Mirsky: New Hampshire Primary Thoughts

It’s less than a week after the 2016 New Hampshire Primary, and I thought it might be good to set down some notes on what I learned from the past New Hampshire Presidential Primary Cycle.

I guess those of us who are interested in politics in New Hampshire had been thinking about the 2016 Primary for almost four years.

So here are a few things I learned:

1. Negative campaigning sure works. Real Estate Developer and 2016 New Hampshire Republican Primary winner Donald Trump of Queens, New York, sure ran a negative campaign, starting with his devastating attacks on Mexican Americans and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, whose wife is of Mexican ancestry. Gee, I wonder if there was any connection there ... On the Democratic side, the victorious New Hampshire Primary campaign of U.S. Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, was positive in most respects, but negative in its basic thrust of trying to say that his opponent was simply in the pocket of Wall Street. That is about as negative as you can get in the Democratic Party.
2. The New Hampshire Primary may not always decide the winner in November, or even the Nominees of the major parties, but our Primary is always important in setting the scene, along with our cousins in Iowa, for the beginning of the Presidential contest. Every major endeavor needs to start somewhere, and New Hampshire and Iowa provide locations and people who are receptive to outsiders coming in and speaking their minds, and are generally polite and courteous to everyone. Unless you want to raise taxes!
3. The most successful Republicans here learned opposite things from this year’s New Hampshire contest: a) Trump learned he can be as rude and inappropriate as he wants and still win – this may not work out well for him in the end – stay tuned; and b) Gov. John Kasich of Ohio learned that the best allies for a GOP Presidential candidate in New Hampshire are Attorney-Political Expert Tom Rath, and Doug and Stella Scamman of Stratham, he the former Speaker of the New Hampshire House and she the former influential many-term New Hampshire State Representative and educator.
4. Nobody should assume that any one particular fact that has happened in the past regarding the New Hampshire Primary will repeat again in succeeding years. In particular, I am thinking about President Lyndon Baines Johnson deciding to quit the race for re-election as President in 1968 because of a strong showing by Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the “peace candidate” that year. That election occurred during the height of our nation’s discontent over the Vietnam War, as we were learning that our government had deceived us. McCarthy’s strong showing in New Hampshire was a message that year to LBJ that he needed to change the War policy. Instead of doing that, he quit. I’m not sure that was the best decision, especially if you look at what we ended up with at the end of 1968: President Richard Milhous “Not a Crook” Nixon. Can’t say we were better off with Nixon. . .
5. It is important for local people in political circles in New Hampshire to keep their heads together and not get too worked up about any particular candidate, positive or negative, or any particular point of view. After all, when the volunteers and national news media leave the state, we still have to live here.
6. The most important thing I have learned from the New Hampshire Primary this year, as a Hillary Clinton supporter (which you all can see I was from the photo accompanying this article), is that the Presidential Election is not over ‘til it’s over, and you don’t know what is going to turn out to be the most important event of New Hampshire until the general election is finally decided in November. The most important event in the New Hampshire Primary could be, as it was in 1992, coming in second to a regional next-door-neighbor candidate as Bill Clinton did that year, or it could be the great speech you make conceding defeat in the New Hampshire Primary, which stirs your supporters and leads you on to victory in November, as happened with President Barack Obama in 2008. You never know until you know.

As my wife, Attorney Joanne Petito of Exeter (who took the photo that appears above), said to me today when asked the most important thing about the New Hampshire Presidential contest:

“You have to come out of it unscathed.”

So that’s it for now. If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.

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• Mirsky: Shirley Chisholm and the 2016 NH Primary