MANCHESTER, N.H. — Hillary Clinton is losing in New Hampshire, and at least one small contingent of family allies thinks it’s nearly time to cut bait.

The group — veterans of the family’s old campaigns and people close to Clinton’s fundraising — see little reason to support a strategy that continues to pour resources into the state where Bernie Sanders’ already surprising lead shows no signs of shrinking.


Despite confidence emanating from the campaign’s paid leadership team that Clinton is well positioned with more than four months to go before the primary, this circle of informal advisers is whispering about more aggressively looking beyond New Hampshire after a summer that saw her polling advantage evaporate. These confidantes are not only granting the possibility that Sanders could win here: they see it as a near-certainty, and in some cases wonder about the usefulness of flooding the state with precious resources.

Instead, they’re arguing that Clinton’s campaign would be just fine focusing on the states that follow in early 2016.

“I look at New Hampshire and I say, ‘um, yeah, whatever.’ I like the people in Iowa. I like the people in New Hampshire. But you know what? They are distinctly different than most places in the country are. They are very white, they are very parochial. And they are not emblematic of the country,” explained one Washington-based Clinton friend who remains in touch with the candidate, adding that she would be comfortable relying on the campaign’s organization in the 48 other states.

“It’s about preserving the antique nomination process. I don’t know if I care so much. I’d like to win. But I don’t think it’s crucial, nor do I think it’s necessary, to win either of those two states."

The widening rift between Clinton’s team and the pocket of informal but influential advisers and old friends is quiet, but real. And it’s exactly this kind of off-strategy, off-message suggestion that drives the official Brooklyn-based campaign mad.

That’s because Clinton’s political team readily acknowledges her weakness in New Hampshire — she was down 14 points to Sanders by the end of September in the Huffington Post Pollster average. And the team is also well aware of the circumstances that the doubters see as evidence of a lost cause — Sanders’ next-door neighbor status, voters’ perceived inability to break into Clinton’s Secret-Service mandated bubble, and her own role as the establishment’s front-runner.

But to Clinton staffers in both Brooklyn and Manchester, the idea of shifting away from New Hampshire — the state that resuscitated Clinton’s 2008 campaign and her husband’s 1992 effort — is beyond ridiculous, and potentially campaign-killing. The state couldn’t be further from hopeless, they say.

“New Hampshire is doing its important work, which is having the candidates do all the critical work that needs to be done to earn the vote,” said Clinton’s New Hampshire state director, Mike Vlacich, who dismissed the suggestion that pulling back would even be remotely considered. “We set out from the very beginning understanding that we would have a challenge, and that we would have to work hard to meet that challenge."

Clinton’s team acknowledges they’ve heard rumblings of discontent from old family hands, but the schism hasn’t broken into the open. Instead, it’s an illustration of the campaign’s struggle to keep its enormous network of Democrats on message as it fends off Sanders’ surprisingly resilient challenge.





Clinton has poured millions of dollars into the state to pay for television advertising and its 50 in-state staffers, and the candidate spends as much time in New Hampshire — where she was on Monday — as any other state besides Iowa — where she’ll be on Tuesday.

So her backers on the ground here are growing frustrated with such hand-wringing from the sidelines, saying that Clinton’s demonstrated investment — combined with the fact that New Hampshire Democrats have tended to change their minds late in the race in recent cycles — should be enough to calm the nervous.

“I wish that the squishy types in Washington would call us,” said former New Hampshire Democratic Party chairwoman Kathy Sullivan, a Clinton supporter. “To make a determination of what the outcome is going to be in early February, based on a few polls right now? That’s craziness."

Accordingly, Clinton’s team sees the summer as a weak period, but more of a phase than a harbinger. While Sanders’ own paid staff of 43 tries to move past the work-in-progress phase it has reached in the eyes of neutral Democrats, the former secretary of state’s own team keeps in mind the primary’s recent history — late-stage favorites losing in the last three contested races.

And while the skeptical contingent sees Sanders’ profile as reason to consider writing the state off, the official side simply sees it as a good way to explain his polling lead, which they say has plateaued.

“There’s not a lot of anxiety over [Sanders]’ lead,” said a close Clinton ally with no formal ties to the campaign, but who still speaks with the candidate and raises money for her. “We’d obviously love to win New Hampshire, [but] he’s the perfect candidate for New Hampshire."

That calculation is reversed among paid Clintonites. New Hampshire’s exceedingly white demographic makeup, increasingly liberal population, and history of loving insurgents — particularly those from next-door states — make Sanders formidable, they acknowledge. But, that he’s only up by 14 points after a summer of fawning headlines about his crowd sizes while Clinton struggled to answer her email questions suggests, her team says, that there’s room for her to storm back.

“This is not the first time we’ve seen this dynamic in the New Hampshire primary,” said Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center. "There’s 40-to-45 percent of the Democratic primary voters who, time after time, want to be swept off their feet by somebody other than the front-runner. This goes back to Gene McCarthy."

And while no candidate from a neighbor state has lost the primary in recent years (except Vermonter Howard Dean, who lost to Massachusetts’ John Kerry), Clinton backers note that relatively few voters live in areas of overlap with Vermont media markets, so it’s not like Sanders was already a state-wide celebrity.





Still, part of Sanders’ lead can be attributed to the goodwill and name recognition he generated by campaigning for New Hampshire Democrats in recent years, said his state director Julia Barnes.

Clinton only came north for one event in the 2014 election cycle, and her party establishment support — including endorsements from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Gov. Maggie Hassan — hasn’t been enough to make up that difference. Even Clinton herself pointed to Sanders’ geographical proximity on Monday morning when asked about his strength in the state.

“Frankly, I think we’ve out-campaigned Hillary Clinton,” said senior Sanders strategist Mark Longabaugh, who ran New Hampshire operations for Dick Gephardt in 1988 and Bill Bradley in 2000. “In a lot of other states there’s a more institutional and organizational structure in Democratic parties, and that’s not the case here. … No disrespect to Shaheen or the current governor, but they don’t have powerful, patronage-driven infrastructure."

So this local advantage is yet another reason some of the skeptics say Clinton would be better served looking straight to the southern states that make up Super Tuesday — states her campaign is already organizing.

The official side is keeping a happy face on its deficit for the moment, pointing to recent history as its guide.

“I would rather not be the person with a commanding lead right now, because in New Hampshire that usually leads to heartbreak,” said Sullivan.

Or, in the words of Clinton friend and fundraiser Robert Zimmerman, who went a step further: “The only thing worse than being in second in New Hampshire and Iowa at this stage is being in first."

