Guess who's not on New Hampshire's Democratic ballot? It's Joe Biden
Biden could lose New Hampshire to an unheralded challenger or prevail as a write-in candidate
New Hampshire voters will once again help kick off the U.S. presidential primary season next Tuesday, as they have since 1920.
But there is a wrinkle this year on the Democratic side. President Joe Biden, seeking his party's nomination for a second term with little in the way of serious opposition, won't have his name on the New Hampshire Democratic ballot due to a squabble between national and state party officials about 15 months in the making.
The Democratic National Committee, with full support from Biden, bumped New Hampshire from its prized primary calendar in a proposal tabled in December 2022 and approved two months later.
Under the new DNC plan, South Carolina was to vote first, on Feb. 3. Iowa, which traditionally kicks off the season with caucuses, will now vote for Democrats on Super Tuesday on March 5.
New Hampshire's Democratic Party resisted the change, even though it would have followed South Carolina by a mere three days, on Feb. 6, in the national committee's proposal. Instead, it is proceeding with its primary next week.
"Well, it's safe to say in New Hampshire, the DNC is less popular than the NY Yankees," state Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley said in a statement. "State law requires the New Hampshire secretary of state to conduct the first-in-the-nation primary … nothing has changed, and we look forward to seeing a great Democratic voter turnout on Jan. 23."
The DNC has called next week's primary both "meaningless" and "detrimental."
The changes come after a 2020 race in which Biden finished out of the top three in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, but revived his campaign in South Carolina.
But, as political scientist and primary expert Josh Putnam has pointed out, there was more than naked self-interest for Biden at play.
"Much of the president's guidance mirrors principles the committee [had] already been working under: diversifying — geography, race/ethnicity and economic — the early states to better match the Democratic Party electorate," Putnam wrote at the time of the proposal in late 2022.
To elaborate on that point, Iowa's population is 86 per cent white, according to the 2020 census, while 92 per cent of New Hampshire residents are white. In the 2020 presidential election, 67 per cent of all voters were white, with 41 per cent of white voters opting for Biden.
Write-in candidates eligible to win
It's conceivable Biden could face the frustrating optics of losing New Hampshire, although it wouldn't be unprecedented for a sitting president. Gerald Ford lost some states to Ronald Reagan in 1976 and Jimmy Carter lost a dozen to Ted Kennedy four years later.
The New Hampshire ballot does not feature challengers of that stature among its 21 names. The most notable are author Marianne Williamson, also a candidate for president in 2020, and Dean Phillips, a sitting Minnesota congressman who has expressed much dissatisfaction with the Biden administration.
There's also a perennial candidate named Paperboy Love Prince, who's seeking to become the first non-binary U.S. president.
Write-in candidates are eligible to win in New Hampshire. President Lyndon Johnson did so as a write-in candidate in 1968, although he subsequently dropped out of the race.
The last successful statewide write-in effort for federal office was in 2010, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska lost the Republican primary but won the general election despite not appearing on the ballot. She received 99 per cent of the write-in votes cast.
Ridin' with 'Bidon'?
A large-scale write-in effort for Biden would increase the workload for local elections officials, according to David Scanlan, New Hampshire's secretary of state.
Scanlan said the counting process will be largely unaffected in communities that already hand-count ballots, but larger jurisdictions use machines to count regular ballots. He added that local officials are enlisting additional help to speed up the hand count.
Election workers will have to make judgments based on how a candidate's name is written on some ballots.
"If somebody wrote in the name of a candidate and they did not fill in the oval, that does not disqualify that vote," Scanlan said in an interview with WMUR-TV. "The intent of that voter would be for the name that they actually wrote on the ballot."
As for variations in spelling: "If they write in 'Bidon,' I think the intent is still pretty clear," Scanlan said in October. (There are no other Joes on the ballot, altough there is a John)
The Democrats aren't alone in changing rules this primary cycle. Many state Republican parties made changes to their rules ahead of the 2020 election by adding more winner-take-all contests and raising the minimum vote percentage where candidates can claim delegates in other states.
Those changes would seem to benefit a front-runner, in this case former president Donald Trump. Losing a state by a count of 12 delegates to eight makes for a less formidable comeback than losing 20-0 in a winner-take-all scenario.
All this leaves New Hampshire's allotment of 23 pledged delegates up in the air, though in 2008, negotiations between national and state officials allowed delegates from Michigan and Florida to cast half a vote at the party convention after those states contravened the primary schedule.
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With files from the Associated Press