I spent the weekend traveling around New Hampshire with a group of Obama For America volunteers from New York and New Jersey. We knocked on doors in Merrimack and Milford, visited the campaign headquarters in Manchester, and talked to strangers in restaurants and gas stations who spotted the many Obama hats, t-shirts, and buttons in our group.
I'm writing this diary today because I want to share why I now feel confident that the assumption New Hampshire is a lock-up for Clinton is absolutely, positively, 100% dead wrong.
Members of our group visited around 500 homes in suburban middle-class and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Very few of us met any definite Clinton supporters. In fact, not a single person I talked to told me that they'd decided to support her. We met a fair number of people who had not yet decided between Obama and Clinton, plus a handful of Edwards and Richardson supporters, and quite a few solid Obamas. The Edwards supporters all said they liked Obama and that they'd like to see Obama as his vice-president, and the Richardson supporter I talked to said that she'd probably vote for Barack if Bill were to drop out of the race. She said that experience was important to her, but that she simply didn't buy the argument that Clinton was the most experienced out of a group of veteran politicians. We also met a couple of Republican-leaning unaffiliated voters, some of whom said they liked what they'd heard of Barack. I even met two pro-lifers who said that they still felt open to voting for him.
We also found a substantial block of undecided voters who stipulated that they absolutely would not be voting for Hillary. Many people I talked to had opinions of Clinton that match my own. They said that she's smart, they respect her, but she's too impersonal and too connected to big business. Voters told me that they don't trust her to focus on the needs of common working Americans. Some folks also said that the staffers and/or volunteers who'd canvassed neighborhoods for her campaign had been haughty, pushy, under-trained, and unprepared.
In a state where retail politics still rule, Clinton doesn't seem to be keeping up with her opponents. Perhaps her currently comfortable poll numbers in the state are making her campaign too lazy. We came across an older woman who complained that a traditional local campaign event was attended by every major candidate but Clinton. She said that she doesn't think Hillary is working for her vote and that she'll be voting for Obama. We met a waitress in a diner who had served Hillary and Barack and said that Obama was personable and down-to-earth while Hillary was impatient and unfriendly. She told us that everyone on her staff had a good feeling about Barack and that he was one of the most impressive of all the candidates who'd come through their restaurant over the years.
After my experience, my sense is that voters in New Hampshire are far from being settled on a single candidate. Now that we're past labor day and all the campaigns are putting boots on the ground, the polls will start to move away from the national numbers. When that happens, I don't think we're going to see a very big lead for Clinton in New Hampshire... if any.
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