Lack of enthusiasm for Biden among New Hampshire Dems could spell trouble for his reelection bid: strategists
Fox News
A recent Fox News Voter Analysis survey revealed that some Democrats in New Hampshire aren’t too excited about the prospect of President Biden serving as their party’s nominee in the 2024 presidential election, posing what could be significant challenges to his reelection bid.
The Fox News Voter Analysis, a survey of more than 900 New Hampshire Democrat primary voters, was released Wednesday. More than half (55%) of the respondents said they would be satisfied with Biden as the eventual Democrat nominee, with 13% saying they would be dissatisfied enough that they would not support him in the November election.
Iowa and New Hampshire have historically been the first states in the Democrats’ election process. However, Biden and the DNC attempted to change the primary calendar this year to kick off with South Carolina, a state that propelled the president to victory in 2020, to try and increase racial diversity in the election process.
That decision created a rift between national Democrats and Democrat voters in the battleground state, which has favored left-leaning candidates in recent national elections.
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Biden won New Hampshire in the 2020 presidential election, depriving then-President Trump of the state’s four electoral votes. Voters in the state also maintained their support for the Democratic Party in the 2016 election, when then-candidate Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Trump to earn the electoral votes.
Prior to Biden’s write-in primary victory in the Granite State on Tuesday night, the Democratic National Committee called the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s primary process “detrimental.”
Highlighting the findings from the Fox News Voter Analysis, Colin Reed, a Republican strategist and co-founder of South and Hill Strategies, told Fox News Digital that it “comes as no surprise given [Biden’s] disdain toward the state.”
Referencing Biden’s “humiliating fifth-place finish” in the New Hampshire Democrat primary election a little less than four years ago, Reed said, “Biden has been hell-bent on punishing New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. Even worse was the willingness of New Hampshire Democrats and their state party to stand idly by as their president and party insiders destroyed a long and storied tradition.”
The findings from the survey, according to another political strategist, show that Democrats in the state “are not particularly excited about another Biden-Harris term” and could possibly stay at home on Election Day.
“New Hampshirites tend to be very practical, level-headed people. They realize that Joe Biden is far too old and lacks the cognitive abilities to be president of the United States,” Kristin Tate, a Republican strategist and columnist for The Messenger, told Fox News Digital. “At the same time, folks in New Hampshire (including registered Democrats) look around and see that every aspect of American life has degraded under the Biden administration. Inflation is still high, our southern border is wide open, and war is breaking out around the globe.”
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“Democrats should be worried. Their core voters strongly dislike Donald Trump but are not particularly excited about another Biden-Harris term,” Tate added. “Ultimately, some percentage of those voters may end up just staying home on voting day. Given how thin the margins were in 2020, this could make all the difference in the outcome of the 2024 election.”
In addition to economic hardships, Tate, who has grown to understand the inner workings of New Hampshire politics throughout the years, suggested Granite State residents could be turned off by another Biden term in the White House after “seeing the impacts” of the crisis that has unfolded at the southern border.
“For the first time in my lifetime, I am hearing New Hampshire residents talking about the border crisis with a heightened level of concern,” she said. “Until recently, the open border was mostly a theoretical discussion for most East Coasters. But now that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is sending thousands of migrants to East Coast areas, including Boston, residents in the Northeast are seeing the impacts of the border crisis firsthand.”
Despite what some Republicans believe should be a concern for Biden as he moves forward in his bid for a second consecutive term in the White House, Kevin Walling, a Democrat campaign strategist and former Biden 2020 campaign surrogate, believes Biden will ultimately receive support from a near totality of Democrats in New Hampshire.
Given the stakes of a Trump-Biden rematch this year, Walling said he believes “many of those 13% of Democratic primary voters will come home to the Biden-Harris ticket.”
Other recent Fox News Voter Analysis findings revealed that 53% of Republican primary voters would be satisfied with Trump as their nominee, with 35% dissatisfied enough not to vote for him.
Due to those findings, Walling believes it’s Republicans, not Democrats, that should be worried ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
“That should be a flashing red light to the RNC and GOP strategists and doesn’t even factor in the high number of unregistered and independent voters who turned out last night in support of former Gov. Nikki Haley; that said they would back Biden if it becomes a 2020 rematch,” he said.
Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.