I love political traditions as much as any member of the chattering classes. That includes the hoary and slightly ridiculous traditions of the first-in-the-nation caucus in Iowa and primary in New Hampshire. So when Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee displaced those two events from the beginning of the presidential nominating contest (even as Republicans maintained them), I was mildly sad. But the logic of letting other states and regions of the country, particularly those with more racially diverse electorates, take the lead for once seemed highly compelling. It’s not like Iowa and New Hampshire are barred from going first until the end of time (or even the end of the decade); the Granite State was given the opportunity to go second and Iowa can probably return to the charmed circle of early states if it fully gets rid of the less than fully democratic caucuses.
Unfortunately for New Hampshire Democrats, the first-in-the-nation status of their state-run primary is fixed in state law, and their Republican secretary of State wasn’t about to bend to the other national party’s wishes. So the 2024 primary will occur eight days after Iowa Republicans caucus and well before the February 6 date sanctioned by the DNC. Accordingly, Biden’s campaign let it be known he would not be placing his name on the ballot there, and unsurprisingly, New Hampshire Democrats immediately set out to create a write-in campaign for the president.
This scenario, Jonathan Martin of Politico tells us, represents a “big blunder” for the Biden campaign now that Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips has filed to compete in the New Hampshire primary, creating the possibility of an upset or at least a damaging underperformance by the incumbent:
New Hampshire’s intransigence was entirely predictable, and Biden should have known as much. Yet he let his animus toward Iowa or New Hampshire, where he never gained traction in his three presidential bids, and his desire to reward South Carolina, which vaulted him to the White House, steer his thinking.
That’s one way to put it. Another way is that Biden used his leverage as president and party leader to execute a wildly overdue reform of the nomination process, at least for 2024. But nonetheless, the availability of the somewhat respectable Dean Phillips and the burdens of a write-in campaign mean we’ll be hearing a lot about past New Hampshire presidential missteps. These will include Lyndon Johnson’s write-in campaign badly underperforming in 1968, leading to that president’s withdrawal from the race, or George H.W. Bush’s heading down the road to a general-election defeat in 1992 by underestimating Pat Buchanan.
Martin is correct (and he should know) that media will be watching the rather phony New Hampshire contest between Phillips and Biden closely and will make a big deal out of any perceived failure by Biden to win big. That’s doubly true of conservative media, which report nothing involving the White House but Biden failures seven days a week.
There is, however, a simple solution to the artificial problem of a backbench congressman running an all-out New Hampshire challenge to an opponent who can’t actually campaign there at all. Biden should tell his friends in the state to shut down the write-in campaign instantly. It is, under national party rules, a rogue primary, and if he’s going to go to the trouble of obeying those rules, he shouldn’t countenance any half-assed effort there on his behalf that gives the media and the president’s various enemies something to blow up into an existential crisis for his reelection bid. Will that annoy New Hampshire voters and toss the state to the GOP in November? Probably no more than the original DNC decision to change the primary calendar, which cannot be undone. Besides, you’d like to think that nine months after the primary, New Hampshire voters would have a few more important things on their mind in choosing a president than whether one candidate did or didn’t sanction a write-in campaign in the dead of the previous winter.
With no Biden primary campaign happening at all in New Hampshire, it seems unlikely that Phillips will get a major boost from trouncing Marianne Williamson in New Hampshire. The beast of excited or hostile media attention will go unfed. And then the primary trail will continue to states like South Carolina, where the president is going to win by gargantuan margins.
Shutting down the Biden write-in campaign in New Hampshire should take one or two phone calls and avoid a world of potential trouble. But it needs to happen now.
