No Reason for New Hampshire to Be First

June 17, 2011 by PaulM Posted in Current Events, History, Lowell, Politics 5 Comments

Here we go again. We will hear more and more about the New Hampshire Primary of 2012 as the weeks are peeled off the calendar and the new year approaches. I don’t get it. Why should New Hampshire be even one day before Massachusetts in the schedule of caucuses and primaries? I don’t understand how political leaders in Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts take this lying down. To have a small state with the demographics and social peculiarities of New Hampshire wielding so much political influence baffles me. I don’t want to hear justifications like the opportunity for retail politics in a small state. New Hampshire is wildly unrepresenative of the US population as a whole. And it is just absurd to have this repeated line-up of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina time after time. Whomever is in charge of this electoral system has no imagination or no guts. The major party leaders accept this hijacking of the process. Shouldn’t a big state like Ohio lead off or a regional cluster like the Northwest or Northeast or Southeast rotate in sequence every four years?

I’ve been reading the early articles on political websites or national magazines and major papers, all mentioning the visits of this or that candidate to New Hampshire. I just can’t believe Massachusetts is getting its lunch eaten again by New Hampshire. What does a it take, a vote of the legislature to schedule the Massachusetts primary one week before the New Hampshire date—just to make a point? I don’t care if the Mass. primary gets moved to October 2011 if that’s what it takes to send New Hampshire a message. The Granite State is not entitled to be the first primary test. That’s not how democracy works.

5 Responses to No Reason for New Hampshire to Be First

  1. Publius says:

    You have suggested that New Hampshire is unrepresentative of the nation and would like to make Massachusetts first in the nation primary. I would like to suggest that Massachusetts is even more unrepresentative than New Hampshire, in terms of electoral offices. The constitutional and legislative offices in Massachusetts are dominated by Democrats and consistently so over the years. New Hampshire has had a little more of a mix over the years, with both parties influence shifting over the years.

  2. PaulM says:

    I don’t really care if Massachusetts is first or not, in fact, I’d rather see a mix of states reflective of American society on a series of Tuesdays. It starts to look like this by Super Tuesday, but the front end of ths system is way out of whack.

  3. Dean says:

    I like NH being first ,the U.S.Congress appropriates funds for highways and highway repairs in the state. This is so the few presidential candidates, their staff and press can get around the state of NH. I spent many years driving around NH and I would see the back roads paved just about every other year. Look at expansion of Manchester airport in the past few years. These is so the candidates can fly to Manchester rather than to Logan like they did many years ago.

  4. Dean says:

    In my travels of this great nation. NH is represenative of many of the states in the mid-west,west and southern states. When we talk about diversity in MA, this is looked on as un-American in many states. Not my words but many people in the mid-west,south and west think that way.

  5. Kosta says:

    I can see the battle of states dates. Schedule Mass one week ahead of NH; then NH goes one week ahead of that date. Eventually, we can have a primary, let’s say for 2016 in 2012. There’s no way to have a rational first primary, but there should at least be several disparate states together. Now, don’t get me started on Iowa.