Candidates arrive in New Hampshire, pitching a different set of voters
Republican presidential candidate Ohio Gov. John Kasich campaigns at the Portsmouth Country Club in New Hampshire on Monday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Facing a different set of voters and an expanded playing field on the GOP side, 2016 hopefuls are now wooing a more moderate, less religious electorate than in Iowa.
For Democrats, with former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley bowing out , the race between Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has intensified after a virtual dead-heat finish in Iowa.
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“God loves the great state of Iowa,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) declared after the votes were tallied in Monday night’s caucuses, showing he had defeated New York businessman Donald Trump. “Tonight is a victory for courageous conservatives, across Iowa and all across this great nation.”
But Cruz — who came here Tuesday morning along with several of his rivals — faces a series of new challenges in trying to replicate that victory in New Hampshire’s primary next week, with a less-robust organization in a state where has spent less time and cannot count on such a large evangelical electorate.
History provides a clear warning. In 2008 and 2012, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania won the Iowa Republican caucuses with heavy support from evangelicals. Both then arrived in New Hampshire lacking a strong organization, lost the state and failed to become the GOP nominees.
With the Republican Party’s focus on Iowa now complete, the spotlight on ethanol and evangelicals is out.
Now begins a week-long push that in many ways will be entirely different because New Hampshire’s voters reflect another side of the GOP. They are socially moderate and fiscally frugal, and use a primary voting system that allows greater participation by independent-minded voters who revel in upsetting the conventional wisdom.
It’s why a handful of GOP “establishment” candidates who did poorly in Iowa think they will perform better here.
“New Hampshire voters reset elections. That’s what you all do. . . . The reset starts here tonight,” former Florida governor Jeb Bush defiantly told about 300 supporters at Manchester’s Alpine Club on Monday night.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told a crowd in Hopkinton on Monday night that Iowa “has passed the ball to you.” The field would soon be thinned. “You all,” he said, “are going to decide it.”
Ohio Gov. John Kasich told an audience of about 200 at Bow Elementary School on Sunday that “you come here, and you look and you poke, once in a while you smell and you try to decide, is this our leader? Whether I win or not, I believe in this process. I believe that folks in New Hampshire are the best screeners that America can have to recommend to the country.”
Wayne Lesperance, a professor of political science at New England College in Henniker, N.H., said that “New Hampshire has gone differently than Iowa in six of the last nine elections on the Republican side, so the idea that one follows the other’s lead just doesn’t bear out.”
And yet, Iowa and New Hampshire share more in common this cycle, thanks to Trump. He has held a double-digit lead over his GOP opponents here for more than 30 weeks and dominates the headlines — just as he did in Iowa before losing to Cruz there on Monday.
Cruz’s first-place finish in Iowa and a stronger-than-expected showing for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, just behind Trump, could immediately scramble the top tier of the race.
Rubio was already making the rounds in New Hampshire on Tuesday morning, doing a series of television interviews and preparing to meet voters.
Speaking to ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday from Manchester’s Airport Diner, Rubio said that Cruz built a formidable operation in Iowa. “But we feel so good about the growth we’ve had and how that’s going to translate in New Hampshire,” he added.
Working the crowd, the Florida senator boasted about the “massive” turnout in Iowa, where 187,000 voters, or 8 percent of the state electorate, came out to caucus for Republicans.
“I got more votes than Santorum did, than Romney did, than Huckabee did,” he said.
As one customer gave Rubio some cigars, he joked that he wanted to keep them under wraps — “I don’t want the kids to see” — but alluded to when he might smoke the stogies. “Maybe we’ll save them for Tuesday night,” he said, as his supporters in the diner cheered.
Rubio also picked up a key endorsement Tuesday: GOP Sen. Tim Scott, an African American from the critical primary state of South Carolina.
“Marco Rubio understands that here in America, it’s not about where you start, it’s about where you are going,” Scott said in a video message. “We have one shot in 2016 to beat Hillary Clinton and that shot is Marco Rubio, and with him as our candidate: we win.”
For now, Trump is favored by 38 percent of GOP primary voters in New Hampshire, according to a Boston Herald-Franklin Pierce University poll released Sunday. Cruz is a distant second at 13 percent, followed by Rubio and Bush, 10 percent; Kasich, 8 percent; and Christie, 5 percent.
A CNN-WMUR-TV poll released Sunday showed similar results: Trump with 30 percent, followed by Cruz, 12 percent; Rubio, 11 percent; Kasich, 9 percent; Christie, 8 percent; and Bush with 6 percent.
Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, said that if any of the four establishment candidates can find a way to jump ahead in New Hampshire, this will shake up the entire race.
That’s why Bush, Christie, Kasich and Rubio see New Hampshire as their last opportunity to emerge as the anti-Trump.
While Rubio placed a strong third in Iowa, the other establishment candidates trailed far behind. Bush earned 3 percent support, topping Christie and Kasich, who each received 2 percent.
In New Hampshire, Kasich held his 89th town hall meeting on Monday night. Christie has held 114 public events in the state since launching his campaign in June. Bush, who has most relentlessly attacked Trump as unqualified to be president, hosted his 80th public event in the state on Monday night. Rubio has been in New Hampshire less frequently, but is certain to earn renewed interest starting Tuesday.
Supporters of the New Hampshire primary process like to remind skeptics that they have more often picked the Republican nominee in recent years than Iowa. In 2008, Sen. John McCain of Arizona won here, and in 2012, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney won the New Hampshire primary. Both won the nomination.
Aside from social issues and state-specific interests, one of the biggest differences is that it is far easier to vote in New Hampshire. Iowa’s caucus system requires hours of time at local meetings and commitments to a political party. The caucuses don’t directly determine which candidates gets delegates. It is an expression of preference that must be ratified months later at state party meetings.
David Price of Weare, N.H., attended Kasich’s event Sunday at the school and said he would take note of how Iowa voted. “But as a true New Hampshirite, I look at it independently,” he said.
Price called Kasich “a very personable individual” but added that right now “I’m leaning to . . . Jeb Bush.”
Arthur Moore, a retired physician from Bow, said he planned to learn more about Kasich but is also considering Bush and Rubio. Whomever Moore chooses, he said that “they’ve got to get rid of Trump — he’s a loose cannon; he’s a narcissist.”
And while a poor performance in Iowa has already prompted Huckabee to drop out, other candidates at the back of the pack are forging ahead.
“We fight on!” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted after coming in fifth with roughly 5 percent of the vote in Iowa “We are not trading our liberty for anything,” he added in a separate tweet. “Not now, not never. Hell no.”
For Democrats, the race is now a head-to-head contest after the virtual tie in Iowa. Clinton currently has 22 delegates, compared to Sanders’s 21, and is leading the overall vote 49.9 percent to 49.6 percent.
In the early morning hours Tuesday, Clinton’s aides said they viewed Iowa as “tailor-made” for Sanders, and that despite his advantages with the state’s liberal Democratic base, he was unable to win.
“Sanders has been saying for several weeks that if this caucus was a high turnout affair, then he would win,” said Clinton campaign press secretary Brian Fallon, after arriving in Manchester. “He was wrong.”
Andy McGuire, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, called the caucuses “historically close” and refrained from declaring a winner despite claims of victory from the Clinton campaign. Instead, McGuire said the party would report on the one outstanding precinct “when we have confirmed those results with the chair.”
Edison Media Research estimates that 171,109 voters, or 7 percent of the eligible voters statewide, turned out for Iowa’s Democratic caucuses. The turnout represents a decline from 10.7 percent in 2008, but an increase from 5.6 percent in 2004.
Sanders can now campaign in a state adjacent to the one he represents, giving him a home-court advantage and a comfortable lead in the polls. But Clinton can take some comfort in the fact that New Hampshire’s Democratic primary voters are less liberal than those who caucused for the party in Iowa. In addition, New Hampshire has demonstrated support for both her and her husband when they have suffered political setbacks in the past.
Sanders, for his part, was celebrating as he made his way to the back of his chartered jet at nearly 3 a.m. Tuesday. The senator told a crush of reporters in the aisle that his campaign is now “in this for the long haul.”
“We’re going to win states all over the country,” a beaming Sanders said. The result from Iowa was “a wonderful start off to the national campaign,” he added. “We’re in this to the convention, and this is a campaign that we can win.”
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