Inside the mind of a N.H. primary voter

What are voters in New Hampshire thinking?

It’s a tough question for most of us in Minnesota to answer, since we’re approximately 1,400 miles away from the Granite State.  Plenty of national media are on the ground there, so we have that going for us, and our friends at The UpTake are there as well doing their thing.  But I was able to touch base with one voter from Dover, N.H., a Barack Obama supporter who says she’s never been this engaged in a political campaign.

I admit, I had an advantage in getting this interview: The voter is my mom.

She said that voters in New Hampshire tend to be more vocal about their opinions on the candidates, but wondered whether New Hampshire voters are asked for their opinions more often than in other states or if it’s simply because their primary is so much more visible.  She considers herself moderate-to-liberal, but says she has voted for Republicans in the past.  In making her decision on whom  to support in the primaries, she said: “I was looking for someone who may not have all the answers (who does?), but is looking to collaborate with the people who do.  And I was looking for someone who can inspire us to get in there and start making it better…and for someone who would not embarrass me every time he opens his mouth.”

There’s no love lost between my mom and President Bush. That much I didn’t need to ask about.  In talking about what convinced her to become active in this campaign, she spoke of a rally she attended last fall in Dover:

[Obama's] speech was the standard stuff we are all hearing on TV and radio — inspiring but nothing new.  What got me was his answers to questions being asked.  He admitted he didn’t have all the solutions, but he showed he had a vision of what the end result should be.  That’s half the battle — and those visions were in line with mine.  His attitude toward bringing everyone in, instead of the current administration’s “if you’re not one of us, you’re against us” attitude knocked me out.

I remember this rally myself.  I also remember how proud I was in 2004 that I was able to convince her to volunteer for a few days before the election in the Kerry campaign office where I worked; I was surprised in 2007 to hear her talk about going out of her way to get involved.  So does this mean that Obama’s campaign approach is winning over disengaged, disinterested and disconnected voters in New Hampshire and around the nation?  If last week’s results in Iowa and the current tracking polls in New Hampshire are any indication, the answer has to be “yes.”

Some very smart people from across the Democratic spectrum have taken issue with the Illinois senator’s policy positions. But it seems from the crowds that Obama is attracting and the excitement around his campaign, that issues and policies are taking a back seat to values and lofty rhetoric.  Minnesota native and political activist Alex Cutler, in a blog post on StarTribune.com, said of the Millennial generation (those born after 1981):

We simply do not function in the same political dichotomies that have colored politics for the past 50 years. This is why young voters were simply not as attracted to the rhetoric of Senator Clinton or Senator Edwards. In Clinton’s case we don’t think we need to “turn up the heat” on the Republicans. We have friends who are Republicans and we need to work with them and tone down the divisive rhetoric.

In Senator Edwards’s case he would often say that “we need to do to them what they’ve done to us;” in other words screw the corporate interests and lock them out of the process. But many of us have parents who work for these corporations; many of us are looking for jobs and may end up working in them. We see them as people like all the rest of us and the idea of taking some sort of revenge on them is just disgusting to us. As Senator Obama said last night we are choosing “unity over division.”

Cutler is in Dartmouth, N.H., helping get out the primary vote for Obama, so he’s biased, too.  But again, speaking in the same tone as my mom did above, Cutler describes the feeling that Obama is somehow different in this race; not necessarily better or worse than his Democratic rivals on the issues, but in some intangible way that even his supporters cannot identify other than to compare him with those rivals and say what he is not.

Today’s primary in New Hampshire is the second step on a long road.  It is difficult to see how John Edwards continues to compete without a strong second-place finish in New Hampshire; South Carolina and Nevada look like tough spots for a third-place finisher in the lead-up to Super Duper Tuesday, Feb. 5.  Sen. Clinton, however, has the financial resources to make it at least to that day, with all the chips on the table and all bets off.  On the Republican side, nothing figures to be resolved after today, with at least four candidates, and possibly as many as six, spinning their way out of the Granite State and moving on.  But it is nonetheless an important step on that road, and it will be very interesting to compare the calculus of voters like my mom to that of voters here in Minnesota, who may well have a role to play (for once) in choosing the major parties’ nominees.

Will the trend toward the Democrats’ presidential candidates represent a permanent shift in the electorate, as Reagan’s election in 1980 did for the Republicans?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  My mom says that she’s working hard for Obama now because “so many of the mistakes in Washington have personally affected me,” but she plans to go right back to being unaffiliated after this election so she can continue to vote for a candidate and not for a party.  Time will tell whether her course of action is shared by independent voters in New Hampshire and around the nation.