Democrats have all but owned the Granite State’s four Electoral College votes, winning seven of the past eight presidential contests – including Joe Biden’s eight-point victory over President Donald Trump in 2020.
But the latest NHJournal/Praecones Analytica poll finds Biden tied with Trump in New Hampshire, putting him at risk of becoming the first Democrat to lose the state since Al Gore in 2000.
The survey of 862 registered voters taken the week of May 15-20 found Granite Staters evenly split between Biden and Trump at 36 percent, with 14 percent backing independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and another 12 percent choosing none of these.
Those numbers may explain why Biden is making his second Granite State stop in two months, an unusual travel pattern for a Democratic president in a competitive national election. For Biden, who rarely travels far from D.C. or his Delaware beach house, it’s particularly notable.
Biden is scheduled to appear in Nashua on Tuesday. On Monday, the Biden administration announced more than $3 million in Brownfield Grants “to rehabilitate and revitalize communities in New Hampshire,” including Nashua and Jaffrey.
“This helps to put President Biden’s visit this week into greater context, as that sound you hear is the 2024 battleground map expanding for Donald Trump, seemingly putting New Hampshire in play this fall,” said veteran New Hampshire GOP strategist Jim Merrill, who worked on the Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio presidential campaigns.
According to Praecones Analytica’s Dr. Jonathan Klingler, Biden’s struggles come from his loss of support among swing voters.
“While registered voters of both parties are largely united around their nominee, independent/undeclared voters are splitting their support in four statistically indistinguishable ways: between Biden, Trump, Kennedy, and other unnamed candidates,” Klingler said.
“In comparison to exit polls from the 2020 presidential election, independent/undeclared voters in New Hampshire demonstrate significantly lower support for Biden, as Biden won around 60 percent of these voters in 2020, compared to around a quarter if the election were held today.”
Biden is struggling in the polls in several states Democrats have done well in for years. The latest numbers show Biden and Trump in a close race for Minnesota, which hasn’t backed a GOP presidential candidate since President Richard Nixon’s 1972 49-state landslide.
And in Nevada, which Democrats have carried in six of the past eight elections, Trump has a six-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average, outside the margin of error.
But a Democrat in danger of losing a state in the heart of deep-blue New England would be a bad sign for the incumbent.
Biden also has a Kennedy problem. The new poll shows Kennedy’s support among Democrats is nearly twice as high (11.2 percent) as among Republicans. (6.6 percent).
RFK, Jr. first suggested a possible presidential run at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in March, 2023. His progressive message has a large potential audience among Democratic voters who twice picked U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for the party’s presidential nominee.
Some Granite State political pros speculated that Biden’s weakness with swing or undeclared voters may be in part from his decision to dump the First in the Nation primary and his criticism of the Granite State as not diverse enough to be allowed to hold the Democrats’ first primary.
“He spent months insulting New Hampshire, and he wonders why he’s got a problem,” one Granite State Democrat and Biden supporter told NHJournal on background. “Politically active people, our party base, we understand the big picture, but the average voter thinks he was just being a jerk to us.”
