Republicans will remember Nov. 5, 2024 as the day Donald Trump won the biggest victory by a GOP presidential candidate since 1988.
But for Democrats who believe Trump’s victory was only possible thanks to President Joe Biden’s narcissism-driven defeat, the date that will live in infamy is Oct. 30, 2023.
That’s the day a group of leading Granite State Democrats launched the “Write In Biden” campaign for the state’s First in the Nation presidential primary.
A year earlier, Biden and his allies in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had stripped New Hampshire of its historic place at the start of the primary calendar. While some political insiders said it was revenge for Biden’s humiliating fifth-place finish in the 2020 primary, Biden supporters said it was done entirely in the name of racial equity. New Hampshire was simply too White to be allowed to host the Democrats’ first primary.
“We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window,” Biden wrote in a letter to the DNC at the time.
However, as NHJournal has previously reported, there was another, more pragmatic reason: Biden didn’t have the mental and physical stamina for the retail politics that are expected from candidates who come to New Hampshire.
Even in early 2022, there were serious questions about Biden’s ability to serve as president. An April 2022 New Hampshire Journal poll found 54 percent of Granite Staters didn’t believe he was “physically and mentally up to the job” if there were a crisis. A UNH Survey Center poll two months later reported 65 percent said they didn’t want Biden to run again.
Plus, New Hampshire has a notorious independent streak and a history of creating headaches for incumbent presidents like George H.W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson. (Jimmy Carter couldn’t break 50 percent in the 1980 primary against Sen. Ted Kennedy, either.)
Sending Biden to campaign in New Hampshire was a risky move, perhaps as risky as sending him to debate Donald Trump would prove to be six months later. Instead, Biden bailed. But that didn’t solve all the problems.
New Hampshire’s place on the primary schedule is mandated by state law. It was going to happen with or without him. If Biden kept his pledge and refused to campaign in the state or allow his name on the ballot, some ambitious Democrat with national name I.D. may have found the opportunity to primary an elderly incumbent too tempting to resist.
If that happened, the floodgates would open and Biden would most likely be out.
And even if the field remained limited to U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) and self-help guru Marianne Williamson, losing the First in the Nation primary to a nobody came with risks, too.
“It would be a bad story if, on the night of the primary, Joe Biden loses,” former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Kathy Sullivan said at the time.
And so she, along with longtime Democratic strategist Jim Demers, launched the “Write In Biden” campaign.
The $1.2 million effort, supported by U.S. Sens. Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, and nearly every prominent Democrat in the state, was designed to protect Biden from the consequences of skipping the primary.
The goal of the write-in campaign was to let Biden stay in the basement but still put political points on the board. With the state Democratic Party machine cranking out primary votes, Biden could keep his promise not to campaign among the racism-adjacent Democrats of the Granite State, and yet still pick up a win.
It worked even better than expected. With Donald Trump campaigning in the GOP’s presidential primary held the same day, anti-Trump Democrats were delighted to cast an early vote against the Republican they love to hate.
Nearly 80,000 people turned out to write in Biden’s name, giving him 65 percent of the primary vote, and sending him on to the safe haven of Rep. Jim Clyburn’s South Carolina.
And eventually, the nomination, the debate, the withdrawal, the Harris candidacy, and Trump’s historic win.
Not that Biden’s backers in New Hampshire had any regrets. Even after the debate disaster, the New Hampshire Democrats behind the write-in push refused to admit Biden was done.
“Suck it up, buttercup,” Sullivan told Democrats at a press conference the day after the debate. “Joe Biden’s our president. He’s done a great job. And it’s time to get with the program and roll up your sleeves like all of us here are doing and fight like heck to get Joe Biden reelected in November.”
Three weeks later, Biden was out.
Some angry Democrats blame Biden, saying his decision to run for a second term was a betrayal. He added to the damage by lingering in the race for weeks after the debate, all resulting in an untested and historically unpopular vice president, Kamala Harris, being elevated to the top of the ticket.
Harris waged one of the least-effective campaigns in modern American history, spending more than $1 billion against one of the most controversial figures to ever seek public office and losing in an Electoral College landslide.
But Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report says not to blame Harris.
“Fundamentally, it does come back to Biden and the administration. He’s an unpopular president, and an unpopular president doesn’t win reelection.”
And Nancy Pelosi told the New York Times, “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race.”
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” Pelosi added. “If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”
The outcome on Tuesday proves the value of the New Hampshire primary, value that party leaders abandoned in service of a flawed candidate. They helped Biden escape the primary so that he could go on to devastating failure in the future.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, came to New Hampshire and fought off a field of impressive challengers. He left New Hampshire a better candidate with more momentum.
The next generation of Granite State Democrats should learn the lesson and resolve to defend, not devalue, the First in the Nation primary.
