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Despite the fact that she’s repeatedly referred to as “the female Obama,”  and that she formally announced her candidacy on Martin Luther King Day, could it be that the most apt description of Democrat Sen. Kamala Harris in the 2020 POTUS race is… Hillary Rodham Clinton?

The comparison comes from the fact that the 54-year-old former California Attorney General appears to be running on a Clinton-esque combination of identity politics and moderate Democratic policy.

“The way Harris is likely to position herself on policy issues during the campaign — liberal as any candidate on noneconomic issues but not as liberal on economic issues as, say, Bernie Sanders — echoes Hillary Clinton’s platform in 2016,” writes Perry Bacon, Jr. at the FiveThirtyEight website.   At the same time, Sen. Harris’s embrace of identity politics is unabashed and beyond dispute.

Harris talks extensively about her biography– she would be the first woman, the first black woman and first person of Asian descent to serve as POTUS–and she openly defends identity politics as part of Democratic Party ideology, suggesting the phrase itself is a divisive slur.  And like Hillary Clinton, Sen. Harris highlights what she claims will be the unique challenges of attempting to break the glass ceiling as a woman of color running for the White House.

“Let’s be honest. It’s going to be ugly,” Harris told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski in December. “When you break things, it is painful. And you get cut. And you bleed.”

But will the Democratic POTUS primary really be a “bloody” battle for the four women (Gabbard, Gillibrand, Harris and Warren) already in the race? According to a Suffolk poll in September, while most voters still claim to be gender-neutral at the ballot box, the percentage of voters who would prefer to vote for a woman is twice as high as the number who would prefer a male candidate. That sentiment is highest among the most liberal voters–more than a third of whom say they want to vote for a woman. Those voters will have a disproportionate impact on the primary.

Add in the historical pattern of black voters strongly supporting black candidates, and it’s no surprise that many political prognosticators have labeled Harris the Democrats’ front-runner.

So playing the identity card as hard as Hillary #ImWithHer Clinton did in 2016 looks like a winner. But what about the Clinton centrism?

Admittedly the word “centrist” is problematic. To most Republicans, and probably many more Americans, the idea that Hillary Clinton was a centrist or moderate candidate seems counter-intuitive. And not long ago, it would have been. But for Democratic primary voters–particularly in the age of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez politics–Mrs. Clinton is a relative moderate. Is Kamala Harris, too?

“I don’t know any progressives who would support her, largely due to her record as district attorney and attorney general in California,” longtime progressive activist Ted Bosen of New Hampshire told Inside Sources.  “Next to Biden, I believe she is the least favorite prospect among us. But she has support among Hillary Clinton supporters.”

And a recent Vanity Fair profile of Sen. Harris included this nugget: “Have you seen her speak?” a (male) Democratic strategist says of Harris. “It feels very Hillary-like.”

As the liberal journal Jacobin reports: “Harris’s rise has produced a fiery debate among liberals and the Left. Leftists and progressives have come out in strong opposition to Harris’s candidacy, with some declaring #NeverKamala and some high-profile Bernie Sanders supporters, such as National Nurses United executive director RoseAnn DeMoro, making clear their lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy.”

“I expect Harris to struggle with The Left,” Bacon writes in his analysis for FiveThirtyEight. “Harris’ professional life has been as a prosecutor and some on the left already are highlighting what they view as flaws in her record — being too hard on low-level offenders of crimes like truancy but not aggressive enough in taking on those accused of white-collar offenses, for example.”

In a press conference on Monday, Harris said she rejected the notion “that you either have to be tough on crime or soft on crime. We should be smart on crime.” However, some critics suggest she tried to burnish her “not-soft-on-crime” credentials by defending police and prosecutors in cases when they didn’t deserve it.   She also bragged in the past about increasing her conviction rates and sending more people to prison, while also promoting liberal social issues like same-sex marriage popular on the California Left. This style of “third-way” politics is straight from the Clinton playbook.

Not everyone agrees with the Clinton/Kamala comparison.

“Their profiles as candidates couldn’t more different,” DC Democratic consultant Joel Payne told InsideSources. “Sen. Harris is a fresh face with relatively low name ID and a lot of room to define herself to voters. Hillary Clinton had been a household name for 15 years before her runs for the White House.”

Payne, who advised the 2016 Clinton campaign says the Democrats he talks to “believe that black voters and, in particular, black women are the key voting bloc in 2020 and Kamala Harris is very well positioned to appeal to those voters.”

But the comparisons are likely to continue, in part because of the campaign team Harris has assembled. Her campaign chair is her sister–and former Clinton senior advisor– Maya Harris. Her general counsel is Hillary’s former campaign attorney Marc Elias, who made headlines when it was discovered his firm was the funnel for Clinton’s campaign to pay oppo-research outfit Fusion GPS, at the center of the “Russia dossier” story.

Other top Kamala Harris staffers include Hillary’s deputy national finance director Angelique Cannon; and David Huynh, the Clinton campaign’s director of delegate operations and ballot access whose job at the Democratic convention in 2016 was to keep protesting Bernie Sanders’ supporters off TV.

Nobody is going to mistake Kamala Harris for Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. By historical standards, she’s one of the most liberal candidates to ever seek the presidency, as her announcement statement makes clear.  But in the #NeedToImpeach/#Medicare4All world of Democratic primary voters of today, virtually every candidate is (at least) as progressive as Harris, and without the “third-way” politics baggage or a staff straight off Hillary Clinton’s campaign bus.

It’s very possible that Kamala Harris’s identity politics can overcome the perception that she’s not progressive enough. But with so many strong progressive candidates in the field, maybe not.

Although Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million, she still lost the 2016 presidential election to Republican Donald Trump. A closer look into the votes cast reveals that one of the factors of Clinton’s loss could be attributed to her underperformance in rural areas. New research suggests that while she nearly matched Barack Obama’s 2012 performance in most urban areas, she failed to match the Democratic presidential nominees in the last five elections in the less populated areas of the country.

The research was released this week by the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire and was conducted by Dante Scala — associate professor of political science and a faculty fellow at the Carsey School — and Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey School and professor of sociology.

The researchers examined voting along a rural to urban continuum, rather than treating rural and urban as a polarity. They found significant variations in voting behavior among both urban and rural places that persist over the last five presidential elections.

“Yet, defining 2016 as the tale of two Americas — one urban, one rural — hinders a nuanced understanding of the country’s political geography,” the researchers stated. “Many political commentators mistakenly caricature rural America as a single entity, but our research … shows that complex variations in voting patterns persist among both urban and rural places.”

Several headlines after the election pushed the urban-rural divide that existed in the election. “How the Election Revealed the Divide Between City and Country,” read a piece by The Atlantic. The researches suggest that while the overall premise is true, it’s a lot more complicated than that because political pundits don’t often include suburban voters or towns adjacent to suburbs.

Clinton received 2.1 million fewer votes in rural America than Obama did four years earlier even though 531,000 more votes were cast there in 2016. Large urban counties are the base of the Democratic Party as well as their suburbs and the cores of smaller metropolitan areas. The outer edges of smaller urban areas and the vast rural regions tend to be Republican territory.

“Through the last five presidential elections voting patterns were consistent along a rural-urban continuum,” the researchers said. “Democrats did best at the urban end of the continuum and Republicans at the rural end. What is distinctly different in 2016 is that Hillary Clinton did far worse across the entire rural end of the continuum than any Democratic candidate in the previous four presidential elections.”

Image Credit: University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy

At one end of the continuum are the urban core counties of large metropolitan areas. This is where Democrats have received their greatest support in the last five presidential elections. Al Gore and John Kerry averaged slightly less than 60 percent of the vote in these areas in 2000 and 2004. Barack Obama boosted the Democrats’ urban vote share in 2008 and 2012, and Clinton maintained it in 2016. Also, the suburbs of these large metropolitan areas gave both Obama in 2012 and Clinton slightly less than a majority (49.6 and 47.8 percent, respectively).

Next on the continuum, the suburbs of smaller urban areas are more strongly Republican. It is at this point on the rural–urban continuum that the contrast between earlier elections and 2016 is evident. Here the gap between Democratic support in 2012 and 2016 widened, which ultimately led to Clinton’s loss.

At the rural end of the continuum, counties tend to be more Republican, but there is variation within these rural areas. Democrats consistently did worse in counties remote from urban areas, and in those without large towns of 10,000 to 50,000 people. This pattern continued in 2016, but there was a substantial decline in support for Clinton across all types of rural counties. For example, in 2012, Obama received 41.6 percent of the vote in rural counties adjacent to metropolitan areas that contained a large town and 38.9 percent in those that did not. Clinton received just 33.1 percent in these adjacent large town counties and 29.7 percent in other adjacent counties.

“Certainly, these rural vote totals are dwarfed by those in urban areas. But, from the suburban periphery of smaller urban areas to the most far-flung rural areas, Clinton’s inability to match the performance of any Democratic candidate since at least 2000 contributed to her defeat in crucial swing states such as Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” the researchers said. “Though many commentators argued that the faster population growth and growing diversity on the urban side of the rural-urban continuum would give Democrats a significant advantage in 2016, the election demonstrated that what happens at the rural end of the continuum remains important.”

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After an unsuccessful run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ray Buckley wants to change the way the national party does its elections–yet how much influence and power he wields in the new DNC leadership is still largely unknown.

In an email to DNC members, Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party (NHDP), laid out his proposal on how to improve campaigns and elections for officers in the coming years. He noted that an impressive $4 million was spent in the DNC chairman’s election, an unprecedented number of candidates ran, and the race was in the national spotlight in a way that it hasn’t been in the past.

“It is likely that the level of interest we saw this year will continue, and so it is a good time to examine whether any reforms or changes could improve the process, while insuring more fairness, accountability, and transparency,” he wrote.

His proposal includes campaign finance limits and full disclosure of receipts and expenditures. He suggested limiting contributions to $500 per donor and not accepting any “dark money.”

“As the party that opposes big money and corporate money in politics, I also would limit donations to individual donors, labor, and progressive organizations,” he wrote. “No donations from any business, corporation or their PAC [political action committee] or lobbyists would be permitted.”

He would also forbid DNC employees, consultants, or even employees of consulting firms that do business with the DNC from publicly or privately supporting a candidate for DNC officer.

WMUR was the first to report about Buckley’s plan.

It’s not immediately clear if any of his proposals would be implemented under the new DNC order.

Despite having the most party leadership experience of the lot, he was still a dark horse candidate. Buckley was vice chair for the DNC and president of the Association for State Democratic Chairs (ASDC), which led him to have many voting members as friends and allies.

The two frontrunners, Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison and Tom Perez, labor secretary under President Barack Obama, stole the headlines at the various debates and forums. It was essentially a Clinton versus Sanders match up again, since Ellison backed former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Perez was a supporter of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Buckley eventually dropped out of the election, shortly before the DNC chair vote in February, endorsing Ellison for the post. Ultimately, Perez won the chair and made Ellison a deputy chair.

The DNC chair race revealed deep wounds for the Democratic Party, which still had not healed from the hotly contested battle between Sanders and Clinton for the presidential nomination. Some Democrats claim the DNC favored Clinton when it was supposed to be neutral. The Wikileaks emails didn’t help the cause, revealing that former DNC chairs Debbie Wasserman-Schulz and Donna Brazile coordinated with the Clinton campaign during the primaries.

After his victory, Perez vowed to heal the party and bring a unified Democratic Party to defeat President Donald Trump’s agenda and beat Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections, but Buckley’s role in the national party has changed since he ran for the chairmanship.

He’s no longer a vice chair for the DNC and there is a new president for the ASDC, with Buckley’s position now listed as “president emeritus.” Although Perez made Ellison a deputy chair after the close election between the two, the position is largely symbolic and doesn’t have any official duties. Even though Buckley backed Ellison, and Ellison has a prominent position, it’s not clear if their agenda would be enacted.

Ellison was recently in New Hampshire for his first public appearance as deputy chair at the NHDP’s state committee meeting on March 25, where Buckley was reelected as state party chairman for a sixth term. Ellison and Buckley argued that the party has been too focused on the White House and not enough on the state legislatures and governorships.

“We’ve got to have a higher vision than just winning an election,” Ellison said. “When we set our sights as really agents and champions for the American people, people start feeling the flow.”

On top of that, Perez is launching a major overhaul of the party’s organization, requesting resignation letters from all current staffers. While it’s usually routine to see major turnover under new leadership, the mass exodus allows Perez to completely rebuild the DNC and determine how it should be structured in the future.

“It sounds good if you’re looking for change, but it’s not what people were clamoring for,” said liberal New Hampshire radio host Arnie Arnesen to The Boston Herald about the DNC shakeup.

“They weren’t angry at the people working within the base of the Democratic Party. They were furious with the leadership. I’m not sure that gets us to the goal,” she added. “I think it hurts a lot of little people. Is that what the Democratic Party is supposed to be known for?”

As for Buckley, it looks like he’s going to be focused on New Hampshire for a while. He’s going to focus on strengthening local communities and grassroots ahead of 2018, with the hopes of flipping the state legislature and taking back the corner office. Will he, or his platform, still be heard up the ranks at the DNC, though? Only time will tell.

“With all that we’ve accomplished, 2016 is a prime example of why we cannot afford to rest on our laurels,” he wrote in a Monday op-ed for the New Hampshire Union Leader. “We know that our economic and social progress means Democratic ideas are working, and our electoral success shows Granite Staters understand that. But we need now more than ever to put our nose to the grindstone and keep fighting.”

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A Democratic member of the Federal Election Commission isn’t going to let President Donald Trump go without providing evidence that there was voter fraud during the 2016 presidential election in New Hampshire.

In yet another letter to Trump, FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub is asking Trump to provide proof of his claim that thousands of Democratic Massachusetts residents were bused to the Granite State on election day to illegally vote against him.

“This allegation of a vast conspiracy, involving thousands of people committing felony criminal acts aimed at stealing the election, has deeply disturbed citizens throughout America,” she wrote in a Wednesday letter. “I have heard from many of them, including proud and patriotic New Englanders who are shocked by the allegation and feel that it impugns their historic role in our democracy.”

She also called on Trump in February to provide evidence for his voter fraud claim.

This latest letter adds fuel to the fire of what’s already been a heated debate between Republicans and Democrats in New Hampshire when it comes to the state’s election laws. In fact, the Senate is close to voting on a major bill that would close several of the state’s voting law loopholes, according to Republicans.

The legend of Massachusetts voters busing into the Granite State to cast a ballot in our elections is not a new tale, but here’s a quick timeline of events that led to this sweeping legislation:

• A few weeks after the election, when Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, he tweeted, “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California — so why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias — big problem!” Trump won the Electoral College, but lost New Hampshire to Clinton by about 2,700 votes.
• Before Trump’s tweet, and about a week before the election, then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Sununu, told radio host Howie Carr that Democrats abuse New Hampshire’s same-day voter registration, and “when Massachusetts elections are not very close, they’re busing them in all over the place.” Politifact rated his claim as “Pants on Fire.”
• This led to backlash from Granite State officials, including the state’s attorney general and secretary of state’s offices, who wanted to quell fears that New Hampshire elections are illegitimate.
• After the election, Sununu said he was not aware of any “specific evidence of voter fraud.”

Yet, it didn’t stop there. Trump kept talking about voter fraud even after his presidential inauguration.

• During a closed-door meeting between Trump, former N.H. Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, and 10 other senators to discuss U.S. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, Trump reportedly started the meeting by discussing the election and voter fraud.  He claimed that he and Ayotte would have both won in the Granite State if not for the “thousands” of people who were “brought in on buses” from Massachusetts to “illegally” vote in New Hampshire.
• Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, made the claim again in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.” He said: “This issue of busing voters in to New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It’s very real, it’s very serious.”
• Even recently, in a TIME Magazine interview published Thursday, Trump stood by his claim that three million undocumented people voted in the national election. He said: “Well now if you take a look at the votes, when I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong, in other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly, and or/illegally. And they then vote. You have tremendous numbers of people. In fact I’m forming a committee on it.”

Many Republicans and Democrats are upset that Trump is pushing a false narrative and is making people question the integrity of the democratic voting process. However, his statement perfectly illustrates what his supporters and several Republicans believe is the problem with election laws in New Hampshire: The current laws make it difficult to charge anyone with voter fraud because what’s legal here is usually illegal in another state.

Are there lots of illegal votes in NH? No.

Are there lot of legal votes from people who have no business voting in NH? Yes. #nhpolitics

— Greg Moore (@GregMooreNH) November 28, 2016

Hence, Senate Bill 3, which was introduced by Sen. Regina Birdsell, R-Hampstead, to address a lot of those concerns. Of course, the bill is divided on party lines — it’s cheered by Republicans who say they are trying to tighten the process and ensure that those who vote in New Hampshire actually live in New Hampshire and criticized by Democrats who say the bill is a form of voter suppression.

One of the issues it focuses on is the definition of domicile, which varies from state to state, and the New Hampshire Legislature is trying to better define the difference between “domicile” and “residence” in this bill. Under current laws, the definition of domicile is “that place, to which upon temporary absence, a person has the intention of returning.” Republicans think that’s vague and allows campaign workers, who might be in the state for a month or so, to vote in New Hampshire, even if they plan on leaving after the election.

An incident occurred in the 2008 and 2012 elections when Sen. Martha Fuller Clark, D-Portsmouth, allowed Democratic staffers to live at her home. The staffers used her address to vote in the election, and since they were living in the state for at least three months before the election, the Attorney General ruled that it was legal.

Under the new bill, a person who registers to vote within 30 days of an election or on Election Day must show verification that a New Hampshire address is his or her domicile. That can be done by showing proof of residency at a college or university, driver’s license, utility bill, among other forms. Those who do not show documentation can still register and vote by filling out a domicile affidavit and registration form, and provide the documentation within 10 or 30 days of Election Day, depending on the community. Someone could get charged with voter fraud if they fail to provide a document verifying his or her domicile within that window.

A previous version of the bill called for police officer to knock on doors to verify a voter’s domicile, but that provision was taken out this week. The bill still allows municipal officials to visit those addresses or ask “agents” to do so.

The Senate Election Law Committee recommended Tuesday in favor of the bill by a 3-2 vote on party lines and it now heads to the full Senate for a vote.

Adding to the controversy, the Attorney General’s office recently said investigations into thousands of affidavit voters who cast ballots in New Hampshire without identification during the 2012 and 2014 election cycles have been dropped due to the lack of manpower and money to complete the investigations.

How can the Attorney General and Secretary of State’s office say there is no evidence of voter fraud if they aren’t investigating every potential violation? That’s what Republicans are asking.

Sununu’s budget didn’t fulfill the attorney general’s request for roughly $93,000 annually to hire a full-time elections investigator. A Senate bill would provide about $500,000 to the Attorney General’s office for with focus on elections, lobbying, and campaign finance law. That bill passed the Senate and is now in the House Finance Committee.

“No matter how you change it, there is not a problem in the state of New Hampshire,” said Senate Democratic Leader Jeff Woodburn. “There’s been a ruse of illegal voting, and Trump buses, and all of this business. This is nothing but a concerted national attempt to suppress voting and harass voters.”

“This is not national trend legislation,” Birdsell said this week. “This is homegrown here. It is something that is trying to address what some of our constituents are looking for.”

The debate on this bill, and the discussion of voter fraud in New Hampshire, is far from over.

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It’s never too early to be thinking about the 2018 midterm elections. For the incumbent party in the White House, it usually means losing seats. However, Republicans are poised to retain control of the House and Senate, barring any major catastrophe, which would give Democrats the advantage.

In New Hampshire, it could mean tough races for Democratic incumbent Reps. Carol Shea-Porter and Annie Kuster, and their final campaign finance filings for the 2016 election cycle can provide clues on what to expect for their reelection campaigns.

Assuming they run again for their seats, Kuster and Shea-Porter enter the 2018 contests with a significant difference between them in their total cash on hand.

Shea-Porter only has approximately $3,800 in the bank as a result of a tough election against former Republican Rep. Frank Guinta and Independent candidate Shawn O’Connor. Out of the 435 representatives in the House, she has the fifth lowest cash on hand total.

Kuster, on the other hand, sits modestly with just over $1 million stashed away.

The median amount that lawmakers who won their races in 2016 have in the bank is about $367,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a nonpartisan research group tracking money and lobbying in elections. Specifically for House candidates, it’s about $361,000.

Of course, for party leaders they have the biggest war chests since they are expected to raise money to help their colleagues. House Speaker Paul Ryan had the highest cash on hand in the House with $9.1 million.

“The typical pattern is that campaigns that are in tough reelections or open seat battles will almost never have any money left,” said Caleb Burns, a partner at Wiley Rein LLP, to the CRP. “But conversely, the opposite is also true, where members of Congress have extraordinarily safe seats and don’t feel the pressure of having to raise a lot of money.”

That’s especially true for New Hampshire’s representatives. Kuster was assumed to have a relatively safe seat in the Granite State’s 2nd Congressional District, while Shea-Porter in the 1st Congressional District was always going to have a tough time ousting Guinta.

So what does this mean going into next year’s race?

Well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) included Shea-Porter and Kuster in their initial 36-member target list.

Kuster spent nearly $2.2 million against Republican challenger Jim Lawrence. He spent less than $100,000, and yet, Kuster only defeated Lawrence by 5 percent, 50-45 percent, respectively, with Libertarian John Babiarz receiving 5 percent. The NRCC figures that if they can recruit a decent candidate and put a little money into the race, they could have a chance at ousting Kuster.

For Shea-Porter, the 1st Congressional District is always a toss up, mostly because it’s been a Shea-Porter versus Guinta contest every two years since 2010. The NRCC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee usually throw a decent amount of funds toward the district’s candidates. It also helps the NRCC that Shea-Porter has been kicked out by voters before and she defeated Guinta in a crowded field. She won by a margin of 162,080 to 156,176, while independents O’Connor and Brendan Kelly and Libertarian Robert Lombardo garnered a total of 46,316 votes among them, possibly to the detriment of Guinta.

However, Republicans swept the 1st District in every other federal race. Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by about 6,000 votes, former Sen. Kelly Ayotte beat Sen. Maggie Hassan also by about 6,000 votes, and Gov. Chris Sununu defeated former Executive Councilor Colin Van Ostern by about 18,000 votes. With the right candidate, the NRCC believes they can flip the district again.

Any ideas on who’s going to run against Shea-Porter or Kuster?

As recently as Wednesday, one Republican has indicated that he’s “seriously” interested in challenging Shea-Porter in the 1st District.

John Burt, a four-term New Hampshire House member from Goffstown, told WMUR that he has spoken with conservatives throughout the state and region about running for Congress. He said he hopes to make a final decision in the coming weeks.

“I have no doubt that I can beat Carol Shea-Porter,” he said. “In 2018, it’s going to be another 2010-type sweep of Republicans heading to D.C. and also to the New Hampshire State House.”

Other Republicans being talked about as possible candidates include state Sen. Andy Sanborn from Bedford and former state commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services John Stephen, who is also a former gubernatorial and congressional candidate.

Don’t be surprised if Guinta makes another run for the seat he lost. Neither Shea-Porter nor Guinta ruled out running again in 2018 if they lost.

Earlier this month, the DCCC made Kuster the chair of its “Frontline” incumbent retention program, which gives special attention to vulnerable Democratic incumbents, so they must feel confident that she can win again in 2018.

However, former state Rep. Joe Sweeney of Salem previously told WMUR that he is “in the very early portion of exploring a run” for the 2nd District against Kuster.

“I firmly believe that Congresswoman Kuster does not adequately represent the district, and her performance and voting record presents a winnable path,” he said.

Senate President Chuck Morse could also be a potential candidate. The Salem senator is listed on the National Governors Association’s website as a former governor of New Hampshire. He served as acting governor for two days from January 3 to 5, when former Gov. Hassan resigned early to be sworn in as U.S. Senator. The New Hampshire Union Leader sees him as an option for Republican Party operatives still looking for a candidate.

Voters shouldn’t rule out seeing the two Republican frontrunners from the 2nd District GOP primary on the ballot either. Former House Majority Leader Jack Flanagan from Brookline indicated that he was hearing from supporters to run again in 2018. He lost the GOP primary to Lawrence by about 5,000 votes. Also, with Lawrence’s close finish to Kuster in the general election, he heard calls from supporters to consider yet another run. If he did, this would be his third congressional bid in six years.

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Pollsters were heavily criticized after the presidential election for completely missing the mark on their predictions. Across the country, they were scratching their heads, trying to figure out how they didn’t see Republican Donald Trump defeating Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton.

Even the University of New Hampshire Survey Center had to take a step back and figure out what went wrong for them. In their last Granite State Poll before the November election, they predicted an 11-point victory for Clinton. She actually won New Hampshire by four-tenths of a percentage point, 47.6 to 47.2 percent.

Their last survey also had Democrat Colin Van Ostern beating Republican Chris Sununu by 11 percent, 55 to 44 percent, for the governor’s office. Sununu beat Van Ostern by 2 percent.

For many political strategists in the state, these way-off predictions confirmed their suspicions that the UNH survey is a “bad poll.” Even WikiLeaks exposed that the Clinton campaign didn’t think much of them.

“As always, this poll doesn’t have a good history of accuracy so we need to take it with a grain of salt,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook wrote to Clinton about a recent UNH pre-primary poll May 5, 2015.

“The state of survey research is not static and there are a lot of technological changes and problems,” said UNH Survey Center director Andrew Smith. “We do an analysis after each election to look for biases that come into the surveys.”

Smith said he believes he found the reason why his numbers were so off during the election and he tweaked his methodology to reflect that in his most recent UNH poll released this week.

In his past polls, he would weight the sample based on age, sex, and region of the state, in addition to the number of adults and telephone lines within households.  Often pollsters will weight their samples to adjust for oversampling and undersampling of key demographics. For example, more women than men, and more older people than younger people, answer polls in the Granite State, Smith said.

Now, Smith added level of education into the mix.

“It’s a difficult variable to use and in the past it didn’t have that much political correlation when we used it, so it didn’t make a difference statistically,” he told NH Journal. “However, we saw that in this election, the percentage of people with a college education make a significant difference, and had we weighted it going into the election, we would have been dead accurate on all of the results.”

This election showed that Trump won the support of white, blue collar workers with some college education or less. He also over-performed in rural areas, while Clinton did better in more wealthy suburban areas.

Smith said he found that men with some college education, known as the Trump coalition, were not participating in the UNH surveys as much as they did when it came time to vote.

“It’s a new phenomena in New Hampshire politics,” he said. “Is it due to Trump? Probably, but it certainly made a difference in our polls. Hopefully, our methods are improved.”

The UNH Survey Center released four polls since February 10. The first one, released last Friday, was on Trump’s approval ratings in the Granite State, which found that residents are pretty divided on the president.

Forty-three percent of adults said they approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 48 percent are disapproving of his performance, and 8 percent are neutral, the poll found.

These numbers are close to the national trend. The Pew Research Center released Thursday the findings of its survey, which found 39 percent approve of his job performance, while 56 percent disapprove.

Looking at the different regions of the state, his approval rating also varies. This is where it will be interesting to keep an eye on the UNH Survey Center to see if their new weighting of education level has an impact on the data.

In the Central/Lakes, Connecticut Valley, and Manchester area, his approval ranges from 32 to 39 percent. Along the Massachusetts border, on the Seacoast, and in the North Country, his approval rating is more positive.

Credit: UNH Survey Center

“It’s not surprising anymore,” Smith said. “Democratic political strength in the central part of the state and Connecticut River Valley is still there and Republicans have been strong in Massachusetts border towns and somewhat strong in the Greater Manchester area, like in Bedford.”

Smith said he found the political dynamics of the North Country interesting because that area is becoming more Republican. For years, it used to be an area of Democratic strength due to blue collar support for Democrats with union support.

“The character and self-identification of the people in the North Country is different than the rest of the state,” he said. “They have not been doing well economically and the Democratic Party has been having difficulty holding onto these blue collar people.”

As exhibited by Trump’s win, many of these blue collar workers in New Hampshire, and in other states across the country, lent their support to the president.

“All we are seeing right now is a group of people who are quasi-Republicans, who might not have participated in politics before, or turned out greater in number, but we’ll have to see how that plays out in the next several years,” Smith said.

The other polls released this week showed that the drug crisis is still the number one issue for residents in the state, Gov. Sununu has similar approval ratings at the start of his term as his predecessors, and all of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation have positive approval ratings.

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There are 19 groups in New Hampshire that have signed on to completely resist President Donald Trump, and they’re trying to take a page out of the Tea Party’s playbook.

A new national organization called “Indivisible” is going back to the basics: push back against Trump from the grassroots level. The group published a manifesto, essentially a manual on how to resist the Trump agenda, written by former Democratic congressional staffers.

“We examine lessons from the Tea Party’s rise and recommend two key strategic components: A local strategy targeting individual members of Congress; a defensive approach purely focused on stopping Trump from implementing an agenda built on racism, authoritarianism, and corruption,” they wrote.

Indivisible, which has more than 2,400 local groups registered with them, is advising voters to assemble at the local level and have members focus on their respective elected senators and representatives by speaking out at town hall meetings, asking their elected officials questions at local photo-ops and ceremonies, showing up at their district offices for meetings, and overwhelming their phone lines with coordinated calls.

“We can all learn from their [the Tea Party] success in influencing the national debate and the behavior of national policymakers,” the group wrote. “To their credit, they thought thoroughly about advocacy tactics.”

Many progressives are trying to recreate the circumstances that led to a wave of Republican victories in Congress and state legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, gained more seats in the Senate, and flipped several state legislative seats, mostly campaigning on conservative ideals and anti-President Barack Obama rhetoric. But liberals could find it difficult to implement a similar strategy and might find more success if they work with Trump when possible.

The Democratic Party enters the Trump presidency completely shut out of power, with Republicans in control of the White House, House, Senate, and even most state governments. And they’re already divided amongst themselves with progressives versus moderates, and whether they should oppose Trump or work with him on common interests.

Just after his first week in office, it looks like many Democrats and progressive activists want to resist him at every step. The American Civil Liberties Union already filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order that temporarily bars entry to refugees from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen due to terrorism concerns. A federal judge granted an emergency stay Saturday to stop deportation of people with valid visas who landed in the United States.

But if they continue that mentality, they might run into some trouble in the 2018 midterm elections and even the 2020 presidential election. Even though the party in charge usually doesn’t do well in midterm elections, many House seats will still favor Republican control due to gerrymandering. And Democrats have to defend 10 Senate seats in Republican-controlled states. The political terrain isn’t favorable for them right now.

By refusing to compromise, Democrats may be unable to influence policy even when the president’s agenda aligns with traditional Democratic interests. It’s true that rejecting compromise can reveal internal differences and struggles within the president’s own party, such as with the ongoing Republican debate on repealing Obamacare. More damage could be done by working with Trump and exposing the internal divide in the Republican Party that’s been there since the rise of the Tea Party movement in 2009.

An area some Democrats and Trump could work on together is infrastructure spending, albeit with some disagreements on how to fund it. Trump will almost need Senate Democrats to help get it through Congress. Some of his ideas resemble the “big-government conservatism” of George W. Bush that upset many Tea Partiers. Working out a few deals with Trump could anger some Republicans, and it might do more damage to the president than being vehemently opposed to everything he does.

If the Democrats could unify around that message, they could be in much better shape to retake Congress and the presidency, and ultimately be able to govern themselves and the country better than before.

Uncompromising Democratic opposition is essentially saying the party wants to be more like the Republican Party, by trying to emulate what the Republicans did in 2009. But while the Republicans were “unified” by being anti-Obama anything, they didn’t take the time to rebuild as a party and create a clear message for the base. That was evident by the loss of Mitt Romney in 2012. And now, look at them. They ended up nominating a candidate who barely aligns with their platform. They have full control over the federal government, but they still are struggling to be unified over how to run it, as exhibited by disagreement over many of Trump’s policies.

While it’s understandable that Democrats and progressive activists would want to go about rebuilding their party the same way the Republicans did in 2009, it’s better for their party to engage with Trump in policy debates because those issues are ones they can build a campaign on, and not just on partisan rhetoric.

The Democrats have a prime opportunity to genuinely build their party from the grassroots level up. If the loss of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election taught them anything, it’s that they need to listen to the working class in Middle America again and create a message that appeals not only to their base, but also to disenfranchised voters who feel left out of the system.

It’ll prove to be difficult for them to do that though, especially with some major players on the national stage that see the party going in a different, more radical direction.

Just look at the confirmation hearing battles. Several Democratic senators who are looking to run for president in 2020 won’t vote for anything put forward by Trump out of fear from attacks to their left. John Kelly was confirmed as secretary for homeland security by a vote of 88-11. Some of those “no” votes came from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). The more moderate Democrats might feel pressure to vote a certain way in order to follow suit, and especially when the media reports that former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Warren, and Booker voted one way, it could make it seem like the Democrats who don’t fall in line aren’t supportive of the party.

An unpopular Trump could win another four years if the next Democratic presidential leader is too far outside of the political spectrum.

And speaking of leaders, the race for the next chair of the Democratic National Committee is revealing to show how anti-Trump and against compromise the Democratic Party could be. While members of their party were participating in the Women’s March earlier this month, most of the 10 candidates for DNC chair were at a private fundraising conference held by liberal political operative David Brock. The message that could send to grassroots leaders is that the Democratic Party hasn’t learned its lesson from its recent defeat and instead, continues to listen to big money rather than voters.

The latest forums between the candidates have also shown that there aren’t many disagreements between them; they don’t have many new ideas to jumpstart the party, and they all have zero desire to work with Trump.

“That’s a question that’s absolutely ridiculous,” said New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley at one of the forums, when he was asked about working with Trump.

If the Democrats try to imitate the Tea Party movement, don’t create a unifying message for its voters, and resist Trump at every turn, then they’re in for a long eight years.

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When Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders held their respective rallies at the University of New Hampshire this past year, Joshua Fox and other members of the UNH College Republicans wanted to stand outside the venue, hold signs, and protest.

When they were protesting, a police officer approached them and told them they needed to move to a “free speech zone” because they could potentially cause some safety problems. Fox, a sophomore at the public university, said they were forced into a small area to carry out the rest of their protest, farther away from where people were waiting to enter the rally.

“A diversity of opinions is important to college,” he testified during a House Education Committee hearing in Concord on Tuesday. “I believe every American should have their right to speak their opinion.”

UNH says presidential candidates and their Secret Service teams are allowed to put some policies in place that the university would not normally do.

But Fox said he still believes universities and colleges sometimes go too far in stifling free speech.

He supports House Bill 477 that would limit “the ability of an institution within the university system or community college system to restrict a student’s right to speak in a public forum.”

The bill states that no university or college that receives state funds “shall restrict a student’s right to speak, including verbal speech, holding a sign, or distributing fliers or other materials, in a public forum.”

Rep. Eric Schleien, R-Hudson, is the prime sponsor of the bill, which has five other cosponsors on it — all Republicans. But he said this bill shouldn’t be a partisan bill.

“The broader principle is if I am a student at a public university or college, I shouldn’t have to ask people for permission to hand out a flyer,” Schleien said.

He is referring to UNH’s policy on students needing a permit to “distribute literature” and for “outdoor assemblies.”

“Individual students and non-students who wish to solicit for contributions, distribute literature…and engage in sequential, incidental, brief and transitory verbal interactions with passersby on the sidewalks and in the parking lots on campus must first obtain a permit from the University of New Hampshire Police Department,” states Section 23.2 of UNH’s administrative rules and regulations.

That’s where Joe Cohen, legislative and policy director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has a problem.

He doesn’t believe students should have to get a permit to assemble a protest or pass out flyers to passersby. He also said having the police in charge of the permitting process is a problem.

“We’re not really changing the law in anyway,” he said. “We’re just changing the mechanism to give students the power to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

According to FIRE, most public colleges and universities in the Granite State do not have a high “speech code rating.”

Only Plymouth State College has a “green light” rating — when a college does not “seriously imperil speech.”

UNH and Dartmouth College received a “yellow light” rating. That’s when an institution’s policies “restrict a more limited amount of protected expression or, by virtue of their vague wording, could too easily be used to restrict protected expression.”

Keene State College received a “red light” rating, which “clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.”

Cohen criticized the state’s college and university system for not having uniform free speech policies. He believes this bill will help fill that gap.

Reports of free speech violations on college campuses have reached national media outlets in the past year. One of the most recent incidents was at Kellogg Community College in Michigan where members of the Young Americans for Liberty chapter are suing the school after they were arrested in September for passing out pocket-sized copies of the U.S. Constitution without administrative permission.

While no incidents like that have been reported in New Hampshire, the Granite State public universities have seen an increase in hate crimes in the past year. A swastika was burned into the ceiling of a Keene State College dorm and at UNH. President Mark Huddleston said several students and staff had experienced harassment or threats.

Educators on New Hampshire college campuses have been trying to have an open dialogue with students about where freedom of expression ends and hate speech begins.

But Karyl Martin, assistant general counsel for UNH, said the new bill on free speech could be seen as redundant since students are already allowed freedom of speech in the First Amendment and some restrictions exist to keep students safe.

“The safety and health concerns are real,” she said. “The permitting notice allows them [the university] to be flexible to needs of the students.”

Lawmakers were also critical of the law, asking if there were any limits to free speech on college campuses.

Schleien said the courts would ultimately decide what limits exist when they interpret the law.

But Martin said it’s difficult to legislate what are reasonable restrictions.

“It also puts the expense of litigating these issues on the taxpayers when they go to court,” she said. “It would ultimately end up on them and the students.”

THE EDELBLUT WILD CARD

This isn’t the first time a bill like this appeared before the committee. In the last legislative session, former Rep. Frank Edelblut, R-Windham, introduced a similar bill (House Bill 1561) that ultimately didn’t make it out of committee.

Republican gubernatorial candidates Executive Councilor Chris Sununu, right, and state Rep. Frank Edelblut shake hands during a news conference in front of the Statehouse Wednesday Sept. 14, 2016 in Concord, N.H. Edelblut conceded the race for the Republican nomination for governor after Sununu won by fewer than 1,000 votes. He will run against his Democratic primary winner fellow Executive Councilor Colin Van Ostern. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

The main differences between the two pieces of legislation are that the 2016 bill included a clause for “spontaneous and contemporaneous” demonstration. Cohen said he would prefer that to be in the current legislation, but UNH says that could lead to more costs.

Last year, the committee referred the legislation for interim study to look more at what the cost would be for the public university and college systems.

They claimed that the law could increase costs due to litigations and a change in their current permitting system, including additional funds for police officers for those spontaneous protests.

The bill was not recommended for future legislation.

Now, without the spontaneous clause, maybe the bill has a fighting chance. Especially, with the Edelblut wild card.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu recently nominated Edelblut, who also came in a close second to Sununu in the Republican gubernatorial primary last year, to be the next state education commissioner. As education commissioner, he helps set the tone of the department and implement policy for K-12 education, as well as higher education, which includes the state universities and colleges.

His nomination is already controversial since he doesn’t come from an education background. But now that it’s likely he will be approved by the Republican-controlled Executive Council, Edelblut could help push this legislation forward. After all, he was the one who first proposed it last year.

With Edelblut in Sununu’s ear, he could give this bill a nudge forward in the Legislature.

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