Wes Students Take on New Hampshire Primary
The elderly woman points to her next door neighbor’s house. “That man over there? I don’t know if you saw the flag out front. ‘Keep America Great,’ it says. He also has a small cannon in his backyard. On Wednesday, when the Senate was voting, he fired that cannon twice: once when Trump was acquitted on the first article, and again when he was acquitted on the second.”
Wes Dems/Yale Dems in New Hampshire. Most of these are Warren or Bernie canvassers, but some are here for Yang or Pete.
The woman is a staunch Democrat who is horrified by Trump and his administration, but who has not yet decided on a candidate to support in the primary, despite the primary being only three days away. She tells me I’m the second Bernie Sanders volunteer she’s seen in the past week, and that Pete and Warren canvassers have visited her as well. She tells me that she loves Bernie but is scared of his age. “I know how my brain works, and he’s not much younger,” she informs me. She says she’s leaning towards Warren and Klobuchar because she wants to elect a woman and wants someone who will unify the party. But when I suggest that the unity candidate might be the one with the most consistent vision and the largest movement behind them -- Bernie Sanders -- she seems quite open to the idea. “Vision is a good word,” she responds. “More people need to talk about that.”
What New Hampshire lacks in racial diversity (like seriously, it’s alarmingly white), it makes up for in its stunning political heterogeneity, a patchwork of polarization you’re unlikely to find outside of a swing state. On one block alone, you’ll find Pete supporters, Bernie supporters, Trump supporters, and a whole host of people of all ages who are waiting until they walk into the voting booth to decide who to support. As I go from house to house, knocking on doors that ostensibly belong to Democratic voters or past Bernie supporters, I frequently encounter their parents or older relatives, who politely tell me that they’re voting for Trump and close the door before I can respond.
Well, most of them are polite. The neighborhood that my canvassing partner George and I are assigned to contains quite a few Trump voters, and one older man asks us to leave and tells us we’re wasting our time. “You too!” I shout back merrily, thinking he had told us to have a good time and wanting to come across as polite. George gives me a high-five on my unintentional roast, and honestly I wish I had the cojones to say something like that on purpose.
The Bernie campaign’s field office in Nashua is a small but bustling hub, tucked in next to a supermarket so staffers and volunteers can do coffee runs. Everyone who walks through the doors believes wholeheartedly in the mission, and many of them share a deep distrust for the mainstream media and Democratic apparatus. One staffer reminds us that we have to win big in New Hampshire, because “if it’s close, they’ll put their fingers on the scale.” An older man and woman (I think they’re a couple. While I didn’t ask, they certainly argue like one) drive me and George back and forth from Bernie’s Nashua field office to the neighborhood we’re canvassing. Due to an overwhelming amount of volunteers to the Bernie campaign, they’re actually running out of turf to canvass, so our neighborhood ends up being quite rural, difficult to traverse on foot, and not particularly filled with Bernie supporters.
“This whole state’s a bunch of fucking centrists,” says the woman in the passenger seat, and her husband (or boyfriend? Friend? Long-term canvassing partner?) seems to agree, but I don’t get that impression at all. Many of the people we talk to want to cancel student loan debt. Many of them want to make sure healthcare is available for everyone. Many of them want to see climate change urgently addressed. On policy issues, they are not centrists.
But above all else, one thing was clear - unless they love him, they all want to beat Trump first and foremost. I had dismissed electability in the past as an invention of the elites and corporate media, designed to undermine real progressive candidates. But while some people in establishment circles may have co-opted the idea of electability to serve their own goals, the idea itself certainly matters to voters in rural New Hampshire, for whom Trump supporters are not just an abstract concept, as they are to some of us who have lived in liberal strongholds like the Bay Area our entire lives. When you see houses on either side of your property with Trump flags, electability takes on a much more urgent character.
On the bus ride to and from Wesleyan, Warren volunteers outnumber Bernie volunteers 2 to 1. If you include all the volunteers from Yale on the bus as well, that number is probably more like 5 to 1. Once you step into the Bernie campaign’s Nashua field office and see that they’re literally running out of turf to canvass, you realize that what you saw on the bus ride up doesn’t really matter, because Bernie is winning the ground game. He has the most volunteers. He has the most money. He’s leading in the polls. The field office barely has room to process all of us, and once we’ve checked in, they hurry us into a back room so that they can process an influx of several dozen volunteers with the Sunrise Movement. The scene is optimistic, and you get the sense that Bernie’s movement is rocketing towards an unstoppable New Hampshire victory.
Once you start knocking on doors, however, you realize that none of that means everything. In the turf George and I are assigned to, I count about 20 Mayor Pete yard signs, and maybe 1 or 2 for Bernie. When you ask Democratic voters about Bernie, they’re both very excited and very nervous. And most of them, even if they have made up their minds, aren’t willing to share who they’ve decided on.
Going up to New Hampshire is also a significant leap from the Wesleyan bubble. “This is an Elizabeth campus,” says my colleague and Arcadia editor-in-chief Josh Ledford, and he’s correct; right now, Warren seems to be the most popular candidate at Wesleyan, and as such it’s no surprise to see a lot of people from Wesleyan riding up to canvass for her. Likewise, “this is a Bernie generation,” would be an apt way to describe the veritable stampede of gen Z, millennial, and even gen X volunteers who are turning out in force to knock on doors for him; among voters under 50, Bernie tops nearly every national poll.
But in New Hampshire, the most you can say is, “this is a state that has not made up its mind.” Polls can only tell you so much when so many voters are either undecided or holding their cards close to their chests. We can speculate all we want, but in the end, New Hampshire is anybody’s game, and we won’t have any idea what it decides on until Tuesday night, when we see the results come in.
The end of a full day of door-knocking at the Bernie Sanders Nashua Field Office.