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[S]en. Bernie Sanders’ rally in Montpelier last month was an ordinary home state appearance, but it was also an outlier: only rarely do presidential candidates make early campaign stops in the Green Mountain State.
New Hampshire, which hosts the first primary in the presidential election cycle, typically draws those contenders instead. This year, two factors have heightened the presidential energy in the Granite State.
First, the field is wider. Twenty-three candidates are vying for the 2020 Democratic nomination. (Per party guidelines, only 20 will appear at the first debates on June 26 and 27, and only about eight will remain by this fall.)
Second, the primary schedule has shifted so that more key states, including California, will hold their primaries earlier in the year than in previous cycles. That’s pushed back the calendar for the nearly two dozen competing Democrats.
VTDigger’s Kevin O’Connor has been following these campaigns from southern New Hampshire. He’s waited as Beto O’Rourke drove a rental car to Keene from State College, PA, showing up hours late for his own event. He’s seen Sanders draw standing-room crowds and surprisingly low showings. He’s seen Sen. Elizabeth Warren take hundreds of selfies at a time.
On this week’s podcast, O’Connor describes how these campaigns have evolved over the past several months — and what to expect from these candidates on the debate stage and beyond.
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Hi, Kevin.
Kevin O’Connor: How are you?
I’m good, how you doing?
O’Connor: I’m doing OK.
How was your drive from Brattleboro?
O’Connor: Drive was fine.
OK, good. I’m just making sure.
Since January, our reporter Kevin O’Connor has been spending more time on the road, reporting on the first presidential primary of the 2020 election cycle, right in Vermont’s backyard.
O’Connor: It’s hard for a Vermonter to see not only a presidential candidate or, for that matter, a president. Vermont always seems to be either the state that candidates don’t come to, or presidents don’t come to or it’s always the last state that they come to. But the fact is I live in Brattleboro on the border and so, within a 10 mile drive, I can be in some place in New Hampshire and they’re all there.
These candidates are many. And in a few days, they’re taking the debate stage for the first time.
Newsperson 1: We now know the matchups — who will face off on each of the two nights of the first Democratic primary debates.
Newsperson 1: There are 23 candidates running in the Democratic primary for president. That’s a lot.
Newsperson 3: A historically large primary field for Democrats in 2020.
Newsperson 4: This massive Democratic field, if you think somebody is running for president, they probably are.
Newsperson 5: The two hour event will air on June 26, and June 27.
You’ve seen how many candidates at this point?
O’Connor: I’ve seen 13 of the 23.
What’s significant about the ones that you have seen?
O’Connor: I’ve seen all of the candidates who have polled at least 2% in the national surveys. I’ve also seen a couple of the more interesting of the candidates who have polled below 2%.
I want to hear about how these candidates differ from each other. Because it’s such a wide field, there’s so many people running, and I feel like we’re getting to the point where you know, this first debate is coming up and people are starting to wonder when is this field gonna get a little bit smaller. When are we going to start to narrow things down? And I’m curious to hear what you’ve seen from each of these campaigns. And I wonder if maybe we could break it down into a few discrete chunks of who’s running the sort of biggest campaigns that seem to be getting the most attention and who’s not? So in this first category of like people who seem to be operating sort of the biggest operations here, who are we looking at?
O’Connor: I would say there are three and that would be Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. I got onto this because Bernie Sanders had announced that he would be running in the winter and was traveling around New Hampshire to sort of start in the Granite State.
Sen. Bernie Sanders: Alright Keene, it looks like we’re ready for a political revolution.
O’Connor: That was the first of the rallies that I attended. And what was interesting about that rally was, if you have been to a Bernie Sanders rally any time in the last 30 years, you would have felt very much at home.
Sanders: This campaign and the government we are going to create is going to transform our country and create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%.
O’Connor: He knows what he wants to say. He says it, it hits a large venue, lots of people. He gives a speech. It’s usually about an hour. And then everybody goes home.
Sanders: Thank you all very much.
O’Connor: So that was my sort of benchmark in terms of ‘how did other campaigns compare to that?’ I then went to a Elizabeth Warren rally, which was interesting in terms of, Bernie likes to sort of give his speech and then move on. Elizabeth Warren very much likes to start with her personal story.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren: I didn’t grow up here. I grew up out in Oklahoma. I am the baby. I’m what used to be referred to as a late-in-life baby. My mother always just called me ‘the surprise.’
O’Connor: Then she talks about a lot of her different policy proposals.
Warren: Here’s the good news: I have the biggest anti-corruption plan since Watergate. Here’s the bad news: We need the biggest anti-corruption plan since Watergate. All right, all right.
O’Connor: And then she will stay and take a selfie with any and every person who requests one. She was at the Hanover Inn in New Hampshire. And there were 500 people, and she announced at the end of her program that she’d be willing to stay and take a selfie with whoever wanted one. And all 500 people in the ballroom lined up and she spent the next hour taking selfies individually with all 500 people. She estimates now that she’s taken 30,000 selfies in the course of the last couple of months with people that she’s campaigned.
And then the third approach is interesting, which is Joe Biden.
Joe Biden: Hi everybody. Good to be back in New Hampshire.
O’Connor: Joe Biden announced late. He announced in the spring, and he came to New Hampshire, he’s only been there twice so far. And he very much limits how long his events are and how many he has during the day. He doesn’t do selfie lines. He talks a little bit off the cuff about himself about what he thinks. But for the most part, it’s just, you know, ‘Hi, New Hampshire. How are you?’ People, maybe you can ask a question or two and then he moves on.
Biden: I plan on doing everything I can to earn the respect and the support of the people of New Hampshire. I am going to be here a lot, bad news for you is I’m coming back. Good news for me is, I’m coming back, but I want to earn your support.
O’Connor: And part of it as a strategy on his part. He is the front runner, there really isn’t a need at this point for him to get out any more than he has to. But it’s an interesting difference between Bernie sticking pretty much to his speech and his thoughts. Elizabeth Warren really doing retail campaigning, lots of handshakes, lots of selfies, and then Joe Biden really sort of keeping it to just the minimum that he has to do and otherwise trying to stay off the stage so not to stumble.
Who would you kind of place in this next group of candidates in terms of the scope of their campaigns so far?
O’Connor: I would say that there are four, and I’m going to list these alphabetically. The first would be Cory Booker. The second would be Pete Buttigieg. The third would be Kamala Harris, and the fourth would be Beto O’Rourke. They have polling that is above 2%. They are in New Hampshire a lot. They also have the challenge of because a lot of the attention is on Biden, Sanders and Warren, that they’re trying to get attention and at the same time, they’re also sort of waiting to see, is there an opportunity for them to rise up?
Tell me about what you’ve seen at some of their events. What’s the vibe of these campaigns so far?
O’Connor: I think what’s interesting is that these campaigns are constantly changing based on what everybody’s doing. It’s almost like watching the Indianapolis 500. Everybody is sort of racing around sort of gauging ‘Where are you on the course?’ ‘Where somebody else on the course?’ ‘How are they driving?’ ‘What are you doing?’ I know when I attended Beto O’Rourke’s rally in New Hampshire, he had just announced he had just raised $6 million dollars in the first 24 hours of his candidacy. He was really on a high.
O’Rourke: Let’s hear it for New Hampshire.
O’Connor: And at the same time, he decided to rent a car and drive himself from State College, Pennsylvania to Keene, New Hampshire, thinking this was going to be something that he could do in the afternoon. Well, everyone who arrived at the rally, at 6 was still there at 7, was still waiting at 8 and was still waiting at 8:30. So he sort of quickly learned that how he thought he was going to campaign might have to change. He wasn’t necessarily going to be able to literally drive himself around America. And I’ve seen as well that as other candidates have come forward, suddenly the momentum that he had when he first announced is really sort of diminished and then Pete Buttigieg came about.
Buttigieg: They call me Mayor Pete. I’m a proud son of South Bend, Indiana, and I am running for president of the United States.
O’Connor: I went to Concord, New Hampshire. Pete Buttigieg had been booked several months earlier. He has a new book out, and the store figured, if we sell 25 copies, that’s great. We’ll see how many candidates we can get here. 500 people were there when he arrived on the scene and they had sold out of the book a week earlier.
Buttigieg: This is the way that we can begin to win not just an election, but an era. So can I count on you for some help?
O’Connor: All of the events that I have been to with some of these top-tier candidates have been at the times when they’re at their crest. And as a result of that, there is a great energy, a little bit frantic, actually, because you can tell with each of the cases, Beto O’Rourke for example, Pete Buttigieg, that the campaigns weren’t quite ready to deal with that many people in that short amount of time. So on one hand, they’re ecstatic. And on the other hand, you’ve got a lot of people who literally want to ask him everything, want to hear everything, they might not even have a sound system set up. Pete Buttigieg case, they didn’t even have a stage, and they had to figure out how to actually elevate him enough so this crowd could see him. So suddenly, he’s standing on a chair and got people holding him up to be sure he doesn’t sort of fall into the crowd.
Sen. Kamala Harris: So it’s great to be here at Keene State and I want to thank you guys. There are many things you could be doing with your time right now and I appreciate you spending some time with us and so I’d like to share with you a couple of my thoughts about what’s going on out there. And then I’d love to hear from you.
Sen. Cory Booker: Hi everybody, how’s it going? How are you? Pleasure to be here!
Booker and Harris are two sitting senators, did you see a difference in the way that their campaigns operated?
O’Connor: I think where Booker and Harris are interesting is the fact that because they are black, they are campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, but they’re recognizing that their biggest strength in terms of an initial state is South Carolina. And they’re very open about that.
Each candidate has different hopes. Some candidates are campaigning in Iowa because they hope that’s where they break out. Some candidates are campaigning in New Hampshire because they hope that’s where they break out. Other candidates are waiting until South Carolina and Nevada because that’s where they hope to break out. Both Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, but pretty much will tell you privately, their hope is, they’re going to wait till South Carolina, hope to do very well there, and then that’s where they hope to take off from there.
You never quite know what’s going to happen. I know sometimes people get upset with the press because we report the horse race aspects of it. But it is a horse race and you’re constantly sort of thinking, OK, this person’s in the lead until two weeks later, and then suddenly somebody else is.
Let’s jump into this third group of people who maybe don’t have as much of a campaign apparatus and just a little bit more of a long shot in the race.
O’Connor: The New York Times Magazine calls them the snowball’s chance candidates. I wouldn’t go that far. I think it’s interesting.
They’ll be on the debate stage next week.
O’Connor: They will be on the debate stage, or 20 of them will be on the debate stage, there are still three that won’t because they did not meet either the polling or the fundraising threshold, but there is a group of probably at least 10 candidates that are polling about 1% or less, but still feel confident that they might have a chance to break out.
What’s your understanding of why you would even stage a presidential run if you are that far down, and then that much of a “snowball’s chance”?
O’Connor: I think each one of them, we keep asking this question like, why are you still in the race? And you try to do it compassionately. And at the same time, you know, there is a curiosity in terms of why do you travel and raise all of this money and go through this aggravation if you’re not even registering at least 1% in the polls, but I think all of them individually, really do believe that at some point, they’ll have the opportunity to break out, that at some point, people will tire of the people who are on top.
I think if you look at the calendar so far, we started the year, Bernie was sort of in the lead, and then Beto O’Rourke came in and he sort of went high for a bit and then Pete Buttigieg went high for a bit. And then Joe Biden came in, he’s now the front runner and yet all of the stories now we’re saying look at Elizabeth Warren. So I think amongst the lower candidates, they see that in the last several months, there been at least five people who suddenly have hit that wave, they sit down and think to themselves, maybe I’ll have a chance to hit the wave. And actually, I’d rather hit the wave closer to the election, then hit the wave early, and then sort of move on from there.
Got it. So who are some of these candidates?
O’Connor: Some of them are interesting. I mean, Kristen Gillibrand, for example, is the U.S. senator from New York. She’s a colleague of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I think people are surprised when they go to hear her because they’re sort of ‘oh, I didn’t realize that she had these policy proposals. And I didn’t realize she had the sense of humor that she has, and you have a sense of strength.’
Gillibrand: You need to have the bravery to stand up to our party when they’re wrong. You need to stand up to the Pentagon when they’re wrong. You need to stand up to Congress when they’re wrong. You need to stand to the banks when they’re wrong, and that is what I’ve done. And that’s why I’m running for president.
She just doesn’t have the national profile going in that those other folks do.
O’Connor: I think the other challenge is, I mean, Julian Castro, who worked in the Obama administration has a national profile, but at a certain point when there are 23 candidates, not everybody can be on the top. So I would say amongst the lower pack, there’s a group of them, whether it’s Kristin Gillibrand or Julian Castro, that have national stature. It’s just, there are too many other people above them. Then there’s an interesting group of people. John Delaney, for example, is the first candidate to announce, he announced two years ago, in 2017. He has visited more places in New Hampshire than any other candidate.
Delaney: My friends, I’m running for president because I believe we should leave the world better than we found it. And we’re not doing that right now. And it’s a shame. I’m running for president for my kids, for your kids, for maybe your grandkids. Hopefully, one day my grandkids.
O’Connor: John Delaney actually has an interesting story. John Delaney became a multi-millionaire because he built his own business and then decided to run for Congress in the state of Maryland, became friends with Peter Welch here in Vermont, and then decided that he wanted to run for president because he’s a moderate. And he felt that the party was going a little bit more to the left than he thought the country as a whole needed to go.
Delaney: I became an entrepreneur. I was good at it. I was successful. I built two businesses. I took them public. I was the youngest CEO in the history of the New York Stock Exchange, I created thousands of jobs.
O’Connor: And so he’s running because he feels that I’m a businessman. I’m a moderate. And I think the democrats need to have that kind of representation. Again, I think John Delaney’s challenge is Joe Biden is also considered a centrist. So you have that lane already taken. It’s interesting, the fact that he has visited almost 100 places in New Hampshire. And yet, when you talk to people in New Hampshire and say the words John Delaney, they don’t know who you’re talking about. So he’s a very personable guy. He does have some specific proposals. He really does think that he wants to be president and can be president. Again, I think his challenge is there’s so many other candidates there. And he can’t have events that will draw people. He has to go to places that already have them.
Who else is in this category that you’ve seen?
O’Connor: The other interesting one is Marianne Williamson. Marianne Williamson, a lot of people might know as a spiritual author and speaker. She is often seen on Oprah Winfrey. She’s been known amongst the sort of health and wellness community for years for her teaching. She is from California. She decided a couple of years ago that she was going to run for Congress because she felt very strongly that the whole human element was missing from politics.
Williamson: All that a country is is a group of people. So the same psychological and emotional and moral and spiritual principles that prevail within the journey of an individual prevail within the journey of a nation.
O’Connor: She speaks a lot at, whether it’s yoga studios, or she tends to go to places where her community gathers. And is sort of taking it from there. But I think she is genuinely wanting to have this conversation. I wouldn’t say that any of these people are doing this for simply vanity reasons. I think they really honestly do think that they have positions that they want to put out there. And I think that part of the story that they tell themselves is, I’ve seen people rise from nowhere. I mean, Pete Buttigieg was mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Who ever thought he would get the rise that he’s gotten? And I think as a result of that, the other candidates have said, well, maybe I’m gonna have a turn at this.
I mean, there has to be some element of it where there’s a little bit of opportunism — whether they’re trying to sell books, or just raise their profile — that this is kind of a built-in way to do it, right?
O’Connor: I initially thought that, but I think one of the things that’s interesting when you actually start attending these rallies, is you recognize it’s not very glamorous. If you’re at home and you’re watching on TV, whether it’s CNN or MSNBC or Fox, it may look glamorous — ooh, look at them walking onto the stage and everybody’s clapping and there’s a spotlight. But the fact is when they get off the stage, then you have to deal with 100,000 different little things, get in a car, drive, who knows where and do it all over again. And a lot of these candidates are doing this literally from first thing in the morning until 11, midnight.
There’s a point where on one hand, I give Elizabeth Warren credit for having 30,000 selfies, at another point, I think to myself, how does anyone, when it’s 10 p.m. at night, and you’ve spent all day long, talking and traveling, and then suddenly you’ve got 500 people that want to have a picture. And you do it, and you stay there until midnight. So there’s part of this, that I feel like if you’re really in it, you really have to do it. And so I think you can say oh, there must be some reasons of vanity, but there’s also a lot of just grit and hard work.
We’ve been talking about these Democratic primary candidates this entire time. It seems like the wild card here is President Trump, who relaunched his campaign this week, even though a lot of people have said he’s been campaigning this whole time.
Trump: We love being in Orlando. Thank you. Thank you, Orlando, what a turnout!
How much of these events that you’ve gone to — across the spectrum of candidates that we’re talking about, how much has the president been a topic of conversation?
O’Connor: I think everyone acknowledges him. And I think everyone says they’re running because they want to replace him.
Sanders: The underlying principles of our government will not be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and religious bigotry.
Biden: The fact of the matter is that we’re in a situation right now where you all know that this election is bigger than any you’ve been engaged in, not because I’m running or anybody else is running. Because who occupies the office.
O’Connor: They use different vocabulary. They use different slogans, they use different language, but pretty much if you go and you hear all of these, at a certain point, you recognize, oh, they all pretty much want the same thing. So the message tends to be the same. I feel as a voter, a lot of people are starting to recognize ‘hmm, it’s not a question of whose messages do I agree with?’ Because they’re pretty much consistent. It’s who do I want the messenger to be? And I think that’s what’s been interesting about seeing New Hampshire voters in particular, sort of talking amongst themselves about, do I want someone who is an elder, for example, Bernie Sanders, or Joe Biden, do I want someone who is younger? Do I want someone who is a woman? Do I want someone who is a person of color? I think there’s a lot of the conversations amongst the voters, that it’s less about the message and more about who do we want the messenger to be? Who needs to sort of represent us going forward?
With the debate next week — as somebody who’s seen a lot of these people in action up close, what are you going to be watching for when you see them all on stage together?
O’Connor: Well, I think what’s interesting, if you covered enough of these, you recognize that they pretty much have honed their statements, the jokes that work for them, the attack lines that work for them, the proclamations that work for them. And so I don’t think there’s going to be a lot in the debates that if you are a person from either Iowa or New Hampshire you haven’t heard before. I think one thing that’s interesting is the fact that on one hand, the New Hampshire primary isn’t until February of 2020. And so, in the middle of the summer, you’re not necessarily thinking about something that’s close. But all of these campaigns understand under the new system in terms of how states are going to vote. Iowa will be voting in February 2020. A week later, New Hampshire will be voting. A week after that, South Carolina will be voting, followed quickly by Nevada. And then Super Tuesday, which is going to be on our March Town Meeting Day, a whole slew of states, including California are going to be voting. So suddenly, if people remember in 2016, when we started with caucuses in the winter, and this still was being campaigned in June, this coming 2020 cycle is going to be much different. It’s going to be much more compact, and a lot of those decisions are going to be made in that first month.
So when people roll their eyes at, ‘oh, we’re having a debate, and it’s a whole year and a half before the actual election…’ There’s a reason that’s happening.
O’Connor: There is a reason that’s happening. And I think the other thing that’s interesting in terms of the current debate, there’s a debate in June. There’s a debate in July, and the players that you see right now are the ones that you’ll see on TV, but come fall, the Democratic National Committee has told the candidates that you’re going to have to have a higher percentage in the polls and have to be raising more money to be able to get on the debate stage. Under the current rules that they have coming for the fall, only about eight of these candidates are going to be able to qualify for the coming debates. So on one hand, 23 seems like a lot and February of 2020 seems like a long time down, but come fall, you may only be seeing and hearing about eight or so candidates. So there’s a short window for people to really sort of get their message out to the rest of the voters.
Got it. Thanks.
O’Connor: Thank you.
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