I wanted to put this in GQ or IMHO, but I noticed that there aren’t any election questions there. I guess they all get posted (or moved) to GD. Oh well, here we go.
New Hampshire is, by all accounts, a battleground state. Yet it sits squarely in the northeast corner of the country, which, according to all predictions, will vote rock-solidly for Obama.
I’m puzzled. I’ve been through New England, and it’s not like you pass through some great divide when you cross into NH. It seems like the jobs and lifestyles of NH residents are very similar to those of neighboring states. Yet NH sits on the political fence while the surrounding states are unwaveringly blue. Why is NH such an anomaly?
New Hampshire has a strong cultural tradition of individualism, conservatism, etc. (“Live free or die”). To a certain extent, that tradition has fed on itself. New Englanders who have that sort of mentality are more likely to move to or stay in New Hampshire.
Note that New England states are relatively small so it’s very common and easy for people to move from one state to another. Or live in one state and work in another.
NH has a long history of conservative antics. This is the state that elected Mel Thompson. Mel Thompson - the governor who expressed support for the idea that the state should have its own nuclear arsenal. Y’know, in case Taxachussetts decided to start a war with it or something.
This is also the state where people had to fight for the right to have a choice of what to put on their license plates. The state motto, “live free or die,” struck some as just a tad jingoistic. But the people who wanted the option (which they did eventually get) of putting “scenic New Hampshire” on their plates instead were painted as a bunch of Commie pinkos.
Of course, that doesn’t answer the question of why NH tends to be so conservative. But New Hampshire’s largest town is Manchester, an ethnically diverse, largely blue-collar city. The name derives from Manchester, England, in light of the garment industry that grew up along the Merrimac River. I don’t know that either Vermont or Maine have a city with a similar history. While I would not be so overly simplistic as to draw a straight line between “blue collar” and “voting Republication” it is probably fairly easy to find evidence for the argument that NH demographics are not quite the same as in neighboring states.
And one must not forget William Loeb and his newspaper, the Union Leader. Although Loeb has been dead for decades, his rabid right-wing politics had a huge influence on people for many years. I have no idea what it is like these days, but during the Loeb heyday in the 1970s, the Union Leader fed a rabid right wing view of the world to all its readers.
Also, the absence of a state income tax doubtless attracted many people of a conservative bent.
They’ve had no affect on anything. NH has a history of conservative politics, and voting Republican. As the economy grew, a lot of transplants from Massachusetts came north, especially in the southern tier of towns, and the voting blocks shifted.
The Union Leader does have a lot of influence, but it’s the character of the population that allows the UL to thrive.
The UL is such a joke of a rag, it’s not even funny. It’s almost like Fox. Though there are plenty of social conservatives, I always got the impression that there were more people who were conservative because of fiscal reasons. I was so proud of my little state in 2000.
That being said, I think people stopped taking the primary there seriously when we voted Buchanan in 92.
It’s sort of a cliche, but it’s sort of true, too: Vermont and New Hampshire are both small states, so people had an easy choice: If you were liberal you moved to Vermont, if you were conservative you moved to New Hampshire.
Another practical reason is that southern New Hampshire attracts upper middle class homeowners from the NE Massachusetts. No income taxes, commuting proximity to Boston and large country lots appeals to the same demographic as the Republican party.
First, the politics of New Hampshire aren’t too different from the neighbors, if you look at it in a historical sense, and if we separate northern New England from southern New England. Into the late 1950s, Vermont and Maine both had the same sort of politics, and parts of Vermont and Maine still have that political environment.
Second, part of it being a toss-up is due to the state shifting away from being as solidly Republican as it used to be. Democrats control both houses of the state legislature, for example, something not seen since the 1910s.
The state’s libertarian tradition (especially on financial matters) explains part of the loyalty compared to their peers (and why it has declined since the late 1980s), as does migration, but another important reason why New Hampshire seems to be an outlier is the change of its neighbors, compared to itself. It did not receive the same sort of migration that happened in Vermont to change the local politics, nor did it end up developing politically like Maine, which, especially in non-federal elections, can be an odd state politically (for example, only one candidate of the Democratic or Republican party has won 50% of the vote in Maine since 1970).
Let’s remember that this region was once the most Republican in the country - the home of the abolitionist movement. The only states Roosevelt failed to win in his landslide of 1936 were Vermont and Maine, which seems funny for us to think about now.
Now, New Hampshire is changing - much as the political culture changed in Vermont and Maine (and Connecticut and Massachusetts - other Republican strongholds once.) We shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that states stay blue or red forever.
Not true in NH. There really is a shift in the political landscape as more people “from away” move to the state and the economy has dramatically changed.
Not true in Vermont either - after WWII there was a significant population shift there as Democrats from out of state moved in alongside traditional Republican voters.
That makes sense for how the flatlanders vote, but the native Vermonters would be conservative. (“Take Back Vermont”) I guess they’re outnumbered by the flatlanders, is that it?
Many were (and still are) but Vermont has a long history of fairly liberal (and even socialist) leanings. Let’s not forget the Bernie Saunders has held elected office since 1981. The “Take Back Vermont” movement also spawned the “Take Vermont Forward” campaign.
I have spent a good portion of my life in New Hampshire. I have lived there and I was married there. I also lived in Vermont. New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont are not easy to categorize even between each other. A major fact that has not been mentioned is that they are the whitest states in the country by a huge margin and they are very rural yet not poor. That explains almost all of it in my mind.
New Hampshire is the northern-most Southern state with much colder weather but with NASCAR. It has a huge libertarian streak. Vermont is not actually liberal. It just has a bunch of people that like to hang out there that are. It has the most liberal gun laws in the U.S. after all. Maine is as big as the rest of New England combined as has some bizarre cultural regions that are not similar to anywhere else in the U.S. It would take a college course or three to understand Maine. Vermont has a tiny native population yet a large group of people that live there part-time from areas like Greenwich, CT and NYC that skew the politics there.
Slightly off-topic: I wonder why Indiana has been red for years, considering it’s squeezed between blue Illinois and purple Ohio. There’s blue-collar Northwest Indiana, the city of Indianapolis, and other smaller cities like South Bend and Fort Wayne – it’s not just farms. Iowa tends to lean to a bluer shade of purple, and it’s arguably more agricultural than Indiana. Same thing with Wisconsin and Minnesota, to some extent.
Remember NH voted for Bush in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 so if NH had gone Democrat in 2000 Gore would’ve won.
Also NH didn’t vote for Obama, they wanted Hillary. Many Democrats feel Hillary should’ve won and if enough of them feel that way to vote for McCain (they wouldn’t really be voting for McCain as much as against Obama) NH could go Red again
