New Hampshire primary: A look at how the state became a battleground of presidential elections
After the Iowa caucuses that proved to be an anti-climax, the focus is now on the New Hampshire primary.
The Granite State holds the country’s first primary in a presidential election year and carries a lot of clout even though it has only four delegates to offer in the general election.
New Hampshire has been holding its first-in-the-nation primary since 1920 but it is only the last decades of the 20th century that its significance really went up. The primary will be held on February 11 and particularly after the Iowa mess, the Democratic Party has shifted the focus on the northeastern state even quicker.
Till 1948, the New Hampshire Primary, like most of the small other primaries, listed the names of only the local people who wanted to be delegated to the convention on the ballot.
It all changed that very year when Richard F Upton, the speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, decided to make the primary more interesting and meaningful. He passed a law thereby allowing the citizens to vote directly for the presidential candidates.
Any candidate could get on the ballot by submitting 50 supporting petitions from each of the two congressional districts and the voters could choose delegates who pledged explicitly to a particular candidate.
In 1952, incumbent president Harry S Truman lost
The change made some immediate effects. In 1952, the then incumbent president Harry Truman became unpopular because of the Korean War and other controversies. In the New Hampshire Primary, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver beat Truman by nearly 4,000 votes and won all delegates.
This defeat saw the heavyweight Truman pulling out of the race for a second term. Things were captivating in the Republican camp, too. General Dwight D Eisenhower came back from the Second World War and politicians across the spectrum wanted to run for the presidency.
He was initially reluctant and people were also not clear about his party orientation. His supporters in New Hampshire took advantage of the new law and put his name on the GOP ballot and even without visiting the state, Eisenhower bagged 50 percent of the votes to beat the tough challenger in Robert Taft of Ohio.
Eisenhower won the presidency that year and made the primary in New Hampshire memorable.
In 1968, Lyndon B Johnson dropped out after New Hampshire 'humiliation'
New Hampshire’s claim to national fame came again in 1968 with yet another unpopular Democratic president LBJ (the Vietnam War) facing the music.
In the primary in the Granite State that year, anti-war senator Eugene McCarthy finished just seven percentage points behind Johnson and it was considered a "loss" for the latter who dropped out of the race soon after.
The fact that another heavyweight candidate Robert F Kennedy that year also renounced his earlier support for LBJ, made it difficult for the latter.
As a result of the contentious convention that the Democrats had in 1968, they established a commission and passed a series of reform rules. Between 1968 and 1976, the number of primaries increased manifold and they started to have some real significance.
And as the number of primaries increased, their sequences also became important and by the virtue of the fact that New Hampshire remained the state holding the first primary, it became a key center of making or breaking of presidential dreams. After Jimmy Carter won New Hampshire in 1976, the Democrats put all their resources in winning the Granite State’s nomination race.
Republicans, whose nomination system was transformed, rather accidentally, by the Democrats, also complained about the outsized influence of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Other states have tried to hold their nomination contests ahead of New Hampshire over the years only to find the state’s laws that say, "The presidential primary election shall be held on the second Tuesday in March or on a Tuesday selected by the secretary of state which is seven days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election, whichever is earlier, of each year when a president of the United States is to be elected or the previous year."
New Hampshire’s voters harbor a pride about their state’s first-of-the-nation primary and they hate to see the tradition getting tampered.