What’s in New Hampshire?
Fall leaves, Dartmouth, and skiing.
Did you know New Hampshire is the only state where you’re not required to wear your seat belt?
New Hampshire not only holds prominence in the history of the United States for being one of the original 13 colonies but also for helping shape the future direction of the country by hosting the first presidential primary every four years.
While Iowa is still the first state to declare who it wants as the presidential candidate, New Hampshire is the first state to hold a primary. This means that it is the first state where people can privately vote to support a candidate. Last week, after the Iowa caucus and some serious confusion, we can at least say the winner was President Trump.
As for the Democrats, it’s not great, Bob. Between new rules, an app that tabulates and reports vote totals in each precinct crashing, and jammed phone hotlines, we’re looking at a classic case of Murphy’s law, where anything that can go wrong did go wrong.
Let’s hope this doesn’t happen again in New Hampshire.
Unlike Iowa, the New Hampshire primary doesn’t rely on a caucus system in which candidates have to meet a 15% threshold on the first vote to be viable for state and national delegates on the final vote.
Instead, New Hampshire is an “open primary,” where registered voters from any party (or no party at all) can participate. And whoever gets the most votes wins.
It’ll be especially interesting to see how Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren perform here since they represent the neighboring states of Vermont and Massachusetts, respectively.
On the bright side, neither of them have to compete with Vermin Supreme. He ran for the Democratic nomination in 2012 and 2016, receiving 259 votes in New Hampshire. Democrats can at least breathe a sigh of relief that he switched to the Libertarian Party.
Additionally, Jeanne Shaheen will be the Democrat to watch in the Senate as she tries to defend her seat for a second time. When she was elected in 2008, she became the first Democrat to win a New Hampshire Senate seat since 1980.
It could get dicey for Shaheen, given that Trump only lost by a little less than 3,000 votes in 2016. Right now, there is no clear challenger for the Senate seat, but up until the end of 2019, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was flirting with a Senate run.
