Add Maggie Hassan, New Hampshire’s junior senator, to the already-large list of Democrats doing the sorts of things people planning to run for president to. Hassan is headed to Dubuque, Iowa, to speak at a Democratic Party event on August 26. Iowa, of course, is home to the first-in-the-nation caucuses that kick off the presidential primary season, followed close behind by New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. Others can assess Hassan’s record and chances and what constituencies she might appeal to in today’s Democratic Party. What interests me is the impact a Hassan candidacy might have on New Hampshire’s primary, and how hailing from New Hampshire might complicate a Hassan campaign for president.
There aren’t many examples of New Hampshire politicians running for president to look to for precedent. The strange case of Senator Bob Smith, who began a presidential race early in 1999 but then left the GOP to run as an independent, only to come back to the GOP not long after that, doesn’t provide much guidance.
A much closer analogue would be the campaign of Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa in 1992. Like Hassan, Harkin was a credible candidate from a state with an early nomination contest. But the fact that Harkin was from Iowa hugely complicated his campaign. Since 1976, Iowa’s caucuses had been of crucial importance in Democratic nominations; they had put Jimmy Carter on the path to the nomination and were an early sign of the strength of Gary Hart’s challenge to Walter Mondale. But in 1992, the rest of the Democratic candidates – Bill Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, and others – reacted to Harkin’s presence in the race by simply skipping Iowa and focusing their attention on New Hampshire, which became the first consequential contest of the primary season. With a native son in the race, they reasoned, there was little reason to spend time in Iowa when there was a more level playing field awaiting them in the Granite State.
However, just because everyone else decided to skip Iowa didn’t mean Harkin could, too. Harkin had to work hard to make sure he won the caucuses by an overwhelming margin. This put him in something of a no-win situation. While his rivals were busy barnstorming New Hampshire, Harkin had to divide his attention between his home state and the Granite State to ensure that he didn’t come up short either objectively or in terms of the high expectations most observers had for his caucus performance. But when he did win with almost 77% of the caucus vote, he received very little credit because he had, effectively, beaten no one at all. This was a far cry from the attention past Iowa winners in both parties had enjoyed from their unexpected successes there.
As for the caucuses themselves, very few Iowa Democrats bothered to turn out for an uncompetitive contest. In 1988, a record-setting 120,000 Democrats had attended their local caucus. In 1992, just 25,000 did. This paltry turnout did little to make Harkin’s win impressive to national media.
What does Harkin’s case suggest about a potential Hassan campaign in 2020?
Hassan would most likely find herself in much the same position Harkin did – working hard to make sure she won her own state’s contest, while many of her competitors decided to forgo New Hampshire and focus on Iowa and the immediately subsequent contests in Nevada and South Carolina. If she were to win the primary, she would probably not get very much credit for it, just as was the case for Tom Harkin in 1992.
But because New Hampshire’s primary follows Iowa’s caucus, she would face a difficulty Harkin did not. In 1992, the effect of other Democrats’ decision to largely ignore Iowa was to push the real start of the primary season back to New Hampshire. A Hassan candidacy would make Iowa become even more important than it usually is. If one of Hassan’s rivals were to win in Iowa, that candidate could very well try to swoop into New Hampshire while everyone else left standing after Iowa focused on the subsequent contests. And because early contests are as much about expectations as absolute vote and delegate totals, Hassan could very well win the primary while losing the expectations game. In a worst-case scenario, Hassan might do so poorly in Iowa that multiple rivals would descend on New Hampshire and defeat her in a frantic and compressed contest. None of this is anything a senator who won the closest Senate race in the country in 2016 wants to have happen two years before her re-election campaign.
None of this is meant to suggest that Hassan shouldn’t run. But the political calculus of a possible Hassan candidacy illustrates one unintended consequence of Iowa and New Hampshire’s positions at the start of the primary season: Would-be candidates from those two states have to make calculations about how a campaign might play out that candidates from later states don’t. It’s one thing to run for president and lose; that’s the most likely outcome of any campaign. But spending most of two years running to make sure you do well enough in your home state to keep your campaign alive while knowing you’ll get very little credit for it is another. That’s at least part of the reason there hasn’t been a serious candidate from either Iowa or New Hampshire since Harkin.
Of course, Hassan may not run at all. But that doesn’t mean she might not find herself pursuing higher office in 2020; after Walter Mondale opted out of the 1976 presidential campaign he ended up as Jimmy Carter’s running mate. Hassan could make an appealing vice presidential candidate for the right presidential nominee, and might be the rare running mate who would make a difference. Christopher J. Devine and Kyle C. Kopko’s book The VP Advantage argues that running mates only make a difference when they come from smaller states and have been longtime political figures in those states, and that advantage tends to be localized to their home states. Their analysis suggests that had Al Gore picked then-Governor Jeanne Shaheen in 2000 he would have carried New Hampshire and won the presidency no matter what happened in Florida. Twenty years later, New Hampshire is still a swing state; Hassan for vice president might give the Democrats some breathing room in the small but crucial Granite State.