Wait for New Hampshire By David S. Broder Thursday, January 3, 2008; A19
... the main impulse is a broader populist tradition that tugs the Democratic Party of Iowa to the left. That tradition may go back to the days of Henry Wallace, the Iowa-born vice president under FDR. But it has been embodied in recent decades by Tom Harkin, the longtime Democratic senator who ran for president himself in 1992 and quickly fell behind the more moderate Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas.
Harkin has accustomed Iowa Democrats to a red-meat diet of anti-corporate rhetoric, a tradition he shared with the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. That theme was echoed this year and in 2004 by John Edwards and was imitated -- with varying degrees of conviction -- by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the closing stages of the Iowa race.
It has been an Iowa pattern to tilt the Democratic race leftward and the Republican race to the right. And often it has been New Hampshire, where the primary turnout approximates the pattern of the overall electorate, that restores the balance and corrects for the distorting effects of the Iowa dynamic.
The key to New Hampshire is usually found among independent voters, who can take part in either party's primary, depending on the choice each individual makes on primary day.
That fact by itself pulls the candidates away from the ideological edges and back to the center, and it is abetted by two other forces. Organized labor is a much weaker political element inside the New Hampshire Democratic Party than it is in Iowa's. And among Republicans, the state is much more secular than Iowa, with a significantly smaller percentage of people who describe themselves as born-again Christians.
The Democratic Party of New Hampshire is a balanced blend of college-trained, high-tech people and educators, with a leavening of retirees and a significant ethnic, urban contingent in Manchester and Nashua, as well. The Republican Party here is a small-business and professional class, with some blue-collar elements and a spillover of former Massachusetts residents living along the southern border.
In New Hampshire, nearly half as many people voted in the 2004 primary as in the November general election -- a far better cross-section of the state. What was even more remarkable was that the number of votes cast in the Democratic presidential primary -- 221,309 -- was two-thirds of the votes John Kerry received when he carried the state in November.
New Hampshire is a more reliable, less distorted lens through which to view the presidential landscape than Iowa.