Concord, N.H. — Let’s deal with this “home court advantage” business.
“I know that they tend to favor their neighbors,” Hillary Clinton said last week, speaking of New Hampshire primary voters. “That’s the pattern, the history of the primary. And Senator Sanders is a neighbor.”
A common theme from Clinton, her supporters, and some commentators/pontificators who argue that winning Tuesday’s primary here won’t mean much for Sen. Bernie Sanders because he’s from right next door in Vermont.
Just look, they say, at what happened in 1988, when Gov. Michael Dukakis of neighboring Massachusetts won, and then four years later when Paul Tsongas, another charisma-challenged guy from Massachusetts, already a former senator and not terribly well-known, finished first in a field of five.
A little history here.
No, actually, let’s start out with a little geography. Those winners were from Massachusetts, south of New Hampshire. Sanders is from Vermont, to New Hampshire’s west. Demographically and economically, New Hampshire faces south. Most of its voters live in the southern third of the state. They watch Boston television, root for Boston teams, read Boston newspapers to the extent anyone still reads newspapers.
By contrast New Hampshire looks to Vermont to … well, mostly to make fun of or to compete with, especially at a high school all-star football game New Hampshire – with twice Vermont’s population — regularly wins. Rarely does New Hampshire seek to emulate Vermont, and Vermont’s influence on the farther shores of the Connecticut is negligible.
(In all respects, the feelings are reciprocated).
Clinton and her supporters do not mention the 2008 Republican primary, in which “neighbor” Mitt Romney of Massachusetts lost by about 13,000 votes (5.5 percentage points) to John McCain of Arizona, which is not in the neighborhood.
Instead, they concentrate on the two primaries in which Massachusetts Democrats prevailed. In 1988, several Democrats vied for their party’s nomination. Without going into more detail than necessary, let’s just say that none of their names was a common household phrase.
No, check that. One of them was. That one was former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, once the (very) early front-runner, but by primary time best known for … for … well, do we really have to go through all this again? Let’s just say some misbehavior concerning a young woman and a trip on a boat named the Monkey Business. For all his political and intellectual talents, Hart was not going to get nominated.
With Hart effectively out of the running (though after dropping out in the spring of 1987, he re-entered the race in December) and Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York refusing to run, the Democratic field was so unimpressive that when a Republican wit called them “the Seven Dwarfs,” nobody could really argue the point.
(It was never clear just who was supposed to play the “Snow White” role; but this is politics, where literary analogies don’t have to meet any standards).
If anyone in this drab field stood out even slightly, it was Dukakis. While he was hardly an electrifying speaker, he was articulate and experienced. He was also, at least to Democrats, reassuring. He came across as a centrist liberal who knew how to govern.
And, yes, thanks to all that Boston TV-watching, New Hampshire Democrats knew him a whole lot better than they knew Dick Gephardt, Paul Simon (the Illinois senator, not the singer), Bruce Babbitt, or even Al Gore, who got more famous some years later.
So being a neighbor did help Dukakis, but only because the political situation left primary voters with little else from which to choose.
A feeling which repeated itself four years later. That was the year that nobody thought a Democrat could possibly be elected after President George H.W. Bush’s success in the first Iraq war. So Cuomo and other leading Democrats opted out, leaving the field to another bunch of little-knowns, or “dwarfs,” to the flippant.
The most interesting of these – if still not very well-known nationwide – was former Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. In the weeks leading up to the primary, though, Clinton became the subject of news stories suggesting he had: (1) attempted, more than 20 years earlier, to wangles his way out of the draft during the Vietnam Ward; (2) consorted with … well, do we really have to go through all this again? See above about Gary Hart, though this time without the boat.
At any rate, New Hampshire Democrats were confused. Not knowing where to turn, they turned to the name they knew best, from watching all that Boston TV. That was former Sen. Tsongas. Like Dukakis, he seemed a safe choice, liberal on social issues, centrist (in this case, actually quite conservative, as the term was then defined) when it came to the economy.
Tsongas beat Clinton 33 percent to 26 percent. But for a few days before the primary, it had seemed that Clinton might do much worse. When the results came in, he nicknamed himself “the comeback kid.” He was.
Dukakis and Tsongas were two New Hampshire “neighbors,” who won in part because they were neighbors, because the voters at least knew who they were.
But those were both multi-candidate races in which most of the contenders were not very well known. This one is Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders, one-on-one. Whatever Hillary Clinton may lack, name recognition is not it. She is one of the best known people in the entire world, far better known than Bernie Sanders was a few months ago, even in New Hampshire.
As must happen in one-on-one contests, one will end up with more votes than the other one. There is a simple word to describe that first one, the one who ends up with more votes: winner.
