CONCORD, N.H. – The 2016 campaign begins in earnest here on Wednesday.
Between now and Nov. 20, a parade of candidates will take part in the quadrennial tradition of visiting the capital to file their candidacy at the state house for the crucial Feb. 9 primary.
When the dust settles in just over three months, the state’s voters will not only make their choices for president, but they will also help arbitrate a fierce political fight that has rocked American politics: the populist war against the establishment of both major parties.
If progressives are hoping to slow Hillary Clinton’s waltz to the nomination so that she takes their voices more seriously, they’ll need Sen. Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic primary here.
On the Republican side, if anybody more acceptable to the party’s establishment is going to unseat businessman Donald Trump or retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, New Hampshire will have to play a central role in that process.
The GOP race in New Hampshire is particularly complex this time, as it will effectively involve several sub-primaries among candidates vying for different slices of the electorate.
Carson and Trump will be competing, along with Sen. Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina, to be the top choice of voters seeking a political outsider.
In the past two presidential election cycles, the Republicans who won the Iowa caucuses – Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012 – weren’t able to capitalize on their victories and stumbled in New Hampshire. It was the Granite State that helped catapult John McCain and Mitt Romney, the preferred choices of the party establishment, to become the eventual nominees those years.
In contrast to Huckabee and Santorum, who surged late in Iowa and didn’t have much of a campaign elsewhere, Carson and Trump are not only ahead of the pack in Iowa, but both are polling as the top two nationally and in other early primary states. They also have the financial resources to do something with a victory there.
Trump, who will be formally filing his candidacy in New Hampshire on Wednesday, is particularly strong in New Hampshire, with an experienced staff, and a roughly 20-point lead heading into November according to an average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics. Once dismissed as a joke candidate and frequently written off by pundits, the reality TV star now has a plausible path to the nomination.
“There’s no reason to say that an outsider cannot survive,” said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based Republican consultant who is a veteran of presidential campaigns in the state. He said Carson and Trump have both had a lot of contact with voters here, and that there’s no powerful political machine in place to take them down in the state.
Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio will be courting a network of voters and donors who are spooked by the prospect of the likes of Trump or Carson becoming the nominee.
New Hampshire is the closest thing to a must win in politics for Bush, who is in the midst of a three-day tour of the state. His campaign has struggled to find its footing, and if he can’t win here, it’s difficult to see how he can win in any of the early primary states.
If Bush doesn’t win, at the very minimum, he has to come out of the state having beaten Rubio. The reason is that if somebody like Cruz, Carson or Trump wins, panicked GOP voters and donors who view them as unelectable will want to consolidate all of their support behind one candidate heading into the later primary states.
This explains why Bush has tried aggressively attacking Rubio, a strategy that has backfired thus far, due to Rubio’s deft handling of the attacks on his attendance record as U.S. senator during the most recent GOP debate.
Rubio has benefited from Gov. Scott Walker dropping out of the race and Bush’s collapse in polls. As of now, he’s viewed as the best positioned to thread the needle between the establishment and those hoping for a non-traditional GOP nominee. A natural politician, a talented orator, young and Hispanic, Rubio is the prototype of what national Republicans think they need in a nominee to win a presidential election.
He’s currently enjoying a moment after a debate in which many viewed him as the clear winner. But he’ll have to put in a lot of time in New Hampshire, where voters expect candidates to press the flesh and return often.
“Out of all of the major campaigns, Rubio is the most invisible,” Carney observed, cautioning that he could have a greater presence in the state than is outwardly apparent.
He later joked that Rubio “may have the greatest machine in the world, but if so he should go work for the NSA, because it’s stealth.”
Rubio starts a two-day swing through the state on Wednesday. He plans to file his candidacy on Thursday.
Govs. Chris Christie and John Kasich, who are in the low single-digits nationally, have invested much of their time and resources in New Hampshire. Christie, for instance, has made 106 campaign stops in the state, more than Bush and Rubio combined, according to data compiled by regional news network NECN.
The state’s voters have often rewarded candidates, such as McCain, who spent a lot of time doing town halls in the state, and Christie and Kasich offer additional choices to voters seeking a more establishment candidate. There’s still a chance that one of them breaks through, but if not, they could still siphon off enough votes to prevent Bush from winning here. Both of them will be campaigning in New Hampshire this week and filing their candidacies on Friday.
Come February, New Hampshire will test whether the populist trend that’s fueling unorthodox campaigns is a short-term flirtation among voters, or a more fundamental shift in American politics.
