MANCHESTER, NH – With voters set to vote in a presidential primary in less than a year, one key ingredient has been scarce in the nation’s first Republican primary: a visit from a presidential contender.
In the mid-spring of 2011 and 2015, the last two times there was no Republican incumbent in the White House seeking re-election, candidate visits almost every day, with the campaign making regular announcements from staff hiring to develop on-the-ground. team to turn out voters.
“Nothing happened. Nothing,” said Fergus Cullen, the former chairman of the state party.
A one-week span in April 2015 saw visits from Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Ohio Governor John Kasich and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker – not counting the state’s candidate forum. party was held in Nashua.
Today, candidate visits are down considerably in comparison. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s first visit was Friday. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared at the state party’s fundraising dinner on Friday, a first for the state. Of the candidates and potential candidates, only former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy are frequent travelers.
“We are 10 months out from the primary, and this is unrecognizable compared to what we have seen before,” Cullen said.
And like many things involving the Republican Party in recent years, the reason for the change is the de facto leader, the attempted coup of former President Donald Trump.
Eight years ago, while other candidates were walking through early voting state meetings with a handful of activists in living rooms and county party dinners, Trump did almost nothing. Instead, he “campaigned” by taking an elevator down from his office in Manhattan’s Trump Tower to the atrium where he appeared on Fox and other cable networks. As the summer progressed, he began to increase his rallies to once a week or so in cities across the country.
Despite the absence of traditional “retail” politicking, Trump came second in Iowa in 2016 and easily won New Hampshire.
“Donald Trump changed the way you campaign. The myth is you have to go door to door,” said Matt Mayberry, a former vice chairman of the state party.
Cullen said other candidates learned from that and are imitating that strategy today. “Why would you bother going to the trouble when you can go to Fox? The main one is playing on cable TV,” he said. “Voters in New Hampshire get information the same way everyone else in America does, which is sitting in their living room on Lazy-boy.”
David Kochel, a longtime consultant in Iowa, said he’s seen the same thing happen. “The new model is to go on Fox, get on Fox as much as possible because that’s where the audience is,” he said.
DeSantis himself used this strategy during his campaign for the GOP nomination for governor of Florida in 2018. The favorite in the race is Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who for several years has established relationships with Republican activists in every county in the state. Instead of trying to have dinner at Putnam, DeSantis took to Fox News at every available opportunity. That, combined with the endorsement of Fox-viewer-in-chief Trump, resulted in a landslide primary win.
Trump also played a more direct role in causing a relative visit to New Hampshire by remaining a dominant figure in his party despite criminal charges against him in New York for falsifying business records to pay money to porn stars and ongoing investigations. against him for the coup attempt on January 6, 2021 and his refusal to turn over secret documents in defiance of a subpoena.
“I think most people know he’s going to get the nomination,” said Di Lothrop of the Nashua Republican Town Committee and a Trump supporter. “I think that’s why there’s a lot of trepidation.”
Mayberry agreed that other candidates are hesitant to make a full commitment to run before they get a better sense of Trump’s criminal record. “I think a lot of Republicans are waiting to see what happens with the president,” he said.
On the other hand, the fact that Haley has officially run while DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence appear committed to announcing their candidacies shows that he knows there are many Republicans — including Mayberry himself — who are desperate for someone else, he said. .
“That’s why they came back. That’s what they see in the polls,” he said.
Gene Fox, a 74-year-old retiree who attended Ramaswamy’s town hall at New England College in Henniker last week, is one of the Republicans ready to cross Trump and said the additional, more serious charges against him could “give other candidates a boost.”
Until that happened, he said he understood why he didn’t want to go after Trump right away. “I think he was a little scared,” he said.
But Lothrop said Republicans who think Trump will be weakened or even discouraged from campaigning for the White House simply because he faces charges that could land him in prison for a rude awakening. “He’s not going to go away. He’s not going to back down,” he said. “We’re all dealing with a different entity than we’ve dealt with in this country before with Donald Trump.”