CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – When I lived and worked in New Hampshire, you had to be a registered Republican to vote in the Republican primary. The same was true for Democrats. If you were an independent, well, you got to wait until the general election that fall.
And that’s exactly the way its supposed to be. Republicans should pick their candidate. Instead Nikki Halley gets to make her pitch to independent women and Trump-haters. These are voters who are unlikely to vote for the GOP ticket this fall, so why should they get to shape the Republican presidential race now?
The New Hampshire that I knew in 1992 is fundamentally different now. It used to be the most conservative state in the northeast. And for someone like me, just out of college and trying to live on a very small salary, it was a great place to start my career. Rents were affordable, cost of living was low, there was no state income tax and no state sales tax, and my family was short three-hour car ride away in Connecticut.
What’s changed?
Liberals moved in. Southern parts of New Hampshire is just 40-miles away from Boston. And lots of libs from Taxachusetts have turned the southern third of the state into suburbs. That New Hampshire would have had a democrat governor and two democrat senators would have been unheard of when I lived there. But the electorate is different.
Democrats in New Hampshire have no contest today. Joe Biden isn’t even on the ballot. So they are free to monkey-wrench the Republican primary if they wish by casting an anti-Trump vote. The Iowa caucuses are a far better measure of where the Republican party is. Iowans are also free to caucus with either party, but the nature of the event, where you have to show up in person and associate yourself with your preferred candidate, makes political mischief less likely. And two-thirds of caucus-goers picked a conservative, Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. That’s the mood of the party; conservatism is the largest block of Republican voters by far. That would be evident in New Hampshire too, if only Republicans got to vote in their party’s primary.
Chris Conley
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