire delegation gathered to have breakfast on the second morning of the Republican National Convention. Governor George E. Pataki of New York stopped by, and so did Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, and while they both took enthusiastic whacks at John Kerry, the subtext of their visits pretty plainly concerned a chilly winter's afternoon at the beginning of 2008. Frist complained about the cold weather in New Hampshire, and Pataki complained about people who complained about it. This was about the next election, and this breakfast was a time machine with croissants.

Tom Rath is a big part of the institutional memory of New Hampshire's politics, or of the Republican half of it, at any rate. A former state attorney general and a former trustee at (yes) Daniel Webster College, Rath was around in 1980, when Ronald ("I paid for this microphone, Mr. Green") Reagan buried the elder George Bush at a debate up in Nashua. (And, for the record, Reagan got the name of The Telegraph's editor wrong in his famous outburst. The fellow's name actually was Breen.) Rath has seen Republican governors from cranky old Meldrim Thomson Jr., who once proposed arming the New Hampshire National Guard with nuclear weapons, to Craig Benson, who has his own problems. Rath has been around long enough to see the state evolve to the point at which the country doesn't dare forget New Hampshire once its cute little primary is over.

"This is great. Isn't it great?" Rath says. "They're all running here already, and that's because they know that the vote in New Hampshire is now one of the significant votes in the country, that it isn't just the primary anymore. New Hampshire is going to be a battleground state for the presidency for a long time. Look at this year. The Democrats have been working the state, one way or another, for 12 to 18 months.

"If you go back through the last four presidential elections, you'll see that we've pretty much gone our own way, that we're always kind of an anomaly in the presidential race. That's a good thing to be."

Pataki and Frist moved away, off into the lobby of the hotel, off toward a rosy future of pure ambition, not yet complicated by voters, opponents, embattled governors, weird letters, jammed phone banks, or the simple cussedness of people who have decided to take an election seriously. Tom Rath stays at breakfast, working the room, cultivating his own little piece of the battleground and rooted firmly in 2004, which isn't anywhere near over yet, which means that, fundamentally, the whole country is New Hampshire now.

Charles P. Pierce is a member of the Globe Magazine staff. Reach him at CPierce@Globe.com.