Retail politics has always been a cornerstone of running for president in the early states. How many New Hampshire diners visited, how many Iowa farm animals petted, and the list of South Carolina pastor endorsements are among the ways campaigns tally their performance leading into the caucuses and primaries. The small size and rural nature of these three states lends itself toward such personal campaigning, and the race to press the flesh also stems from the instincts of people who have been running for office their whole lives.
Even candidates who view this stuff as personal torture have always gone through the motions, either scared into it by their consultants or in search of camera-ready experiences to humanize themselves. But now we have a showdown in New Hampshire between Donald Trump and Chris Christie that may tell us whether or not retail politicking actually matters much when running for president.
Christie has essentially made his Granite State play into a scaled-up version of running for local office in New Jersey, which he did throughout the 1990s. He is coming up on his 50th visit to the state, where Politico reports that he’s done at least 112 events – much of which are smaller gatherings like house parties. Like any credible New Jersey freeholder candidate, he’s put heavy emphasis on local endorsements, wooing low-level Republican elected officials with calls and texts and bagging the early backing of the Union Leader newspaper.
Trump, just as he has broken with every other presidential campaign tradition, is having none of this. He only speaks to large crowds and devotes most of his schedule to national media appearances. Trump even eschewed campaigning on the revered Labor Day holiday weekend, concluding most ordinary people wanted a break from politics.
The effectiveness of free media convinced Trump early on that he didn’t need paid advertising in the spring and summer, something his advisors questioned at the time but now concede was correct. That Trump’s instincts have gotten him this far shows how much modern elections are marketing campaigns rather than organizational contests. Voters are increasingly willing to assess candidates exclusively on cable news, talk radio, or social media rather than seeing them up close. Even in seemingly exceptional places like New Hampshire. “We always prided ourselves on insisting on retail campaigning,” speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives Donna Sytek told Politico. “Donald Trump has turned tradition on its head.”
Before Trump it looked like Christie might actually be the candidate who would excel in this new format. His made-for-YouTube town hall performances in New Jersey suggested an attention-getting national campaign. But the candidate whose slogan is “Telling it like it is” has so far yielded only one memorable outburst, on fantasy football.
Going door-to-door in New Hampshire may be the only play Christie has, and it’s too soon to dismiss his efforts. Public Policy Polling finds him in fourth place in its new survey, and he has the highest favorability rating at 61 percent of any Republican candidate in the state. Still, it’s hard to envision how this micro-focus on New Hampshire buoys Christie in South Carolina and beyond. He will somehow have to capture the same resonance with the Republican electorate that Trump currently has. If there’s a Christie comeback it will be because he discovers a message that lands. As Trump has shown, engaging with voters through the media is a more effective way to find it than door-belling in New Hampshire.
It doesn’t take a political version of the book Moneyball to figure out that free media today is vastly more available and accessible to propel a candidate’s message than it was before the advent of Twitter and Facebook – these are applications that have more or less made people addicted to the news. But just how much more effective it is has never been tested in such a crude way until Donald Trump came along. His showdown with Chris Christie in New Hampshire should educate us on how to wage campaigns in the future.
Rich Danker is a Washington-based political consultant.
