New Hampshire tradition

Trump treads on tradition in New Hampshire

Here, voters once demanded close contact. Now they are rewarding contenders who keep some distance.

By Shane Goldmacher

High-flying Donald Trump landed in New Hampshire on Tuesday afternoon and was headed for the exits by the end of the evening. It was just another quick stopover in a state that demands persistent and extended attention from presidential candidates.

At least, it has until now.

Instead of the traditional one-on-one conversations at parties and handshakes in diners, New Hampshire voters are getting mostly distant waves and occasional autographs from Trump at big rallies, and they’re rewarding him nonetheless.

“Right now, Trump’s going to win New Hampshire,” said Dave Carney, a longtime GOP strategist in the state who is not connected to any of the 2016 contenders. “It’s a jump ball for second.”

Trump has led every poll taken here since July, and pulled in double the support of his closest competitor in four of the last five surveys. “In New Hampshire, we’re really doing well,” Trump relayed to the adoring crowd. “Really, really, really doing well.”

The event in northern New Hampshire was Trump’s 16th visit to the state this year. And yet not once, according to the New England Cable News candidate tracker, has he spent the night here to campaign on back-to-back days. He ferries himself to and from on his private jet.

New Hampshire institutionalists fret that Trump’s celebrity-based and media-fueled candidacy threatens to undermine one of the last bastions of hand-to-hand campaigning left in national politics, and the chance for underfunded underdogs to break through.

"We always prided ourselves on insisting on retail campaigning,” said Donna Sytek, who was the first female speaker of New Hampshire’s House of Representatives. “Donald Trump has turned tradition on its head.”

But he’s not alone in dismissing the traditional New Hampshire approach, and gaining ground in the process.

Both Ben Carson, who until recently had been among the top contenders here, and the steadily climbing Marco Rubio have both dedicated less time to glad-handing in New Hampshire than contenders stuck at the bottom of the 2016 polling, including Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Chris Christie.

Trump’s campaign says his popularity simply makes traditional retail campaigning all but impossible. Stephen Stepanek, co-chair of Trump’s New Hampshire campaign and a state representative, hosted Trump’s first 2015 appearance at his home in Amherst back in March. He expected a small affair; 350 people showed up.

“It was like, after that, every time we announce [an event] we get literally thousands of people,” Stepanek said. “We would love to be able to do some of the smaller events but there’s too much demand for them. Every time we put something out there, we just get an incredible crush of people who want to see him.”

On Tuesday, Trump packed multiples of Waterville Valley’s 247-person population into his event, even as freezing rain fell across northern New Hampshire. Trump told the crowd his own motorcade slipped on the icy roads more than once en route. He vowed to drive slower during his departure.

Steve Duprey, New Hampshire Republican National Committeeman, said Trump is simply taking advantage of an option available to no other 2016 rival. “If you ask every candidate who’s doing a town hall in front of 50 people, ‘You can do a rally in front of 2,000, would you like to do it?’ Every candidate will take you up on that offer,” Duprey said. Of Trump, Duprey added, “His version is, ‘I’m doing a town hall. It’s just in front of 2,000 people. Don’t blame me because I’m beautiful.’”

Trump has drawn comparisons to endless flavor-of-the-month candidates from 2012: Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain, who appeared alongside Trump at a rally in Georgia this week. But his durability atop the polls now appears more akin to Mitt Romney than his fallen 2012 challengers.

“How many times are you going to say he’s going to fall? And he hasn’t. He doesn’t,” said Carney, the GOP strategist. “There’s no law of politics that the wild-assed, unsophisticated showman has to fall apart.”

Still, Trump’s rivals, especially those employing more traditional tactics, hope his big rallies will amount to a temporary sugar high and won’t engender the same level of devotion as they say they are securing through private conversations with New Hampshire’s voters.

Across the state from Trump’s event on Tuesday, for instance, Christie celebrated his 50th day campaigning in New Hampshire, where he has held more than 100 events. “I’ve been here more than any other candidate and Mary Pat [Christie] has been here more than any other candidate but me so we’re thrilled to be back in New Hampshire,” Christie said in a Londonderry diner. Christie picked up the influential endorsement of the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper this week, as well as the backing of some other state leaders.

Sytek was among the recent Christie endorsers but she still worries about Trump. “For people who are card-carrying members of the GOP establishment,” Sytek said, counting herself among them, “we worry he has hijacked our primary and we won’t know until February.”

Whatever the outcome, Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party who recently filed a petition to keep Trump off the ballot in the state, said the Trump campaign was setting poor precedent. “The lesson for future candidates will be I don’t need to troop all over Grafton County in the north country I just need to hang out in a cable TV green room and wait for my next cable hit,” Cullen said.

In 2016, recognizing the increasing value of national media exposure over local politicking is not unique to Trump. Rubio, after an appearance at a VFW hall in New Hampshire on Monday, retreated to a quiet corner to tape a segment for On the Record with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News. Local reporters watched from 20 feet away, with iPhones, microphones and notebooks in their outstretched arms. Rubio left without taking any of their questions.

As for Trump, what his events lack in intimacy they make up for in entertainment value. Some drove for hours to see it Tuesday and dressed up for the occasion, as if attending the symphony. “We’re going to see a classy guy,” said Jodi LaBoffa, who made a three-hour drive from Massachusetts and arrived in heels and a patterned dress. “Why not look classy?”

In a sop to New Hampshire tradition, Trump took questions on Tuesday – “something different,” he told the crowd – and variedly called his questioners “cute,” “beautiful” and “good-looking.”

The final question came from a young boy who asked Trump what would be different if Trump became president. “If I become president,” he said, “your life will be much better than it would have been if I didn’t become president.”

Moments later the event was over. “Go out and vote,” Trump told them. He signed autographs and shook hands before he was on his way. There was, after all, a rally in Virginia to get to on Wednesday.