While the 2024 New Hampshire First in the Nation Presidential Primary has come and gone, the debate about which state should hold the first Primary continues. As usual, the metrics used to determine that have nothing to do with why New Hampshire is the best place to start.
The survey
WalletHub does a lot of national research, and we appreciate their keeping us on the mailing list. We get access to their work immediately and often report on the results. This week, “WalletHub sought to identify which of the 50 states are most representative of the US population and thus truly worthy of the top primary-election spot.”
If that was what truly mattered, New Hampshire ranks 36th. Illinois scored best, followed by Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. And to that bitter Vermonter who wrote about how NH doesn’t deserve it, you were ranked in the bottom five at 46th. Only Wyoming, Alabama, Mississippi, and Utah were less representative of America than Vermont, according to WalletHub.
And while I’m sure the seething mass of illegals will help your numbers next year, “demographics” is not why New Hampshire deserves to keep it, not that we’re likely to change the state law that mandates we be the first Primary.
Jeff Chidester, Mike Rogers, and I discussed this on Radio Row during Primary Weekend, the three days leading up to the date itself. That conversation starts at 3:25 if you want to listen in, but I’ll break it down for you.
It is incredibly easy to file and get on the presidential primary ballot. There were 42 candidates on the NH Ballot in 2024, and there was a well-balanced mix between the Dems and the GOP. That means more people, with more ideas, issues, and perhaps more solutions, get an opportunity to meet and talk to citizens with a high political involvement. These regular people ask regular questions and challenge assumptions, and the media is following many of them around – sharing at least some of that debate with America.
Candidates must engage us in numerous small venues in New Hampshire, like bakeries, restaurants, diners, and dozens of places where you can’t escape their concerns. And they will vet you, from the flatlanders in the south to the North Country. Candidates cannot stick to a few large cities and hope to win the state – we don’t have any large cities. Manchester has just over 100,000 residents in a state of 1.35 million—people who are not all that different from anywhere else.
We have farmers, laborers, job creators, small and large businesses, a wealthy class, and work-a-day minimum wage voters. There aren’t as many people of color, but statistically, they have a significantly greater chance of engaging candidates one-on-one or in small groups in New Hampshire than they would in Illinois.
Is a large venue filled with African Americans who can do little more than hear what a candidate is promising the better experience for the National electorate than that candidate sitting in a booth at a diner? As Fran notes in the video above, “If you are a minority in New Hampshire, you have a stronger voice.” You will get dozens of opportunities not just to see but to meet and talk to top-tier candidates one-on-one—face-to-face.
You’ve got their undivided attention for a minute or five or whatever it is, and that happens daily over months in New Hampshire. People with no political access or party favoritism can engage with would-be future presidents and, thanks to the internet, can then share that with Americans, unfiltered by major media.
There is no large state where that can even begin to happen on the scale it does here in the Granite State, and I doubt anything like that would come close to happening in Illinois or even Florida. They are too large with too many large cities where it makes more sense for a campaign to spend time and money.
You can’t do that in New Hampshire, and we don’t let you do it, and America is invited to watch and learn at the beginning of the process. What happens here during the Primary doesn’t stay here and more than a third of our electorate … is registered independent.
We take pride in our role and take it seriously, so while we are not demographically “perfect,” we provide things to every demographic you won’t get anywhere else, and you are welcome to come here and help us vet all of them again in 2028. And if you don’t think this is where the first Primary is going to be, then you haven’t been paying attention.
The guy playing at being Leader of the increasingly less free world tried to take it away, and we told him to go to Hell!
