Hillary Clinton and her staff have always said they wanted a competitive primary. At the moment it looks like they have one.

Clinton faces a growing threat from Bernie Sanders in the once-safe haven of New Hampshire, but her campaign has no intention of attacking or even name-checking the white-tufted democratic socialist — yet.


The left’s counter-candidate is gaining fast on Clinton in the Granite State, the site of her most uplifting 2008 victory and suddenly a source of worry rivaling her Waterloo that year — Iowa. Two polls this week showed the Vermont independent polling over 30 percent in his neighboring New England state, just 10 to 12 percentage points behind front-runner Clinton — a big leap from his 15 point to 18 point showing in various polls in recent weeks.

“I think because he is a little bit of a fringe figure in politics, people didn’t think we took him seriously, but we always did,” said a Democratic operative close to Clinton. “But we really do think it is the case. When you look at New Hampshire, Hillary herself in 2008 only got 40 percent … and it’s Bernie’s neighborhood.”

To some Sanders advisers, it’s no surprise that the senator would be pulling in close to a third of the Democratic vote. Senior adviser Mark Longabaugh, who ran the New Hampshire campaigns for Dick Gephardt in 1988 and Bill Bradley in 2000, argued that Clinton’s appeal as the establishment candidate wouldn’t wash in insurgent-loving New Hampshire. “Because it’s a small state and you can reach and touch every voter, I think that establishment support for Clinton in New Hampshire is much less significant for her there than in other places,” he said. “That’s why insurgents have always had an ability to emerge there, because there isn’t any kind of machine or organizational barrier.”

Thus far, Clinton has refused to acknowledge Sanders by name in her speeches — or even during a news conference in Concord earlier this week — despite Sanders’ repeated criticism of Clinton for failing to take a position on fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

Following the standard front-runner’s textbook, she has no intention of shifting her “Bernie who?” pose — although her surrogates on the ground have tried to counter the threat by portraying Sanders’ rise as a helpful, though ultimately futile, party-building exercise.

Last week, Billy Shaheen, husband of New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and a longtime Clinton family friend, told Sanders supporters at a meeting of the Hillsborough County Democrats “how great it was that Bernie was in the race” for the purpose of providing the Democrats’ inevitable nominee with “a contested primary,” according to a person in the room.

At her campaign launch last weekend, Clinton told the crowd in New York that she expected a “competitive” race, but until Sanders’ surge, most senior Democrats thought the bigger test of her popularity inside the party would come during the Iowa caucuses — which cost her the 2008 nomination.

But no more — especially now that the earnest 73-year-old Brooklyn native is out-drawing the world’s most famous woman at campaign rallies.

“Let me tell you a secret. We’re going to win New Hampshire,” Sanders told an overflow crowd of around 1,000 people at a rally in the western New Hampshire city of Keene earlier this month.

His rallies have been big — from more than 5,000 people at his beyond-capacity, late-May kickoff in Burlington, Vermont, to more than 3,000 people at a rally the following Sunday in Minneapolis. Last weekend in Des Moines, Iowa, an overflow crowd packed Drake University’s 775-seat Sheslow Auditorium to hear Sanders speak.

On Tuesday, his campaign announced that it’s moving his town meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, from a union hall to a high school to accommodate the more than 1,000 people who have signed up online to attend. By contrast, the overflow pen at Clinton’s campaign kickoff remained empty, loudspeakers blaring her speech to an empty patch of Roosevelt Island lawn.

Sanders’ rise in the polls — a new Suffolk University poll put him at 31 percent in New Hampshire and a Morning Consult poll this week had him at 32 percent there — has prompted mixed feelings in Clinton’s camp. Despite the public message, the candidate herself and many of her senior staff would like nothing better than a cakewalk — and one of her top fundraisers told POLITICO recently that the “lack of a serious Democratic challenger is the best thing that has happened to us so far.” But many in Clinton’s orbit think the opposite — that she needs a sparring partner with the capacity to give her a scare and lend a sense of urgency to big-money donors who have been reluctant to fundraise for a candidate they view as the party’s presumptive nominee.

A closer look at the polling shows the distinctive outline of Sanders’ support in New Hampshire: In the Suffolk poll, he beats Clinton by more than 20 points in the northern and western parts of the state — the liberal counties that border Vermont and are reached by the Burlington media market, the city where Sanders served four terms as mayor.

It’s an area that’s known for its anti-establishment streak. “They are loyal voters and they really don’t care what’s going on in the rest of the state,” said David Paleologos, who conducted the Suffolk poll. He noted that Howard Dean — the last Vermonter to run for president and who made a strong challenge to John Kerry in New Hampshire in 2004 — received early and strong support from the Connecticut River Valley.

The story is different on the other side of the state. In the two most populous counties — Hillsborough and Rockingham, which make up roughly half of the electorate — Clinton is up big. Sanders is down almost 30 percent in the Seacoast region — the southeastern part of the state that is farthest from Vermont.

New Hampshire as a whole, though, is thought to be Clinton country — the place where Bill Clinton posted a surprise second-place finish in 1992 to help jump-start his campaign and where Hillary Clinton came back to defeat Barack Obama after coming in third in Iowa. She already has endorsements from a number of top state Democrats, including former state party chair Kathy Sullivan, former House Speaker Terie Norelli and former Rep. Carol Shea-Porter.

“In New Hampshire right now, [her] lead has shrunk a lot,” said Paleologos in the poll’s release, “and this is a much different Democratic primary race than we are seeing in other states so far.”