None
of this is lost on New Hampshire Democrats. Ray Buckley, the state party chair,
told me, “My whole message in the final week before the DNC met wasn’t
about the schedule, but about the penalty. My whole position is not to have a
penalty that will impact on New Hampshire in November 2024.” Implicit in
Buckley’s words is the reality that New Hampshire is willing to risk having
its delegation downsized but state Democrats are panicked that a campaigning
ban could cost the party in the presidential election, since it is the only up-for-grabs
state in the Northeast. As recently as 2016, Hillary Clinton won New
Hampshire by fewer than 3,000 votes.
No
matter what the punishment, Biden risks embarrassment in New Hampshire,
assuming he runs for reelection. A University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll, conducted in late January, found
that only 27 percent of Democrats in the state want Biden to seek a second
term. What that suggests is that there could be a significant protest vote
against Biden in the New Hampshire primary. It could take the form of support
for a currently unknown anti-Biden candidate. Or it could be that an effort by
local Democrats to write in Biden’s name flounders badly.
The
truth—often forgotten by political insiders and campaign reporters—is that
primaries can be unpredictable. At this point in 1967, no one could have
imagined that Eugene McCarthy, a little-known anti-war senator,
would run so strongly against a write-in campaign for Lyndon Johnson in the
1968 New Hampshire primary that he would drive LBJ from the presidential race.
Equally unforeseen was right-wing columnist Pat Buchanan’s strong challenge to incumbent
George H.W. Bush in the 1992 New Hampshire primary that ended up weakening the
GOP ticket in November.
