Gary Hart y su abnegada esposa Lee celebran los resultados de la primaria de New Hampshire el 28 de febrero de 1984. (Foto: Michael Grecco).
Dante J. Scala nos resume la primaria demócrata de New Hampshire de 1984 en su libro Stormy Weather: The New Hampshire Primary and Presidential Politics:
Presidential primaries in New Hampshire, said activist and author Dayton Duncan, can be divided into two separate contests: the campaign for activists and the campaign for votes. From winter to early fall of the year before the primary, candidates earnestly pursue the support and endorsement of local and state politicians and activists. Getting local names on board is trumpeted as an early sign of momentum and perhaps even as a sign of inevitability of victory.
Throughout this part of the invisible primary, one of the assumed rules of the game is that more is better: Better to have more local politicians on board than fewer, better to have a long list of names to print in the newspaper advertisement than a short list. While winning the campaign for activists has some influence over the final outcome, it is not necessary for winning the primary itself, Duncan said. Indeed, a candidate who wins the campaign for activists and gets established as the front runner sometimes falls victim to an insurgent backlash during the second (and obviously more important) campaign for votes. For example, during the run-up to the 1984 primary, the rush of activists to front runner Walter Mondale only hardened the resolve of activists to support the upstart Colorado senator Gary Hart, to “beat the giant” and “take on all these forces, all these important people that say they can do everything,” said Mondale operative Katherine Rogers.
Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s vice president, was the presumptive front runner during the run-up to the 1984 primaries, especially after Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy announced that he would not run for the nomination. Mondale Inc., as political insiders called the campaign, led all other contenders in both fund-raising and endorsements from the party elite, including the support of the AFL-CIO, the National Education Association, and the National Organization for Women. As a result, Mondale began the race with a “target on his back,” said Dayton Duncan, who served as deputy press secretary for Mondale’s campaign. “If you’re the presumed front runner,” Duncan said, “everything’s important.”
Mondale’s overall strategy, then, was to take the fight to his opponents for the nomination at every opportunity. In this national full-court press, no contest was too small for the front runner to enter in the hope of proving his opponents unworthy. During the year before primaries actually started, for instance, Mondale entered straw polls held by various state parties; his opponents would follow him, hoping to impress party elites and increase their fund-raising with an unexpectedly strong showing. Mondale’s national campaign, which would fight for every delegate to the convention in every state, was not only designed to win his party’s nomination, but also to serve notice that he was better poised to compete against the popular incumbent president, Ronald Reagan, than any other Democrat, Duncan said.
Mondale’s main challenger was presumed to be Ohio senator John Glenn, the astronaut hero of the 1960s turned politician. On paper, at least, Glenn was a model candidate for the New Hampshire Democratic primary, being more moderate than Mondale and thus more appealing to the Democrats’ moderateto-conservative bloc of voters.
In 1983, the year before the primaries began, Gary Hart was squarely in the second tier of candidates for the nomination, joining liberals such as the nuclearfreeze advocate, Senator Alan Cranston of California, 1972 presidential nominee George McGovern, and Jesse Jackson; among the conservatives were Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina and Florida’s former governor Reubin Askew. Throughout the year before the primaries began, Hart’s campaign was periodically reported to be on life support—short of cash and short of any kind of breakouts from the pack of candidates following Mondale.
What Hart did seem to have, even early on, was that most intangible of assets—a message for the times. Months and months before the primary, a good candidate is developing a message, “something to hang their hat on . . . what is this guy about? Does he or she have a handle on what our concerns are?” said Merrimack County activist Rob Werner, whose first experience with the primary was on the Hart campaign. Iowa and New Hampshire give politicians the ability to test market their ideas, Werner said, as well as the ways they convey those ideas to ordinary voters: After a campaign event, for instance, a candidate might step back and think, “Maybe I still think I have a good idea, but for whatever reason, I’m not communicating it well, or I’m not clear enough, or I’m not saying it in a way that is compelling.”
A candidate needs a core message that tells voters why they should vote for him, Werner said, but the message does not necessarily need to be a laundry list of policy prescriptions. In Hart’s New Hampshire kickoff speech in Manchester in February 1983, for instance, the candidate focused on themes larger than his own candidacy: “We are facing the greatest challenges ever in our nation in the mid-1980s, and we must meet those challenges with unity and determination. This coming election is not for a candidate, but rather it’s an election to recapture the vision for the future.” Throughout the campaign, Hart presented a range of new ideas, Werner said. They all supported a common theme of the need to retool the Democratic Party, to keep core values while taking a different approach to issues in response to new realities, such as changes in the economy and the need to prepare people for those changes. Hart was one of a new wave of Democrats who argued that while the party did not need to cast aside its principles, slavish obedience to every old government program the party had started was misplaced, said Hart activist Ned Helms. To Helms, Hart conveyed the sense of certainty of a man who knew what he was about.
Hart spoke to a crowded hall on that February day in Manchester, but for many of the following weeks, the candidate’s New Hampshire team often found itself operating in isolation. “We assumed that if someone was running for president of the United States, there was a plan, there was money, there was national staff to implement the plan,” recalled campaign operative Susan Berry Casey in her memoir of Hart’s New Hampshire campaign. “We could not, however, have been further from the truth.”
Hart deliberately left campaign management in the hands of state organizations, rather than allow a national office in Washington, D.C., to call the shots. Casey and campaign director Jeanne Shaheen were largely left to their own devices to build the organization. Shaheen was pleased with this arrangement, she said, recalling that she would not have joined the New Hampshire campaign if she had not been promised control over the operation. Then as now, Shaheen believed that a New Hampshire campaign is successful when people on the ground in the state have real influence over its activities and its allocation of resources, especially how much time the candidate spends in the state and what the candidate does on campaign trips. When Hart gave his kickoff speech in Manchester that February, Shaheen and Casey had succeeded in forming that “first circle” of activists that would provide the core for future expansion of the campaign. Indeed, as Hart struggled to gain some footing for most of 1983, it often appeared his New Hampshire organization was carrying the national campaign, rather than the other way around.
Mondale operative Katherine Rogers experienced none of the struggles of Hart’s start-up organization. When the candidate is a virtual unknown, it is more important to get activists on board early because they lend the campaign credibility and offer the candidate access, Rogers said. In contrast, people rushed to sign on for Mondale’s New Hampshire campaign very early, both because of the candidate’s prestige as the former vice president and because of his status as the acknowledged front runner. But when it came to building the legs of the campaign—establishing the door-to-door canvass, getting people to make phone calls, recruiting the personnel needed for setting up an effective Election Day operation—the presence of so many activists tended to be more of a hindrance.
For example, a front runner’s ability to attract a Who’s Who list of prominent New Hampshire activists often stunts the campaign’s ability to attract new young activists, Rogers said. In 1984, Mondale’s campaign did have a lot of volunteers, but those volunteers did not perceive that they had the ability to make a difference in the campaign in the way that Hart’s volunteers did. This inability to make a difference was perceived in a number of ways, including the seemingly most mundane task of who got to drive around the candidate. Whenever Walter Mondale was someplace in New Hampshire, Secret Service agents were his drivers. Back in the Carter campaign, volunteers like Rogers had driven the candidate and his wife around the state. “If you ended up spending a couple hours driving the candidate or a family member,” she remembered, “you were kind of personally vested then, and that made your commitment really strong.”
Rogers recalled one small success in this regard: a group of students from Memorial High School in Manchester who became enthusiastic volunteers and had the chance to hang out with Mondale on one occasion. One of Mondale’s sons, Teddy, came to a volunteer party and talked to them, treating them as if they were friends. Because the commitment had become personal, the high school students came to work every night and on weekends, Rogers said.
The personal connection is especially important for cementing the relationship between the candidate and new rookie volunteers, whose enthusiasm for the campaign borders on the “rabid,” Rogers said. Candidates who sign up lots of established activists inadvertently stymie that connection for the new volunteer since the established activists tend to monopolize the personal space around the candidate.
Walter Mondale’s campaign, for instance, found itself in a Catch-22 when it came to the recruitment of activists. On one hand, Mondale’s operatives considered it vital to get as many top-tier activists as possible on board to bring credibility to the campaign. Mondale’s front-runner status meant that any top-tier activist he did not get on board was considered a loss for the campaign. Rogers recalled betting a bottle of Dom Perignon that she could get two thousand names for Mondale’s New Hampshire steering committee before the formal announcement of his candidacy. Perhaps it would have been better, Rogers mused, to have spent that time building personal connections between Mondale and new volunteers.
In contrast, the Hart campaign was free of crowds of activists, so newcomers had access to the inner circles of the campaign. Debbie Butler, a lawyer who works in the state capital of Concord, still has fond memories of working for Hart’s New Hampshire campaign—the most fun campaign she has ever worked on, she said. Single at the time, Butler would volunteer for the campaign when not working at her job. She recalled going to the airport in her diesel Volkswagen to pick up the candidate. Hart traveled without an entourage, Butler said, which put the candidate in close contact with his grassroots supporters. Volunteers like Butler would take him to one destination, take his bags out of the car, and pass him off to the next person.
A hallmark of the Hart campaign was very early voter contact, Shaheen said. Cheshire County activist Andi Johnson recalled learning much on the importance of early campaign work from Shaheen. Johnson met Gary Hart with ten other people in a living room in Lebanon, where she was then living. Hart told the assembled group that he was going to finish second in Iowa and then win New Hampshire. (“And we’re going, ‘Yeah, right,’” Johnson recalled with a laugh.) Hart was talking about “working in concentric circles” and going door-to-door in order to raise his name recognition: “You tell this person, and this person will tell this person, and this person will tell this person, who’ll tell this person, who’ll tell this person, and so on.” Hart and his New Hampshire team astutely recognized that the first stage of a campaign is important for generating word of mouth. The hope, at this point, is not necessarily to win over large numbers of voters, but simply to get the candidate’s name out there in a positive way, in the hopes that the first mention would make the voter more receptive to more information about the candidate in the future. The next stage is doing the door-to-door work, using “walk lists,” lists of frequent voters by order of street address which are supplied by the party. Successful door-to-door work requires the personal touch, Johnson said, someone to “knock and talk,” to engage in a conversation with the resident or leave a signed note if the person is not at home. Volunteers had a plethora of their candidate’s position papers, said Butler, and were walking encyclopedias of the candidate’s views in their own right. All in all, the Hart campaign knocked on tens of thousands of doors in the fall of 1983, Shaheen said, while other campaigns spent time trying to win straw polls in other states in order to gain media attention and prove their candidates had momentum.
Very little good news filtered in from Hart’s national campaign during the year preceding the primary. From early March to mid-June of that year, the candidate only visited New Hampshire twice. Morale was a key challenge for the insurgent campaign, Helms said. During the Hart campaign, there were continual reports that it was light on money and could not possibly win. “When you can’t pay the bills” and people working for the campaign are not getting paychecks, and the national media are reporting that the candidate will drop out in a couple weeks, “that weighs on the morale,” Helms said.
Hart’s campaign remained buoyant, however, because of its “home-grown understanding and excitement,” Shaheen said. During that campaign, as in Jimmy Carter’s eight years earlier, people had reached out to their friends and acquaintances in the state—and as a result, the sometimes dreary day-to-day activities of campaigning became less of a chore and more of a crusade. Brainstorming sessions on ways to reach voters were part of the campaign’s routine, Shaheen said. “That keeps people interested because when they feel like they have input into what happens, they’re a lot more excited.” Volunteers sometimes paid out of their own pocket for local campaign efforts when Shaheen refused to use scarce funds for them, Butler recalled; for instance, a Hart volunteer in a particular town might take it upon herself to write postcards to all of the town’s registered Democrats. “The Hart campaign had all the people that took the Kool-Aid,” Butler said. “They just completely believed in what they were doing,” as opposed to just going with the likely winner.
When times were tough, the Hart campaign stuck with their mantra: The candidate would not drop out, and in fact the base for victory already had been laid on the ground.
The campaign’s boasts were met with some skepticism. Hart hardly had any name supporters, and his campaign “was so subterranean, that for many of us, we just didn’t see anything happening through the whole fall,” recalled Mondale activist Ray Buckley. At the time, it was an open question whether Hart was just staying in the race long enough to collect his federal matching funds and pay off his campaign debts. Hart’s concentric-circle organizing “was all quiet. None of us who were involved in the party saw any of this stuff going on because it wasn’t among the average party activists,” Buckley said.
To this day, Mondale operative Katherine Rogers describes Hart’s organization as just a well-executed example of a “blue smoke and mirrors” operation, a campaign that succeeded in looking much larger than it actually was. “They were at the right place, at the right time, doing the right things, so people talked,” Rogers said, and the positive word of mouth helped to move voters their way. When a candidate has a small but dedicated core of volunteers, his campaign will try to create a field operation that is “smoke and mirrors,” Rogers said. The goal for such an operation is to create good buzz for the campaign, to get word out on the street that the candidate has lots of good organization working for him. In any neighborhood, the campaign should have a map with the houses of opinion makers highlighted: members of the media, elected officials, and known activists. The campaign makes sure that each of those movers and shakers is visited by campaign personnel; that each is included on the literature drops; that yard signs are placed on nearby properties. “You want them thinking that you’re everywhere and you’re doing everything,” Rogers said, “because they’ll talk about it.” People like to think they are voting for a winner, so providing them with some prima facie evidence of a winning campaign makes them more inclined to vote for your candidate.
Shaheen maintains that Hart’s field organization in New Hampshire was vital to his victory there, but agrees with Rogers that the campaign played the media game as well in order to make its limited resources look as robust as possible. At the state party convention in October 1983, for instance, Mondale delegates outnumbered Hart delegates, and Hart’s campaign had no money to buy space at the convention to place signs. So instead, the campaign borrowed an RV and placed it in the parking lot outside the convention for free, and put signs on the roof of the building where the convention was held (also for free).
In addition, the Hart campaign made the decision early on to cultivate New Hampshire reporters, reasoning that New Hampshire voters would get more information on the campaign from local newspapers and television than national media, Shaheen recalled. The campaign made sure that local reporters would have time with the candidate and were persistent in keeping reporters in the loop on campaign activities. Hart’s operatives also made note of times when prominent national reporters would be in the state and which local political “regulars” they would habitually contact. People on the Hart campaign who knew these activists personally would contact them and offer information on the campaign, in the hope that they would pass it on to the national media.
During the month before the primary, Hart’s goal—to separate himself from the rest of the field challenging Mondale and to become the alternative to the front runner—began to be realized. The national media began to tout Hart as the candidate who could replace Glenn as Mondale’s main challenger. The media’s new conventional wisdom about the Democratic race crystallized the night of the Iowa caucuses, the week before the New Hampshire primary. Hart finished second in Iowa—a weak second place, but one that vaulted him ahead of John Glenn to the status of lead challenger to Mondale.
The voter volatility in the 1984 New Hampshire primary was not atypical, said political advertising executive Pat Griffin. To explain, Griffin divided the primary voting audience into three parts. The first part is the local community of political activists, those who are engaged in political matters to the highest degree. At the other end of the spectrum are those voters who are not particularly engaged and make up their minds very late in the game. They tend to be uninformed followers, most prone to vote for the candidate who seems to be the inevitable winner. In between these two relatively small groups, Griffin said, is the “great middle,” a large group of voters with an intermediate level of attention and interest, who may support one candidate for awhile, then shift its support to another. Candidates must make appeals to all three groups, but the “great middle” are the most coveted:
[It’s] like working a lounge act in Vegas. It’s tough. There’s the drunks, who laugh at anything. And then there’s the people who basically say, “Yeah, everyone else is laughing, so I better laugh, too.” But there’s the people who show up sober and say, “OK, forty-two bucks for this ticket, this guy better be funny.” And that’s the toughest part of the room to work.
In a primary, when perhaps a third of the electorate is new, it is difficult to do traditional voter contact, and it is also difficult to come up with hard numbers of candidate support, Griffin said. Even if the voter came to a coffee with the candidate, even if the voter has been sent mail and contacted by the campaign multiple times, the voter should not be counted as committed unless she has been spoken to the previous night, Griffin said. Too many things happen over the months before the primary to be able to identify voters weeks or months in advance. Griffin concluded, “In New Hampshire, we get to dance with a lot of people before it’s time to go home.”
The week between the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire, no one seemed to want to dance with front runner Walter Mondale. It was a week Katherine Rogers would just as soon forget: She had developed pneumonia, had no voice left, and she had to wake up Mondale, the former vice president of the United States, not once but twice to tell him he was losing New Hampshire.
New Hampshire had become the right place at the right time for Hart, in part because the challenge from Mondale’s supposed chief rival, John Glenn, simply evaporated, much to the frustration of the Mondale campaign. Going into the last month and a half before Iowa and New Hampshire, Mondale’s campaign felt confident that he would defeat Glenn in New Hampshire, Duncan said. “We hadn’t anticipated . . . that [Glenn’s] whole campaign would implode after Iowa.”
Glenn’s collapse changed the dynamics of the multicandidate field in New Hampshire in subtle, unpredictable ways. Most Democratic voters had made one basic decision: whether they were with Mondale the front runner or against him. The Mondale campaign estimated that they had secured not a majority but perhaps just under 40 percent of New Hampshire voters. Mondale’s standing in New Hampshire had been consistent throughout the months preceding the primary, enjoying a 35 to 40 percent standing in the polls. In a multicandidate field, the Mondale campaign estimated that this probably would be enough to win, with each of the other candidates carrying various shares of the remaining 60 percent of the vote.
But with Glenn’s collapse and the slow fade of most of the remainder of the field, what the Mondale campaign got instead in New Hampshire was a two man race between the front runner and Hart. Duncan recalled: “If you’d already said you weren’t voting for Mondale, you were pretty much told if you were watching the news, ‘Don’t waste your vote on this pathetic guy from Ohio, because that campaign’s gone nowhere. Your choice, if you decide you’re not voting for Mondale, is this exciting new product: His name is Gary Hart.’”
The Hart campaign, said Duncan, had worked on the grassroots level in order to capitalize on this wave of media-generated momentum. Hart activist Andi Johnson recalled that about three weeks before the primary, the campaign began to see voters breaking toward Hart in their canvassing. Hart was not the status quo, Johnson said, and generated more excitement than Mondale. Duncan maintains, however, that Hart’s grass-roots organizing was not what ultimately created his victory in New Hampshire. He pointed out, for instance, that Hart also succeeded in places where he had no organization set up. A week after New Hampshire, Hart manhandled Mondale in the Maine caucuses, despite the fact that Mondale had made a significant grassroots effort there and the insurgent had spent virtually no time and developed no organization.
In the reconstruction of [the 1984 New Hampshire primary], it’s that they [Hart] had this very good local organization, where the Mondale [campaign], the Cadillac Imperial campaign, didn’t. Well, that’s not true. We might have been the Cadillac Imperial candidacy in some people’s eyes, but the grassroots campaign—getting out the vote, talking to people, walking the walk—was just as much ours as it was theirs. It’s just that when the bolt of media lightning hit, they were fully prepared to take advantage of it. And they gave Mondale and our campaign a good pasting here.
When the media lightning hit right after Iowa, “by the time it was clear what was happening, it was almost too late to do anything about it,” said Duncan. While Mondale had done “beyond overwhelming” in Iowa, Duncan said, Hart had finished second, exceeding expectations and thus gaining momentum that his campaign in New Hampshire exploited. When Hart took Glenn’s place as the alternative to Mondale, he benefited from the subsequent media glare on Mondale and alleged mishaps in the front runner’s campaign. “Hart was viewed as storming” toward the stumbling front runner, Duncan said, and the perception helped to create the reality.
Meanwhile, Mondale’s front runner status only seemed to hurt him by making his campaign simultaneously cautious and arrogant. Fresh off his victory in the Iowa caucuses, Mondale’s national campaign directors decided that the candidate should enter New Hampshire “as a conquering hero, kind of like [General Douglas] MacArthur . . . because he kicked ass in Iowa,” Rogers said. At the time, Rogers objected that such a display would not go over well with voters in New Hampshire, who did not want to be told who the nominee should be, and she quit briefly in protest. After that, “everybody said, ‘oh, well, Mondale’s coming in like he owns the place,’” Rogers recalled, acting as if he were the self-declared winner who did not seem to need anybody’s vote.
Mondale’s victory lap in New Hampshire was short-lived. On the Thursday or Friday before the primary, the Mondale campaign received reports that the undecideds, rather than dispersing among several different candidates as would normally be the case, were all breaking to Gary Hart. Rogers remembered calling Mondale’s national campaign director in Manchester and the two of them going to the Wayfarer in Bedford to wake up Mondale and deliver the bad news.
The Mondale campaign decided the way to stem the Hart wave was to increase turnout because the more passive voters (those less likely to vote) were more likely to favor Mondale. Attempts to increase turnout, however, were hampered by the fact that the campaign was up against the federal spending cap in New Hampshire. And when Hart received his matching funds, he had invested it in commercials on New Hampshire television and actually had put more ads on the air in the last two weeks than Mondale.
By the weekend before the primary, all signs pointed to a disaster for the front runner, both from the polling data and from the Mondale campaign’s nightly calls and canvassing results. It was a “tidal wave,” Rogers said, and riding the top of the wave was Gary Hart. Mondale’s ground organization was well prepared to deliver the vote, given its excellent get-out-the-vote organization in terms of people, targeting, and canvassing. On election day, Mondale had door-to-door canvassing in every city and many towns, as well as phone canvasses. The problem, Rogers recalled, was that “we didn’t have enough people to pull out.” As she summarized, the voters “had shifted . . . people liked Gary Hart, but I think they were angry at Mondale. . . . He came into the state and said, ‘I won. I’m coronated. I’m going to be the nominee.’ Gary Hart was out throwing the axe, being young, being vital. The press thing . . . had more to do with it than the organization.”
Shaheen contended that it was voters’ lack of emotion toward Mondale’s candidacy that hurt him in New Hampshire. Voters simply were not excited about Mondale. The former vice president’s campaign compounded the problem, she said, by running a traditional campaign, highlighting his status as the former vice president.
The Mondale disaster culminated on primary day. “If anything could go wrong for Walter Mondale that day, it went wrong,” Rogers said. In the early morning hours, the snow began to fall and the sleet followed, “the worst weather I’ve ever seen in New Hampshire,” she recalled. For a campaign depending on high turnout for a victory, the game was already over before it had hardly begun, despite the campaign’s door-to-door canvassing. The passive voters Mondale was counting on did not come to the polls. To cap off the day, the tires on the airplane scheduled to take Mondale out of New Hampshire went flat, so the candidate had to ride in a hastily assembled motorcade to Boston.
For Gary Hart, primary night confirmed his never-wavering belief that he would win New Hampshire, Helms said. Hart always felt that “the media wants a race, and the people want a race, and all you had to do was to make it to that next stage so you can make it a race, and then all of a sudden you had a race,” Helms said. And so it was, all the way to the last primaries in California and New Jersey months later. Although Hart fell short of the nomination, he proved what it took to win New Hampshire, said Butler: smart people who understand the local landscape, a good chunk of money, and believers.
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