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Jane Coaston
By Jane Coaston
Ms. Coaston is a contributing Opinion writer.
Donald Trump won Iowa and wants to win New Hampshire and seal up the nomination. Nikki Haley wants to come from behind, win New Hampshire, and gain some momentum before heading to her home state of South Carolina.
What matters to people in New Hampshire? How has the state’s Republican Party, which gets a major say in the politics of the rest of the country, changed over the last decade with Mr. Trump in the mix? New Hampshire is a very different state from Iowa: In New England, they’re less interested in abortion, and more interested in the kinds of working-class populism once espoused by a figure like Pat Buchanan and now personified (if not exemplified) by Donald Trump. So I spoke with Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire and an expert in presidential primaries and New Hampshire politics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity and is part of an Opinion Q. and A. series exploring modern conservatism today, its influence in society and politics and how and why it differs (and doesn’t) from the conservative movement that most Americans thought they knew.
Jane Coaston: We spoke just before the Iowa caucus and you said that you believed that Nikki Haley was in a strong second place in New Hampshire after Chris Christie’s exit from the race. What did you make of the Iowa results?
Dante Scala: Haley will have to improve her performance markedly among New Hampshire conservatives in order to succeed here. The split between moderates and conservatives out in Iowa regarding Haley was eye-popping.
[Before the caucuses, Mr. Scala also mentioned that if Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy also dropped out before the New Hampshire primary, as has since happened, it could be a problem for Ms. Haley in New Hampshire.]
Coaston: What separates New Hampshire Republicans from Iowa Republicans in terms of their outlook, their interests, their backgrounds?
Scala: Two main things, I think. Haley said how New Hampshire corrects Iowa and so forth, and that wasn’t the most politic thing to say, but there is some truth to it. It’s one reason why Iowa winners typically don’t gain momentum in New Hampshire. It’s not as if New Hampshire voters haven’t heard of them, but they know what they stand for and they tend to reject it. And what Iowa winners tend to stand for is religious conservatism, evangelicalism, social conservatism, and all of those things are lacking in New Hampshire. We are a very unchurched state as a whole, right?
Very few people go to church here or any kind of religious services regularly, and coincidentally, we tend to be — and this includes Republicans — rather socially moderate on issues like abortion and gay marriage. A typical New Hampshire Republican, I would say, wishes that the abortion issue would just go away. ‘Do we really have to talk about it so much?’ A lot of them are in that rather ambivalent, mushy middle of the country when it comes to abortion politics. But what’s more, they don’t want that to be the issue. That’s one reason why 2022 was such a nightmare for New Hampshire Republicans, aside from some of the candidates they actually nominated. It was that abortion was on the front burner, and the burner was turned up as high as it could be.
There are social conservatives, don’t get me wrong, but they do find themselves on the short end of the stick here. There’s also — you hear it especially with Ron DeSantis — there’s big state versus little state or small state conservatism, and DeSantis with some of his actions in Florida taking on corporations like Disney. He tends to want to use the power of the state in conflicts over culture and so forth. Chris Sununu on the other hand has kind of taken pains to separate himself from DeSantis-style conservatism. On education, he would say: Leave it to the localities, leave it to the towns and municipalities to figure that out. So there’s that as well in New Hampshire, this kind of big state versus small state conservatism.
Coaston: How has Trump changed the Republican Party over the last eight years? And more specifically, how has he changed the kinds of things that voters want from political leadership?
Scala: On the one hand, elites love to tell the story of the primary as this kind of one grand town hall meeting where the townspeople go and ask ever-so-well-prepared questions of the candidate. And the voters deliberate long and hard, see several candidates multiple times, and engage in this exercise in deliberative democracy. That’s how elites like to tell it.
But another history of the New Hampshire primary is much more raw and it’s much more populist, and it’s much more of a working-class image. You can date it back to Pat Buchanan in the 1990s. I think you can really draw a line from Buchanan in ’92 and ’96 to Donald Trump, circa 2016, except of course Trump was more successful, and it’s that working-class populism. That’s always been here in New Hampshire politics. One of the real divides among New Hampshire Republicans is along lines of social class and educational attainment.
Polarization by education plays a real role. It has for a long time, and it does today because of Trump. In some ways Trump is a good fit for New Hampshire Republicans because … I mean, Trump never came across as especially religious in 2016, just like a lot of New Hampshire Republicans. A lot of New Hampshire Republicans might mispronounce 2 Corinthians the same way Trump did. Typically the traditional view of the New Hampshire Republican is someone who’s fiscally conservative — someone who’s all about taxes and budgets. But Trump’s style of populism really put that style of New Hampshire conservatism on the back foot.
Coaston: How did Chris Christie’s exit impact the race?
Scala: I saw a mailer that came from Trump’s super PAC on one side was Chris Christie, and it described Chris Christie as the only anti-Trump Republican in the race. The true anti-Trump Republican. And on the other side of the mailer was Nikki Haley, and it described Nikki Haley as a MAGA Republican. And now of course, that mailer came a little bit late. But what’s the psychology of the Chris Christie voter who’s been left at the altar, so to speak, right?
I mean, you were 12 days away from voting for Christie, and now your vote is up for grabs and your candidate deserted you. What’s their willingness to settle? And if they settle, I suspect they’re going to be settling for Nikki Haley because they can live with her. But are they going to cast a vote for someone who is not as anti-Trump as they would like because it’s the only chance they have to beat Trump?
That goes for moderate Republicans, but Democratic-leaning independent, or undeclared voters as we call them here — what are they going to do? Do they see Haley as a bridge too far because in a lot of ways she’s a rather conventional Republican, or do they desire so much to take it to Trump? Do they desire so much to cause him pain at the ballot box that they’re willing to cross party lines and cast a vote for Haley? Basically, I think Haley’s the only game in town for those Christie voters, but as Christie himself said numerous times, you definitely are settling for something less than you would’ve wished. But it’s a quadrennial event; people get caught up in the excitement. If it really does come down to one or the other, Haley or Trump, that could be hard to resist because what we’ve seen play out in New Hampshire generally speaking during the Trump years is, it’s rocket fuel for the opposition.
Coaston: In September you wrote, “It’s exceedingly difficult to find a campaign here trying to build something that connects with citizens, that makes its presence known in communities.” Does that end up being the case in New Hampshire? How has the primary system changed over the past few decades? I know those are two questions, but just kind of wanted your take about that.
Scala: I would say, OK, since I wrote that of the campaigns out there, I think Haley was trying to make the most strides in building local organization. I did see a couple of Trump canvassers this week. I guess the difference between Haley and, say, campaigns of bygone years is building that local organization would’ve started months earlier than it did this time around.
But how much of that was a party thing? How much of that is that campaigns no longer buy into physical organizational infrastructure the way they did with the advent of social media and so forth? How much of it was simply that in the shadow of Trump it was difficult to grow anything?
I do think that’s one clear difference we see now versus then, is in bygone years I would hear is you start building a campaign with house parties, and then you gradually build so that your campaign can fill bigger and bigger rooms until you’re filling, let’s say middle school auditoriums with several hundred people the week before the primary.
I think a lot of that is gone now, in part because, and this is true for Democrats as well as Republicans, you have the nationalization of the nomination process where campaigns need to become very big very quickly, and to build a national ID very quickly. So like a Pete Buttigieg, for example, perhaps back in the day, he would’ve been one of those who built slowly, slowly, slowly. But I’d say for the last 20 years, it’s more kind of go big or go home.
Coaston: What are New Hampshire voters looking for?
Scala: Well, among Republicans, probably a pretty close to a majority were never looking for anyone else but the person they knew so well, Donald Trump. To me, this whole past year makes a lot more sense if you think about Donald Trump as the Ronald Reagan of his day. Now, obviously there are limits to that parallel, Reagan stood for different things and all that’s true, but in terms of being a dominant figure. I mean, I got here to New Hampshire for the 2000 cycle so I’ve been here for several now, and I remember before Trump it always seemed to be like Ronald Reagan was always the lodestar that candidates would reference or recall.
It was always about Reaganism, but all along the way, Reaganism was becoming increasingly stale as time passed. But there wasn’t a replacement for Reagan. There was McCain and so forth, but there was never really McCainism, there was the candidate, That changed with Trump. As some of my colleagues have written, he kind of defines ideological labels now. You’re kind of defined ideologically by what you think about Trump.
For others, they’re in a bit of a quandary. You scratch the surface, what was Christie for? We know what he’s against, but what is he for? It was this same old warmed-over Reagan-Bushism, right? There’s some nostalgia that’s present among New Hampshire Republicans, but in some ways the nostalgia is a bit, again, it fills a vacuum because the party has changed with Trump in a way that a coherent counter alternative has not yet solidified. Maybe Haley will find a way to do it, but I think even Haley or DeSantis, they’re going to incorporate parts of Trumpism into their profile.
I remember several years ago seeing the former editor and publisher of the Union Leader, Joe McQuaid and Judd Gregg, former senator, and they were on a panel, and it was fascinating because they both once upon a time represented that working class versus New England upper class split that, as I mentioned, kind of defined a New Hampshire Republican Party for so long. But then these two were on a panel and they both were kind of anti-Trump.
And it was fascinating to see them both on the same side of something, but I think finding that alternative to Trumpism and kind of awakening to the realities of the party. There are lots of college-educated Republicans who looked around and said to themselves in 2016, who are all these people supporting Trump? It’s the old Pauline Kael joke, right? Now, maybe they do know some of those people, but they don’t know how to beat him yet.
[The film critic Pauline Kael said, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”]
Coaston: Do New Hampshire voters see Trump as conservative? And what does the conservative label mean today in New Hampshire? Is it a political identity or kind of a yardstick of an ideology that’s less relevant today?
Scala: What’s interesting to me, and we see this nationally as well, is that back in 2016 Trump was rather nonideological. He came to the table with some very heterodox, unorthodox ideas like protecting spending on entitlements, for instance. That was anything but conservative, at least as traditionally defined, but it’s a testament to Trump’s power that nowadays we look nationally where do very conservative Republicans place themselves? Firmly behind Trump.
Coaston: So my last question, it sounds simple, but I don’t think it is. Why wouldn’t Trump win the New Hampshire primary pretty handily?
Scala: Why wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t win the New Hampshire primary because the electorate turned out to be bigger and more moderate than was expected, both by most pollsters perhaps, and by the Trump campaign itself. I think that in a nutshell is the reason why he would not win, because the electorate, because an awful lot of people jump into the pool, so to speak, including from that body of independent or undeclared voters who are here as free agents who can participate in either party’s primary here in New Hampshire. I mean, on the Democratic side, the Democratic primary if polling’s any indication, and there are other indications as well, Dean Phillips isn’t catching fire.
A lot of people are going to write in Biden. The action is on the Republican side, and Christie’s departure only adds to that. The Trump canvassers handed me a card when they came to the door, and on the card it said something along the lines of liberals are invading our primary and we have to stop them. That speaks, I think, to the conventional wisdom that Trump’s campaign is much more sophisticated than it was eight years ago. And those two mail pieces confirmed that to me, and they also confirmed that they’re concerned that it is competitive.
They’re running a campaign that will win according to a set of parameters, including turnout. Even the best laid campaign, the best operated campaign can lose control of the parameters of a New Hampshire primary. That’s why they might lose.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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Jane Coaston was the host of Opinion’s podcast “The Argument.” Previously, she reported on conservative politics, the G.O.P. and the rise of the right. She also co-hosted the podcast “The Weeds.”
@janecoaston
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