Hugh Gregg arrived for dinner at a fancy Mexican restaurant in once-sleepy Nashua on a recent night and left amazed.
“It was mobbed. It was reasonably expensive, but the customers were all high-tech people, young people, full of pep and energy. Some of them were even speaking Spanish. Nashua has three or four Mexican restaurants, believe it or not,” marveled Gregg. The former governor of New Hampshire, former mayor of Nashua, father of the state’s junior U.S. senator, Republican Judd Gregg, and, at 81, a taciturn, bone-deep Yankee as flinty as the reputation of his beloved Granite State, is still mystified.
“Who ever heard of a Mexican restaurant in Nashua?”
Welcome to the new New Hampshire, or “Nouvelle Hampshire,” as some wags dub it, putting a sophisticated spin on a scenic but homespun state. Over the last 20 years, New Hampshire has transformed itself from a landscape of hardscrabble farms and textile mills to a low-tax, high-technology mecca boasting one of the highest standards of living and lowest unemployment rates in the country.
The question is whether these profound changes, vividly reflected in new economic, demographic and political realities, critically affect the validity of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary. Proudly celebrated and fiercely protected, the 79-year-old primary long has been, with the Iowa caucuses, half of the dynamic duo of American presidential political forecasting.
As it is, this dramatically beautiful, gleefully quirky state can hardly recognize itself from the place it was even four years ago. Then, job insecurity still ran rampant after the severe recession of the early 1990s and conservative pundit Pat Buchanan surprisingly swept away the GOP establishment primary opposition with his “pitchfork brigades” of disenchanted workers.
What was once a staunchly conservative Republican bastion, now has a progressive Democratic governor–Jeanne Shaheen, the state’s first female chief executive to boot–and a Democrat-controlled state Senate for the first time in 87 years. And after stubbornly resisting the national trend, in May New Hampshire became the last state to approve a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and recently became the next-to-last state to rescind laws banning gays from adopting.
Most significant of all, perhaps, in terms of the primary now slated for Feb. 8, 2000, the state is home to a rising number of independent voters, whose ranks now rival those of the barely dominant Republicans–and they are allowed to cast ballots in either party’s primary.
These independent voters, many of them recent transplants, present a significant challenge to the traditionally partisan approach to presidential campaigning in New Hampshire, and may decide the 2000 primary’s outcome. Look at the numbers: In 1998, Republicans accounted for 37 percent of the registered voters, independents 36 percent and Democrats 27 percent; in 1984, the comparable figures were 37 percent for the GOP, 32 percent independent and 31 percent Democrat.
Deborah “Arnie” Arnesen, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 1992 and now the general manager and a commentator for a Nashua radio station, calls the independents the “radical middle,” with some of their numbers swelled by disenchanted moderate Republicans.
As for the Republican Party, “I think they should be sending Bob Smith roses for leaving the party,” she said, referring to the longtime GOP senior senator and would-be presidential candidate who defected from the party last month, calling it too liberal.
“Smith represents the ultra-conservative wing of the party and if he’s feeling miserable in the Republican Party, the Republican Party may be in a position, for the first time, to lead in the middle,” Arnesen said.
New Hampshirites, no matter their political leanings, scoff at any suggestion that the independent-minded state is anything but even more perfect for the kind of retail politics, one-on-one, coffee cup campaigning that is its signature. That the quadrennial event, drawing thousands of journalists, analysts, pollsters and camera crews, brings in an estimated $20 million-plus to the state adds cash value to the political cachet.
“New Hampshire has become much more part of the rest of the country in the second half of the 20th Century,” said Charles Perkins, executive editor of Manchester’s Union Leader newspaper, noting that suburbanization didn’t really take root here until the late 1960s and diversity, which for so long has eluded a state still 98 percent white, is just beginning to develop with the influx of high-tech newcomers.
The arrival of minorities is most visible in the big Southern Tier cities of Manchester and Nashua, where the presence of Hispanics manifests itself on the streets and in the Spanish names of churches and social clubs. “We’ve also seen a scattering of Cambodians and Laotians in Newmarket on the Seacoast,” added Perkins.
Indeed, he said, the picturesque Colonial-era Seacoast region, which stretches for 18 miles from Hampton Beach to Portsmouth, is now called the E-Coast because of all the high-tech workers moving there from congested and costly Massachusetts and from increasingly expensive places like Washington state and San Francisco’s Bay area. New Hampshire estimates that 84 out of 1,000 residents work in the technology area, which may be the highest per-capita rate in the nation.
Between 1965 and 1997, the population of New Hampshire grew 74 percent, from 676,000 to 1,173,000. Many of the recent arrivals are entrepreneurs, attracted by the state’s accessible combination of mountains and beaches, low taxes and start-up costs, high standard of living and an adequate, if strained, infrastructure that the state, fueled primarily by property taxes, is scrambling to upgrade.
On the weekends, Interstate Highway 93, the main artery linking New Hampshire with Boston, becomes a virtual parking lot jammed with vacationers, shoppers and new residents, their progress further slowed by the ubiquitous orange cones of road construction. New houses seem to be going up everywhere; the cost of a starter home is estimated at about $150,000, or about half the cost of comparable homes in California’s Silicon Valley. The still semi-rural state is talking about mass transit for the first time and recently approved creation of a second area code. And, in nearly every storefront, a plaintive sign announces “Help Wanted.”
The sparsely populated North Country, formerly primarily dependent on timber mills, has not fared as well economically as the Southern Tier, but nonetheless is healthy and has seen its fall and winter tourism grow strongly.
Part of that is because in just the last two years, it has become much easier to get in and out of New Hampshire and possible to bypass Boston, about an hour’s drive to the south, altogether.
Manchester Airport, even four years ago a pokey place where fog or snow or rain regularly defeated the departure and arrival of tiny propeller planes bound for New York and other exotic destinations, now is one of the fastest-growing airports in the country. Served by jets and buoyed by the arrival two years ago of Southwest Airlines, which swiftly was followed by others, the airport now makes efficient connections to almost anywhere an executive might want to go. That development has lured even more businesses and residents.
Another, if more subtle, change has been the end of the Union Leader’s longstanding monopoly on political opinion-making in the state. Until recently, the Union Leader, which features a daily prayer on its front page, was the only statewide newspaper and the chattel of the ultra-conservative Loeb family, whose feisty matriarch, Nackey Loeb, retired in May.
Nackey and her late husband, Bill, before her, were for decades New Hampshire’s most powerful opinion-makers, requiring candidates campaigning in New Hampshire to take “The Pledge,” as it became known: a public renunciation of taxes. Although the state narrowly avoided instituting an income tax three months ago to fund a court-ordered school financing plan, there still is no income or sales tax here, and “tax” remains a semi-dirty word.
With the withdrawal of the Loeb family from the scene and the expansion of other newspapers, such as the Concord Monitor, Nashua Telegraph and even the Boston Globe, the state’s strongest new political kingmaker is television, specifically WMUR-Ch. 9, the only commercial station in the state and one that broadcasts to the majority of its communities.
The new Talk magazine recognized this month what many in New Hampshire long have accepted: Karen Brown, WMUR’s news director and anchorwoman, has succeeded Nackey Loeb as the doyenne of New Hampshire politics.
Born and bred in New Hampshire, with a graduate journalism degree from Northwestern University, Brown, 38, energetically is expanding WMUR’s news programming this fall from 35 to 40 hours a week, with two live Town Hall meetings with candidates slated in October.
“If I feel I’m making a difference to this process, it’s that we are able to devote so much air time to the candidates, and impartially,” said Brown, whose station will host the formal candidates’ debates in February.
And there’s an appetite for it, she said. “If you ask somebody, How do you like Candidate A, they’ll say, `I don’t know, I’ve only met him three times,’ ” she said, laughing. One survey showed one person in five shook the hand of a presidential candidate in 1996.
There are some downsides to New Hampshire’s newfound popularity, said Gregg. For a state that has some 400 state representatives, the world’s largest legislature after those of Britain, India and the U.S., involvement in this most intimate of democracies seems lost on many of the newcomers, he said.
“They don’t understand the New Hampshire ethos. They came here because their jobs brought them here,” he said. “They like our way of life, but they don’t have time to serve on the Rotary Club or the Grange. They don’t even know where Concord is,” he said with a snort of disgust.
But they do vote, and that’s what the New Hampshire primary is all about.
“We know how to do it,” said Gregg. “We have more elections than any other state in the country. We’re always election-ready, election-conscious. That’s why the New Hampshire primary works so well.
“We’re always electing somebody to something and, every two years, we elect everybody to everything, except the U.S. senators, who get six years.”
