New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) reported on Oct. 4 that there have been efforts from many political groups on the Republican side for an anti-Trump vote.
As the first-in-the-nation primary and being a semi-open primary, N.H. has a lot of skin in the game when election season rolls around, as I’m sure we have all experienced to one degree or another. These groups are appearing to be emboldened, in my humble opinion, because of the resilience of Donald Trump in the Republican primary polling and the disarray of the New Hampshire Democratic Primary.
According to NHPR people like Secretary of State David Scanlan have noticed this as well saying, “You hear of this sort of thing being done, but this is certainly by far the most organized that I’ve seen such efforts.”
In N.H. the primaries are semi-open. So when you register to vote and decide on a party affiliation, that is the primary that you vote in. But, if you are an Independent/Undeclared voter in N.H., you can decide on the day of the election which ballot you want to vote on, with some groups using the slogan, “dare to undeclare” with Democrats, says NHPR.
I’m sympathetic to the cause that these groups are trying to push for, with this spoiler anti-Trump vote.
I also agree with people like Kenneth Scheffler, leader of Primary Pivot, who according to NHPR say, “We are singularly committed to reminding people that Trump is a unique threat, and to vote for really for anyone else on the Republican side.”
But, there is an elephant in the room that these folks seem to be avoiding: run better campaigns. Let me throw some numbers at you. According to the N.H. voter registry totals, there are: 277,720 Democrats (31.9%), 267,526 (GOP) Republicans (30.8%) and 324,802 (37.3%) Independent/Undeclared in the state. A plurality of N.H. voters are Independent/Undeclared, so there should be no issue for these campaigns and groups to get a sufficient number of voters to do a protest vote. I say that understanding these numbers are the total of registered voters and that a fair amount of people do not vote. Yet, I still struggle to see why they would need to come hat in hand to Democrats and Independents. If the other GOP candidates are still losing to Trump then they need to change their messaging. But, with Democrats like Scheffler, I would be more concerned with the N.H. Democratic Primary. Joe Biden is probably not going to be running in N.H. because of the current shuffling of the primary schedule, leaving him vulnerable to an early and important defeat. A defeat he cannot afford considering how tight the head-to-head polling numbers are looking in a Trump v. Biden race. It seems like we’re shuffling deck chairs when we really need to get the lifeboats, and the clock’s about to strike 02:00.
Timothy Fitzpatrick can be contacted at
tfitzpatrick@kscequinox.com
