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An NBC News website tracking early and absentee ballots reports Granite State Democrats hold a 44 to 30 percent advantage over Republicans.

For Democrats, that is the bad news.

Political pros tell NHJournal that Republicans are the party of Election Day voting, a trend that has increased in the wake of President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of widespread election fraud. Democrats, on the other hand, embraced early and mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result, New Hampshire Democrats have typically enjoyed two-to-one margins in the ballots cast before Election Day arrived. But according to NBC News, of the more than 45,000 early ballots cast in New Hampshire as of Monday, 44 percent were from registered Democrats, 30 percent from registered Republicans and 26 percent from undeclared or third-party voters.

“More Democrats (54 percent) than Republicans (32 percent) say they will vote early — a 22-percentage-point difference,” Gallup reported last week based on a national sample.

However, Michael McDonald, the University of Florida political scientist who tracks early voting data, recently told CNN there are red flags for Democrats in the data already collected.

“On balance, the early vote in a typical election is usually won by Democrats, or at least registered Democrats. This election cycle it is the Republicans who are winning the early vote,” McDonald said.

According to McDonald, as of last week, registered Republicans have an almost 180,000-vote advantage in both the mail ballots and the in-person early vote nationwide. While Republicans tend to outnumber Democrats at in-person voting, they are now surprisingly taking a big advantage in early voting, he said.

While Democrats are signaling a preference for early voting, this year the reality is trending toward Republicans, according to McDonald, with more Republicans returning their early ballots than Democrats.

“So, if you look at the return rate, as of (November 2), 48 percent of Democrats have returned their mail ballots compared with 55 percent of Republicans. So those are people who have a mail ballot in their hand, and you’re seeing a big disparity there in these return rates,” McDonald said.

Former House Speaker Bill O’Brien said the data currently shows Democrats are slipping in the early vote game, with fewer of their voters even asking for absentee ballots this cycle. Democrats have a major enthusiasm gap driving the declines, he said.

“The fact that only about 6 to 7 percent of the ultimate vote in absentee ballots have been requested and that the Democrats have gained less than a .06 percent advantage for all their absentee ballot efforts certainly shows their voters are discouraged,” O’Brien said. “And Democratic voters should be discouraged because they have to choose whether to effectively join the weird branch or the insane branch of the Democratic Party by voting for Democratic candidates almost exclusively representing one or the other.”

This year’s totals are already down from past cycles. In 2020’s COVID-era election, more than 260,000 of about 815,000 ballots cast were via mail, or about 31 percent of the total

The high absentee ballot turnout is largely due to COVID fears driving more people to skip the voting lines. This year’s 45,000 early ballots are like 2018’s 45,000 ballots cast. That midterm election saw a total of 580,000 ballots, meaning the early vote made up about 8 percent of the total.

The New Hampshire Secretary of State’s Office does not break down the total data by party registration.

Keene Mayor George Hansel has yet to announce his candidacy in New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District race, and he has already been targeted by a political dirty trick.

The Keene Sentinel ran a story on Sunday declaring, “Keene Mayor George Hansel announces run for Congress.” It was based on “a tweet from his new campaign account.” The paper did not speak to Hansel.

Less than 24 hours later, the Sentinel pulled the report and posted a correction: “A story written by The Sentinel and posted on our website Sunday evening claiming that Keene Mayor George Hansel would be running for the N.H. Congressional District 2 seat, currently held by longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster, has been removed.”

The account, @Hansel4Congress, became active in just the past few days and it followed news outlets like NHJournal. Its few posts featured anti-Trump and pro-abortion messages likely to hurt a candidate’s efforts in a Republican primary, a sign that it was a political dirty trick. Sources familiar with the account tell NHJournal it was created by a Republican who opposes a Hansel candidacy.

On Monday, the account had been suspended by Twitter.

Hansel’s actual Twitter account had no mention of a potential congressional bid as of Monday afternoon. However, the Federal Election Commission reports the “George Hansel for Congress” committee was formally created on Friday, May 27. The treasurer is listed as David Hansel.

Republican insiders have been buzzing for weeks about the possibility Hansel might challenge Democrat Kuster, particularly since businessman Jeff Cozzens dropped out of the GOP primary in April. With polls showing President Joe Biden’s approval rating below 40 percent — and Kuster not doing much better — Republicans believe a 2022 wave could be big enough to bring down the five-term incumbent, despite her $2.4 million war chest.

After the GOP’s surprising successes in the 2021 election cycle, the National Republican Congressional Committee put Kuster on its expanded target list.

Hansel did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the FEC filing. He was first elected mayor of Keene in 2019 and had easy re-election in November, facing no serious challengers. Before becoming mayor of the left-leaning college community, Hansel was a two-term city councilor. He is currently vice president and manager of innovation/engineering and Keene’s Filtrine Manufacturing Company, a business founded by his uncle, Peter Hansel.

Because the lines of New Hampshire’s new congressional districts have yet to be finalized for November’s election, political analysts at organizations like the Cook Political Report have not released their view of the Second District’s midterm prospects. No Republican presidential candidate has won in the district this century, and the last Republican to represent the district was Rep. Charlie Bass, who won in the 2010 red wave midterm.

Hansel positioned himself as fiscally responsible in his first term as mayor. He pushed for an economic development action plan for the city and the creation of a home weatherization/renovation program for Keene’s eastside homes through a public/private partnership, according to his campaign. He also lobbied for the adoption of RSA 79E that allows Keene businesses to take advantage of New Hampshire’s development incentives.

He has also supported the Black Lives Matter movement and maintained a local mask mandate after the state order expired — positions likely to be problematic in a GOP primary.

Already in the race are Bob Burns and Lily Tang Williams.

In this edition of “New Hampshire Journal: On the Air,” listen to David Paleologos, Director of Suffolk University’s Political Research Center, talk about his new poll of New Hampshire voters.

From the governor’s race to the 2020 primary–and the possibility of a GOP challenge to Trump–Paleologos shares the numbers that popped for him.

Find more podcast conversations at NHJournal.com.  And to subscribe to the NHJournal.com newsletter, please click here.

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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