Political speed-dating in New Hampshire

SPEND MORE than ten minutes talking to a political junkie in New Hampshire, and you will hear some version of this old chestnut: Ask a New Hampshirite if he plans to vote for Candidate X for president, and he’ll say, “I don’t know; I’ve only seen her three times.” The Granite State holds the first presidential primary (Iowa selects a candidate a week earlier, but through caucuses rather than an election), so voters there expect, and receive in profusion, face-to-face contact with anyone who wants their vote. During a recent five-day stretch, eight candidates popped up across the state, their appearances fostered by groups of dedicated local volunteers. This fits well with the state’s political culture, which is equal parts charming and lunatic.

Larry Drake, who chairs the Rockingham County Democrats, a Republican-leaning region in the state’s south-eastern corner, and reckons he has seen 15 declared and prospective candidates so far in this cycle, explains that New Hampshire has kept its methods of political administration relatively unchanged for the past few centuries. To ensure that ordinary citizens can take part in the political process, the state begins its legislative sessions in winter, when farms lie fallow. The bedrock political entity is the town rather than the county or region and, as in much of New England, town Boards of Selectmen—in effect, powerful city councils—make virtually all political decisions. State legislators’ pay was set at $100 a year in 1889, and there it has remained.

New Hampshire has a famously libertarian ethos. It has no income or general sales tax, preferring to gouge outsiders with hefty hotel, restaurant and hire-car taxes, and tolls where highways cross the state border. Since 2003 the Free State Project has been asking libertarians to move to the state, to put their ideas into practice.

Somehow this ethos has produced a profusion of government. New Hampshire has 424 state legislators, or one for every 2,557 residents of voting age (if California used the same ratio, it would have a 11,920-person legislature). This makes it not just the biggest state legislature in America, but the third-biggest legislative body in the Anglophone world, behind only the United States Congress and Britain’s Parliament. In addition to the legislature and governor it elects an executive council, a five-member body first convened in 1680 to check the royal governor’s power. The council today approves and monitors agency budgets, and can veto the governor’s pardons and appointments. It is, in short, a state that takes participatory democracy seriously.

That is where Mr Drake comes in. He is a compact, genial retired labour economist who spent 32 years studying employment patterns at the Bureau of Labour Statistics in Washington, DC, before retiring to southern New Hampshire. He has been politically active since attending an anti-war march in 1968, and has chaired the Rockingham County Democrats for seven years.

Over breakfast at a country club in Atkinson, where Donald Trump held one of his last pre-election rallies, George Hamblen, a party chairman in the neighbouring town of Plaistow, credits Mr Drake with “building something out of nothing”. On a recent presidential-election map, southern New Hampshire is solidly Republican. Republicans outnumber Democrats in 34 of Rockingham’s 37 towns. Mr Drake’s job entails building local party organs where none existed before, and persuading people to run for local office even though they will probably lose. It helps that he is a self-described “people person”, with a warm, patient manner and an easy laugh.

Over one weekend in mid-March Mr Drake attended two town caucuses, where local party committees chose leaders, as well as town hall meetings with two presidential candidates: Amy Klobuchar, who spoke in a gym at a local school, and John Hickenlooper, who made a deeply on-brand appearance at a deconsecrated church that is now a bar (Mr Hickenlooper once owned a brew pub). A caucus made Mr Drake miss a third; Tulsi Gabbard drew a crowd to a public library in Plaistow.

He will undoubtedly see them again. “If they don’t come here,” says Mr Drake, “it’s political malpractice.” New Hampshire is small, but an early victory lets a candidate build momentum and then a war-chest. The state also lets candidates hone their retail skills. Debates and huge rallies come later; New Hampshire events are intimate. Before Ms Klobuchar took the stage, the chairman of the Rye Democrats thanked “Mr Philbrick for letting us use the bank’s parking lot”, and asked how many people had children who played basketball in the gym (a lot of hands went up).

Asked which candidate he favours, Mr Drake will not be drawn. “I made a conscious decision to be neutral in the primary,” he explains. The 2016 primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders fractured friendships, and “bad feelings” lingered in 2008 between supporters of Mrs Clinton and Barack Obama. Most Democrats seem to understand that harbouring grudges this year could hand the White House back to Mr Trump.