Elise Amendola/AP Photo
Democratic presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren is applauded at a campaign event in Laconia, New Hampshire, October 29, 2019.
MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE – Decades ago, the great Murray Kempton, covering his umpteenth frigid New Hampshire primary, described a good share of that state’s electorate as elderly people “whom poverty has cheated out of Florida.”
They’re more than still with us today. New Hampshire has the second-highest median age of any state, trailing only Maine and just ahead of Vermont. That’s not because seniors go to northern New England to retire. It’s because the young leave for jobs in more prosperous, less isolated regions. It’s because the region has no big (or even biggish) cities to attract many young or middle-aged workers. It’s because many of the region’s jobs don’t pay enough to enable workers to amass the retirement savings they’d need to move south.
There is, in plain view, a prosperous New Hampshire, in its handful of cities, with the usual, if small, complement of hip bars and eateries, staffed by the young. But even in those cities, the visitor encounters waitresses and hotel housekeepers who are women (white women—the state is home to few racial minorities) in their late seventies or even older. I asked one such waitress at breakfast how she was doing. “Living the dream,” she answered. Irony, with potatoes on the side.
As the second-oldest and fourth-whitest state in the union, New Hampshire might seem at first glance a Republican paradise. But upper New England whites don’t include many evangelicals or racists raging against minority incursions, since minorities, including immigrants, have largely stayed away. It’s a purple state with an all-Democratic congressional delegation. Most of its oldsters voted for Trump, but a sufficient majority of non-seniors has given the state to the Democrat in recent presidential elections.
In the 2016 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary, as in nearly all that year’s Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders clobbered Hillary Clinton among the youngest voters, while she handily prevailed among seniors. Next February’s upcoming primary presents no such binary neatness, and Sanders must split whatever geographical-proximity advantage he had with Elizabeth Warren.
He still maintains a wide lead among the young in the latest New Hampshire poll, pulling down 34 percent of the 18-to-34 bracket, while registering just 9 percent support among voters 65 or older. The reverse is true for Joe Biden, who has just 6 percent support among those under 35, and 25 percent among seniors. Warren’s support, by contrast, isn’t nearly as age-stratified: She has 21 percent backing from those under 35 and 16 percent among those over 64. (“The young like Warren because she’s like Bernie,” one New Hampshire Democratic operative told me; “the old like her because she’s not like Bernie.”) Pete Buttigieg, who was running a distant fourth overall in this poll, didn’t have age-stratified support either, with 8 percent among the youngest voters and 9 percent among the oldest.
While the age divisions, or lack thereof, in the various candidates’ bases are likely to persist, the actual levels of support for the candidates are very much up for grabs. “I know there’s just 100 days until the primary,” one New Hampshire Democratic veteran told me, “and many outside the state consider the results locked in, with Bernie and Warren battling for the top spot. That’s not the way I see it; it’s still anyone’s game up here.” That most recent poll bears him out: In it, just 23 percent of Democratic voters said they’d definitely decided on whom they were going to back.
Sanders likely claims the highest share of the already-decided; many of his supporters campaigned for him four years ago and remain resolutely loyal today. Their considerable ground game has been largely, though not entirely, matched by Warren’s campaign, while Buttigieg’s is only recently gearing up. (He’ll be making a four-day bus tour of the state beginning today.) As elsewhere, Buttigieg’s gains will have to come in good measure from Biden’s losses—and, possibly, from voters he persuades to abandon Warren because she’s presumably too angry (though no candidate is more solicitous of their crowds) or elitist (though it’s Buttigieg, not Warren, who is in hock to big Wall Street and Silicon Valley contributors). Warren is hoping that familiarity breeds respect: She’s already held more than 150 town halls across this small state, and will surely hold many dozens more before February rolls around.
For their part, the campaigns of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are less visible today than they were some months ago—Harris has completely pulled out of the state and bet everything on Iowa. By the metric of billboards in downtown Manchester, the most visible campaign is Tulsi Gabbard’s, which boasts a billboard every couple of blocks, though it’s not at all clear it can boast of anything else.
In population and physical size, New Hampshire is small enough that a sufficiently manic campaigner can personally contact a nontrivial share of the primary electorate: In his 1992 “Comeback Kid” primary campaign, Bill Clinton was estimated to have shaken the hands of one-quarter of the eventual Democratic primary voters. But it comes one week after the ballyhooed Iowa caucuses, and the outcome there shapes media coverage and New Hampshire voting, too.
Above all, says a top campaign staffer, “voters are looking for a way to beat Trump, and they haven’t decided who that is. We won’t know who they’re going to pick until Election Day.”
