Hillary Clinton’s campaign says that she’s losing New Hampshire because Bernie Sanders, being from neighboring Vermont, is a “favorite son” in the state. But according to reporters and editors at four of the state’s top news outlets, that’s “a load of crock” and “would make most New Hampshire stomachs turn.” In fact, most New Hampshirites probably didn’t know who Bernie Sanders was until he launched his presidential campaign. And bobcat-killing and the opiate epidemic are more likely to be at the top of their list of concerns than, say, immigration.

Those are just a few of things the pundits and candidates are getting wrong about New Hampshire as we head into its first-in-the-nation primary on Tuesday. In a roundtable interview moderated by Politico’s senior politics editor Charlie Mahtesian, five of the journalists who follow New Hampshire politics most closely revealed more about what's really going on on-the-ground in the Granite State and what we in Washington are missing.


Charlie Mahtesian, Politico: One of the things we’ve heard is a lockstep message coming out of the Clinton camp—this idea that Hillary Clinton’s not going to do that well because it’s Bernie’s backyard. They’re downplaying expectations since she’s trailing in the polls. My question, though, is how well does New Hampshire actually know Bernie? Is it the case where he’s the third senator from New Hampshire, as Clinton would like to believe? Is he known in the Connecticut River Valley, known in southern New Hampshire?

Roger Carroll, Nashua Telegraph: I was watching CBS news the other night, there was a woman doing standup in front of a bridge in Manchester. She said that Sanders is practically a favorite son here in New Hampshire. You know what, that is a load of crock. There’s no other way to—that is, I mean, I’m sitting there, you know how a dog turns its head when it doesn’t quite get something? [Sighs deeply].

Look. People in the Connecticut River Valley knew who he was. They knew who he was when he was mayor of Burlington, because Channel 3 has a really strong signal that beams in. But you go 15 miles to the east and nobody knew who he was, he was 50 points behind at this time last year. So, as Colonel Potter from MASH used to say: Horse hockey!

Trent Spiner, New Hampshire Union Leader: I’d take it a step further, and I would say, people still don’t 100 percent understand who he is. I was talking to someone just yesterday, and she said that if she bumped into Sanders at a Starbucks she wouldn’t know what he looks like. I think you have to consider that a lot of the polling you’re seeing in New Hampshire is not accurate. There’s still a lot of undecided voters, and a lot of voters are not fully aware of Bernie Sanders and his campaign proposals.

RC: It kind of ticked me off, didn’t mean to get too animated. It was a case of a reporter making up her own facts.

Daniel Barrick, New Hampshire Public Radio: I agree with Roger. Not only personality, but the notion of favorite son from Vermont would make most New Hampshire stomachs turn. Just look at New Hampshire Democratic politics. Bernie Sanders would not win statewide office in New Hampshire. I would put money on it. Look at the kinds of Democrats we get—[Sen.] Jeanne Shaheen, [Gov.] Maggie Hassan, [former Gov.] John Lynch. These are not liberal heartthrobs. These are very practical, pragmatic, soft-spoken, conservative, not politically but in temperament and rhetorical style. … I understand the Democratic electorate in New Hampshire is more liberal than rest of country, but it’s not Bernie Sanders liberal on a regular basis.

TS: People in New Hampshire call [Vermont] the upside down New Hampshire for a reason.

RC: There’s a lot of cross traffic in Vermont and New Hampshire in that ten to fifteen miles to the east in New Hampshire. They have no great love for Vermont. They sometimes derisively refer to it as the People’s Republic of Vermont.

Ella Nilsen, Concord Monitor: I wanted to say, it goes the other way around. I used to be a reporter at the Keene Sentinel, on the border with Brattleboro, Vermont. And I went over to cover a bacon festival, and someone asked me how I managed to cross the border.

CM: I wonder if you could find one factor to watch or one place to watch, give us something to keep an eye in the run-up to primary day?

DB: On the Democratic side, keeping an eye on blue-collar, post-industrial mill cities, places that typically vote Democratic, but have very much a working class flavor. Cities like Rochester and Claremont and Berlin up north, these are cities that really were at the heart of Clinton’s win eight years ago over Obama. But I do think that Sanders’ message may be amendable to a lot of those folks, lower middle class, blue-collar workers—if he can eat into her margins there, compared to Obama eight years ago, it’s going to be probably be a rough night for Clinton.

On the Republican side, just keep an eye on Manchester. No Republican has won the New Hampshire primary without winning Manchester, New Hampshire, in over 40 years. The city is very much working class, it has a burgeoning tech sector, a lot of college graduates there. It’s where 10 percent of the votes in the state are, and for Republicans, it’s a bellwether.

Chris Garofolo, Nashua Telegraph: I agree with Dan. For me, one of most interesting places is Claremont and Newport, which tend to be blue-collar towns. And just look at the Senate returns in 2014, where it was basically straight ticket Republican with the exception of Sen. Shaheen—she won a lot of votes in Claremont and Newport. So I think that’s there’s a lot people who can be persuaded one way or other up there. It’s out of our coverage area, but you’ll want to keep eye on it.

EN: One place I’m keeping up on in the same vein, and this is more personal, I’m from the North Country, originally Coös County. There are definitely fewer votes up there, but it’s kind of this very economically depressed area that used to have a lot of manufacturing jobs and some paper mills and things like that. Just from what I’ve heard, it seems like Sanders has a lot of appeal, but I’m interested to see if that translates into Sanders carrying some of those smaller more northern counties.

RC: I like to watch the mock elections, not because they count, but sometimes kids are parroting what they hear at home. So when schools hold their little mock voting day, I don’t put much stock in it, but sometimes, it’s a reflection of what’s coming.

CM: I like that.

TS: Just to echo Dan, look at Manchester, but if you really want to dig into the numbers, look at Manchester Ward 1, the city’s north end, a very big Republican pocket. I’ll have someone stationed there that night because they’re not only a Republican pocket, but they get their vote count in very early on. They use electronic ballots, like Scan-Trons, and so you can tell very early on how Republicans did in Ward 1. That’s number one.

Two, this Republican triangle that starts in Manchester and goes south on one end to Salem and the other end to Nashua—that’s Hillsboro and Rockingham county—55 percent of the state’s GOP live in those two counties. If you’re doing well in Londonderry and Salem, that’s how we on Election Night are going to tell how this is coming in.

The third thing I want to say: I think you have to really consider that the polls you’ve seen in New Hampshire are not right. We have a story today basically talking about how the last few months there have been 77 polls in the field in New Hampshire. 77 polls. And there are all kinds of problems with these. About 30 percent of the people voting in this election were not old enough to vote or did not live here in 2008. That’s 300,000 people. The polls you’re seeing I think are totally off.

RC: If I can piggyback on what Trent is saying, one of the things that sets this primary apart from any other that I’ve seen is that it’s not unusual for people to not know which candidate they’ll vote for four to five days out, but it is unusual not to know which primary they’re going to vote in four to five days out. And I think Trump and Sanders have sort of distorted that picture, this time around.

CM: Can you tell me what it feels like on the ground in New Hampshire right now? How does the primary affect the rhythms of daily life? How would you characterize the levels of excitement and bustle to someone from another state who has no idea, or has never gone through something like this?

DB: It depends on where you live, first of all. If you are an independent voter in southern New Hampshire, it’s probably going to feel very different than if you live in far northern Coös County, or a more rural, isolated place. But the campaigns are certainly targeting at this point, they’re implementing a get-out-the-vote effort, the strategy is very much to excite the base, excite your supporters, create a sense of momentum.

When an event comes to your town, it definitely takes over, whether the satellite trucks and CNN or Secret Service vehicles and the whole caravan. Chris Christie basically shut down Main Street of Hopkinson, New Hampshire, for a couple of hours Monday night with his New Jersey Secret Service detail, and all those satellite trucks—it was a big deal. But in my daily rounds, people know I’ve worked in journalism and cover politics, it’s not necessarily on the tips of everybody’s tongue for people who are outside of that bubble.

EN: What I would add to the point of how it feels and the excitement level is this: This is the primary, it’s not the general election. But it’s been interesting to me, because it feels like people haven’t reached fatigue yet. And I think that has partially to do with the fact that there’s a pretty diverse array of candidates to choose from—on both sides—and I think that people this election, whether they’re Republican or Democrat, there are some candidates that people are really, genuinely excited about. With the Sanders-Trump influence, the kind of outsider influence in the mix, there are definitely the people that say, I feel that these people are speaking to me more than a typical politician has in the past. I think that people have—again, on both sides of the aisles—have found politicians, outsider candidates, that they can sort of get behind. And so that has created excitement.

The other thing I would add is that certainly with Trump in the race, at some of the earlier events, you definitely felt there were a good mix of people at events in New Hampshire that were there partially just to see Donald Trump and to snap a photo of him. But at the past few events I’ve gone to—New Hampshire voters are known for taking politics very seriously, and everyone is seriously evaluating the candidates—I do feel like voters that I’ve spoken to at the past couple of Trump events, it’s less of a circus, and more of New Hampshire voters really saying: I’m out here, I want to see him speak, I’ve seen a lot of the other candidates and am really trying to evaluate things carefully.

TS: A very quick flavor from Manchester. We are in full blown carnival mode. It’s like political Disneyland. I was downtown this morning and the number of people and satellite trucks is incredible. You’ll hear other people say: This is the most magical week in politics. This is the week where you can go out and talk to any candidate you want, ask questions and they are willing to answer to get your vote.

RC: I think Dan’s point back in the beginning was a good one, that it depends. It depends on a couple of things. One, where you are. Also, what you do. I’m experiencing this in southern New Hampshire for the first time. I grew up in western New Hampshire, and it’s much less intense. It’s much less intense in the North Country, I think it’s much less intense in the Connecticut River Valley, where candidates are less frequent, so there’s that part of it. But I also think, just from our own professions, as an editor, I’m getting 150 emails per day, and a lot of them from people outside New Hampshire trying to influence the primary. They want us to write, or to publish their op-eds, publish their letters. If you’re a reporter like Ella or Chris, I’m sure, it’s just much more of a maelstrom because they’re in the thick of it.

DB: Just to this point of the geographic variation and how the primaries descend on New Hampshire, a single elementary school, Mary Fiske elementary, is hosting three town hall meetings this week, because Salem is right on the Massachusetts border, nudged between Nashua and Manchester—full of Republican voters, right by the airport, it makes sense. As Roger said, you go up to Berlin, New Hampshire, or Lisbon or somewhere off the beaten track, you’re not going to see candidates. You might have seen them in the summer, with all of them making obligatory visits to the far outreaches of the state. But right now it’s where the people are, in south central New Hampshire.

CM: We noticed [in Iowa] on the Republican side there was record turnout, high turnout on the Democrat side. I wondered if you can walk us through a bit about the enthusiasm level for those two candidates. Is it something that you’ve noticed, is there something different about those events, a different energy? I’m interested in your perspective about who those supporters are and how likely they are to show up on Tuesday.

EN: I cover Sanders and Trump for the Monitor, so I get to go to all of the events, which have been really fun. I was actually just remarking to one of my editors that it feels like the thing that Sanders and Trump events have that not really any other event has is this kind of boisterous crowd, and that people from the crowd will just shout things out. And maybe that happens to a lesser extent to some of the crowds, but that’s something that I just notice a lot at both of their events. And so the other day in Keene was no different, it was very enthusiastic. When Sanders was talking about free healthcare for all Americans, someone shouted out, “Don’t forget dental!” But I definitely think there is more palpable excitement at those events from the voters than there are at a lot of other events.

RC: I’ve been doing this for a while. I remember my first primary—I didn’t vote in it, but the primary that first came on my radar was in elementary school in Lebanon, New Hampshire, in 1968. And so, I’ve sort of followed it, was bit by the bug. I don’t ever remember the rock star factor the way that this campaign has had. It’s not that people have never been passionate, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Some of it may be the fact that Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” but how do you account for Bernie? I don’t know. That makes it very, very different.

DB: I’d agree with all of that. Roger’s description of the rock star factor, it is notable—you go to these events, Sanders and Trump events, and this has been remarked on, but it’s very notable especially if you’ve covered a number of these primaries. Just the lack of engagement with the voters: The voters are coming to see a spectacle, which is a very different model than how the New Hampshire primaries typically—what the voters are demanding of candidates, typically. There’s no questions, there’s no real local flavor in these events, it’s very seldom that a local elected official introduces candidates, no real ostentatious attempt to display knowledge of local politics or issues form either candidate. It’s very much a show. You get the sense that many of the attendants have been to several of these shows. They know what the applause lines are, what the laughs lines are, in Trump’s case they’ll finish sentences. You often see these bigger rallies or get-out-the-vote efforts.

But I do think, we’ve tried really hard to report on this ground game flip-side. You can get out the crowds, but what will that mean on Election Day? Sanders certainly has that effort, and I do think they’re working very hard to translate that. They have a traditional ground game model, despite an untraditional candidate. With Trump, it’s impossible to say. We’ve tried to talk to the campaign, we get bullish statements about how they’re upping expectations and bringing out new voters, but it’s very hard to see that materially, to see what their call centers look like, or actually see or follow canvassing effort. We just haven’t seen that. It’s hard to know how that will translate.

CG: I’ve covered both Sanders and Trump multiple times, and actually was a Vermont reporter for a number of years, and I know Bernie pretty well. Bernie crowds tend to be much more energetic than Hillary, and certainly O’Malley. He’s focusing on his bread and butter issues, which is younger voters: You’ll see him in places like Keene, Dartmouth a little while ago—he’s doing a good job of reaching out to the young constituents, the people who he knows are most likely to get out the vote for him. Whether they vote on primary day, that’s a different question. And echoing back some of the other reporters: the Trump crowds, when he was here in Nashua, people were shouting out not only anti-Obama things, but if he mentions Hillary, let’s just say certain words were screamed from the top rows.

EN: It will be interesting—from the reporting that I’ve done on the Trump ground game, I feel like that has the potential to be a weak spot in New Hampshire. Like Dan said, the Trump campaign has been very secretive about its ground game and what is actually going on in the state when reporters try stories. I made a lot of phone calls and sent a lot of emails to the state director and deputy state director, and got directed to Hope Hicks, the national spokesperson, who said you can’t talk to anybody. I did manage to talk to one staffer who apparently just hadn’t gotten the memo about not talking to the press, at a local college student event. And between the reporting I did, and then later CBS had also put out a Trump ground game reporter, it seems like they’re very focused on phone banking, and maybe now in the last week actually doing canvassing.

But the people that I talk to, it seemed very much like, basically, do however much you want to do. And also, I think one staffer anonymously told CBS that he just didn’t feel like going and knocking on doors because he kind of got annoyed when canvassers would come knock on his doors, and he didn’t want to replicate that and didn’t feel like bugging voters.

CG: It’s interesting, I’ve found many of these volunteers for Sanders tend to be much younger. This is their first campaign, they’re not nearly as seasoned in the same way that some of the Clinton supporters are. They [Clinton volunteers] tend to be older, to have worked on many, many campaigns in the past. Some worked on Shaheen’s Senate campaign two years ago, many are holdovers from Obama’s second round here in 2012. You don’t see that with the Sanders campaign.

It will be interesting to see whether that has repercussions, almost like Howard Dean in 2004, where they had ground game and momentum, but not the experience needed to keep moving after a loss in Iowa. We’ll see what happens after New Hampshire, especially with Sanders.

DB: I agree, but I do think that the Sanders ground game has matured significantly in the last couple of months. Over summer, we did a story following canvassers around. The line from the camp in Burlington at that point was: Just share your story, share why you support Bernie, talk about your personal feelings. And understandably, it would seem a little amateurish, listening to these interactions between canvassers and homeowners on very unfocused conversations.

That seems to have changed recently—it’s just more data driven, targeting of voters, more specific lines of argument and messaging. Whether that will bear fruit is tough to say, but between the level of sophistication, the money that has flowed in, the attention and staff that has flowed into New Hampshire, Sanders has much tighter ship than they did three months ago.

CM: Can we talk a little about the top issues in the New Hampshire primary. I imagine that many of them are national, but in Iowa, we saw for example, ethanol came to the top of the list in terms of the kinds of things candidates were talking about. What issues are resonating in New Hampshire? Anything local? Just national issues? And how are the candidates speaking to those issues?

CG: I wrote story about this last summer. Southern New Hampshire, you get a lot of questions about the Kinder Morgan pipeline, questions about the northern pass. Roger and I were with Christie yesterday, and he was questioned about the bobcat issue. And came out in favor of shooting bobcats, and I don’t know who else has since done that. You get a lot of questions about national issues, like Obamacare depending on which side of aisle you’re coming form, but you do get an unbelievable amount of local school board questions, questions about how places like Nashua can improve the downtown economy. No questions about ethanol though.

TS: We just asked our readers to submit questions for the MSNBC debate. And we got hundreds and hundreds of questions, and we’ve been able to sort them, so I can give you a fact based assessment of big topics. Right at the top, northern pass and Kinder Morgan; the second big issue was heroine and fentanyl. A poll came out lately that showed half of people in New Hampshire know someone who has overdosed on opioids. That’s a really big topic of conversation. People are wondering what the candidates would do. We just had a story on Sunday showing that a lot of the drugs coming into New Hampshire come from Mexico, and people are wondering what they would do—are they in favor of cross-border enforcement? Would they be stricter about marijuana? All kinds of drug related questions. It really is an epidemic in the state.

Another big topic is college affordability. The state school here is one of the most expensive in the country, and New Hampshire students per capita have the second highest rate of student loan debt in the country. So lots of people sitting in the audience have 30, 40, 50, 100,000 dollars in student loans, and they’re wondering what all of the candidates would do, not only about loans but college affordability in general. And then a lot of people are talking about the Affordable Care Act; there are a lot of small business owners in New Hampshire and it’s really impacted their business and their strategy on hiring and number of full-time people they have versus hours they give part-timers. I would say that the top four topics are heroine/fentanyl, Northern Pass/Kinder Morgan, college affordability and health care.

CG: To build on what Trent was saying, most candidates have held drug forums. People like Hillary Clinton have introduced topics on heroine and opioid abuse. I don’t know how many other people were in the event, Hillary’s first event in Keene, but a grandmother stood up and talked about how she was taking care of her granddaughter, because actually her daughter was in rehab or arrested for opioid abuse. And for the Clinton campaign, that’s where a lot of this started from. They bring that up a lot of times when issue are addressed.

EN: I just want to quickly point out that as far as candidates actually taking a stand on local issues, I think one of the most significant ones has been Bernie Sanders coming out against the Kinder Morgan pipeline in southwest New Hampshire. I thought that was interesting, he took a stand on that publicly at this big Democratic dinner in Manchester, and it is kind of interesting, because obviously it’s a very controversial topic in New Hampshire—this proposed pipeline running through I think 79-plus miles of the state. And a lot of state officials in New Hampshire’s own delegation haven’t really come out in a stance on it yet, and I don’t think any of the other presidential candidates have either.

DB: I think one thing that comes up in the Democratic side and on the Republican side, too, is a lot of general questions on the state of the economy. I think in New Hampshire, post-recession, has done quite well. Median income and the employment rate here are relatively high, we never really suffered the crash as a lot of other parts of the country. But there is a real sense of uncertainty around the economy, and I think that comes from the fact that New Hampshire was a state that benefited, one of the few in New England, from high rates of migration, baby boomers moving from Boston and New York and Connecticut. And that was in part because of aging patterns; that has all really frozen in the last 10 years. There’s a large unease about what’s the state’s next chapter. We know we’re aging, public higher education is very expensive this year; it doesn’t make it easy to retain young folks. Just a general sense of economic malaise, that we’re sort of standing in place, is gnawing on a lot of voters. It’s this displaced economic anxiety that I do think the candidates, especially Trump and Sanders, are tapping into. People are just grasping for answers.

RC: I think the latest unemployment figures showed the state was at 3 percent, something like that. But I think the unaddressed issue is underemployment, and I think that’s part of the reason for some of the resonating messages coming from Sanders and Trump—you can have a fulltime job and still be a long way from making ends meet. And some people blame John Galt, some people blame immigrants and there’s no question that part of the success of those candidates is to feed the fire aflame. You asked about the top issues that are being addressed, that’s one, along with probably infrastructure. That I think isn’t being addressed.

CM: I saw today that the New Hampshire State House Speaker endorsed Christie. We’ve seen throughout campaign endorsements trickle out. Clinton has backing from the governor and Senator Shaheen. Can you speak a little about what kind of role, or how much stock should people put in those endorsements in trying to figure out who has the advantage in New Hampshire? Do they have some value? Which carry some heft?

DB: I hate to give another one-hand-other-hand answer. But on the one hand, New Hampshire is a really small state. It’s a retail politics state—that’s been quoted a million times: 400 house members, where people and politicians are close to their communities. Those are people in many cases who can work their neighborhood, town or their board.

On the other hand, you look at a lot of past primaries, you go back to 2000, and the McCain-Bush race, and Bush had the political establishment, the Sununus and the Republican establishment, and it did him very little good. As you said, every top elected official in the state is behind Hillary Clinton, and it seems to be doing her very little good in her race.

Part of it, too, is recent political history here. There have been these simmering fissures within both parties in New Hampshire. On the right, it’s in part fueled by the Tea Party, and we’ve had these intramural battles in the GOP between a Tea Party-infused speaker of the house and state Republican chairman, and both were deposed from within. But that fracture still lives on.

On the Democratic side, they’ve been told for a long time that in order to win elected office in New Hampshire, Democrats have to take the tax issue off the table, we can’t talk about taxes, we’ve got to stick to a more moderate course. And I do think a part of what’s fueling Bernie is this sense of We’re sick of taking our medicine, we want to vote for someone who represents Democratic values. And lining up establishment endorsements will not endear you to those folks. So it’s hard to say. But in general, it’s kind of wash I would say.

RC: Dan hit on the key word: I think the key word is work. It’s one thing to get endorsement form someone fairly well known, from Keene or the North Country. It’s another thing to get backing from someone who was really well known and will bust their butt for you. Knock on doors—not only endorse you but try to bring their neighbors along. That varies person to person.

CG: Dan and I actually got this question at a forum last month. And I agree 100 percent with Roger, and I said at the time: Endorsements are one thing, but that surrogate on the ground, going into someone’s house or giving a speech, helps get new voters in to canvass, knocking on doors—that’s much, much more important in New Hampshire than just getting a simple endorsement.

CM: I wonder if you can put something in context. How liberal is the state Democratic Party relative to the national party? And how conservative is the New Hampshire GOP relative to the national party?

DB: It’s difficult to say. I know that especially in the comparisons to Iowa that we’re seeing, nationally, this argument about why New Hampshire or Iowa should not retain first position, that our electorate here is more liberal than rest of the country. You could look at some issues: We were one of the first states to adopt marriage equality. Things like that were largely driven by Democratic leadership in the legislature.

But I think it’s still a very—[Sighs]. The leadership does a good job calling the shots here, which has tempered some of the more liberal instincts in the party. On the Republican side, definitely on the whole, they’re more conservative on things. Your classic New Hampshire Republican is probably going to be fairly moderate to agnostic on social issues at least, as a policy priority, and fairly fiscally conservative. I do think that there are, as I mentioned, these fraternal battles within each party. But I think neither is wildly out of the mainstream of the national parties.

RC: I think there’s a distinction between party leadership and voters themselves. I would say that the party apparatus in New Hampshire is at least as liberal as the national Democratic Party. But as Dan was saying earlier, Bernie Sanders couldn’t get elected in New Hampshire. And he’s absolutely right about the Republicans: Fiscal conservatism is a bedrock of New Hampshire Republicanism, here in the state. And, on social issues, not so much.

CG: Even a lot of the Democrats in this state. I’ve heard Governor Maggie Hassan and State Rep. Ann Kuster refer to themselves as frugal Yankees, which certainly shows a level of fiscal conservatism even on some of the moderate Democrats.