The New Hampshire primary, which is coming up next week, is given huge importance in the US political process. There’s no doubt that it makes for great drama and a ready flow of enjoyable political anecdotes. But does it all matter?
What’s almost never mentioned is that the majority of winners of open contests don’t go on to be their party’s candidate for president. (By “open” I mean a contest without an incumbent President or Vice-President, which is what both the Republican and Democrat contests are this year).
Here are the details: for the Democrats: in 1984 Mondale lost to Hart, in 1988 Dukakis won, in 1992 Clinton lost to Tsongas, in 2004 Kerry won; for the Republicans: in 1980 Reagan won, in 1996 Dole lost to Buchanan and in 2000 Bush lost to McCain.
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5 Comments
Indeed. iowa and New Hampshire are about knocking out the also rans. The other primaries comign up will tighten the fields further. Super Duper Tuesday on 5 February will be the crunch.
You’ve left out all the sex, Mark!
Hart’s victory in New Hampshire put him in a race in which he had previously been invisible. His problem was that he wasn’t really prepared for the limelight (and that Mondale had huge union backing).
Tsongas beat Clinton, but Clinton was perceived as having outperformed expectations (after the sex scandal allegations had hit his campaign) and so got back into the race.
The key is to do better than expected rather win (remember Jed Bartlett…”there’s nothing to win here…”).
On the Democrat side, I make it that only Mondale had a poor result in NH (and arguably it was never great territory for him).
It seems less significant for the GOP – where
McCain is the real warning. He won NH with the support of independents who couldn’t vote for him in most other (closed) primaries. So both he and Obama (who also appeals to independents) might do well in NH and struggle further down the road. OTOH they are in a direct fight to attract independents to one or other primary in NH, making it an unusually anorakish sort of primary.
Surely, the last time there wasn’t an incumbent President or VP in the primary was in 1928? Perhaps its just badly worded and you mean within each party or something? But I’m sure you’ll come along and correct me!
If there’s an incumbent President in, say, the Democrat contest it doesn’t make much sense to say that therefore the Republican contest isn’t open; hence me saying “By “open” I mean a *contest* without an incumbent President or Vice-President” and my reference to *both* of the contests in New Hampshire being open this year.
If you’re a candidate who is polling strongly amonst your party’s registered and weakly amongst Independents, is that not an incentive to try to get independent voters to vote in the other party’s primary?
Is it not true that last time McCain ‘won’ a lot of primaries in popular vote terms, but not in terms of delegate count?
‘Super Tuesday’ seems to be a month earlier than usual, is this a permanent change?