Opinion | Biden will survive the big kerfuffle over New Hampshire’s primary

But don’t let the drama distract you. Biden has a decent chance of coming out ahead even if neither the state nor the national party back down. And Democrats will have taken a significant step toward reforming the election calendar.

The dispute centers on a decision by the Democratic National Committee to put New Hampshire in second place in the primary pecking order — behind South Carolina and on the same day as Nevada. The overall purpose of the calendar reshuffle was to allow states that better represent the party to vote first and to increase the role of swing states such as Michigan.

Biden, to whom New Hampshire has never been kind in primaries, championed the change. He argued in a letter to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee: “We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process.”

Ratified in February, the reform would deny recognition to delegates picked outside the prescribed window at the party’s convention in Chicago next year. Candidates are discouraged from putting their names on the ballot in disqualified states.

New Hampshire isn’t happy, even though its Democrats still profess great loyalty to Biden. “We’re all one team and we all want to reelect Joe Biden,” Rep. Ann Kuster (D-N.H.) said in an interview. But she added: “We’re in a really awkward stalemate right now.”

For decades, the media celebrated the probing questions New Hampshire’s citizens put to candidates in living room gatherings that often felt like sophisticated policy seminars. It was sure a relief from a media- and money-driven process.

Jeanne Shaheen, the state’s senior Democratic senator whose political career was jump-started by her role in Jimmy Carter’s 1976 primary victory, told me of a conversation she had recently with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) after he visited the state.

“People are engaged,” he reported to her with great enthusiasm. “People really know what’s going on.” For defenders of the primary such as Shaheen, voters here have earned their special role by taking it seriously.

“It doesn’t mean that we pick for the rest of the country,” said Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.). “But it means that we help shape the parameters of the debate and ensure that candidates are accountable to the voters.”

As supporters and some detractors of the state’s role often point out, New Hampshire winners have often not won the party’s nomination. South Carolina, they argue, has had more power as the fourth state in line.

What complicates matters is that state law requires New Hampshire to hold its presidential primary before any other similar contest in another state. That law empowers Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan to set an earlier primary date to hang onto #FITN status. (That’s “first in the nation” for those outside the Granite State.) Scanlan is fully prepared to use his power.

“We’re not obstinate,” Kuster insists of her fellow New Hampshire Democrats. “It’s just the fact that the secretary of state is going to pick the date. And the date he sets has nothing to do with the DNC.”

The DNC has given the state party time to sort things out, but it will not back off its calendar changes. “There was a consensus on the committee that it was time to open things up,” Mo Elleithee, a Rules and Bylaws Committee member, told me, noting that New Hampshire got a good deal of deference already. Whereas New Hampshire was moved to only three days after South Carolina, Iowa’s special standing was wiped out altogether. Plus, the new calendar keeps New Hampshire as the second contest in the nation. (It has long been the first primary, but Iowa’s caucuses came first.)

“I worked in New Hampshire campaigns and have great respect for their primary,” said Donna Brazile, a veteran Democratic consultant who is also on the Rules and Bylaws Committee. But, she noted, the primary goes back to a time when most Black Americans in the South could not vote and women were just getting the right to vote. “You need to refresh and experiment and find new approaches, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”

Interestingly, rank-and-file New Hampshire Democrats are more open to change than their leaders might think. Last week, a University of New Hampshire poll found that only 43 percent of self-identified Democrats (and just 38 percent of registered Democrats) supported the law requiring New Hampshire to stay first. Backing for the law was much stronger among Republicans and independents.

The best news for a compromise is the probability that even if Biden does not appear on the ballot in an unsanctioned primary, he will almost certainly carry the state with write-in votes. The UNH poll found that 70 percent of likely Democratic primary voters supported Biden to just 10 percent for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy theorist with a great name, and 4 percent for author Marianne Williamson. Despite all the publicity Kennedy has received (or maybe because of it), he does not appear to be any threat to Biden; 69 percent viewed Kennedy unfavorably. Only 9 percent had a favorable view. Importantly, roughly two-thirds of Biden’s supporters said they would write in his name if he were not on the ballot.

Should Biden win the state this way, it would open the path to a settlement. State party chair Raymond Buckley hinted at this over dinner.

“People are eager to vote for Joe Biden and they are going to show up,” he told me. “And we’ll show up in Chicago with our 23 delegates, and if they say we can’t vote, that’s fine.”

Buckley didn’t say so, but there is widespread interest at the national level to find a way to let New Hampshire’s delegates be seated if the state party agrees to a separate process after the primary. This would keep the rules intact without shutting New Hampshire out.

Does New Hampshire matter that much? Well, in 2000, Democrat Al Gore lost the state to Republican George W. Bush by just over 7,000 votes, or 1.27 percent. A few thousand votes the other way and Gore would have been president. A lot of Democrats remember that. Especially in New Hampshire.