Republicans haven’t won New Hampshire in a presidential election in decades. However, as President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance rocked the Democratic Party, political strategists say there’s an opening for former President Donald Trump to flip the state this November.
Political science experts are pointing to two polls indicating Biden has cause for concern in a state that typically has Democratic presidential candidates’ backs.
A poll conducted after the debate by New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College Survey Center shows Trump leading Biden by 2 points in the Granite State.
Last week’s poll follows a a late May survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, which gave Biden only a single-digit edge.
That’s a drop from 2020 when Biden handily won New Hampshire with a 7% lead.
“I do think we are now in a battleground,” Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, told Fox News.
The Trump campaign has jumped for the jugular.
“Joe Biden abandoned New Hampshire when he canned our first in the nation primary, and his policies have given our state more inflation, record-high energy bills, an increasingly unaffordable housing market, and an immigration crisis at our northern Canadian border,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told the Washington Examiner.
She said Biden’s set to “[lose] the Granite State and President Trump is poised to flip it red for the first time in more than twenty years.”
New England College president Wayne Lesperance, a veteran New Hampshire-based political science professor, agreed, telling Fox News that his state “is in play.”
“Biden’s performance at the most recent debate has pushed Democrats to question his ability to campaign, win and govern. Recent polls in New Hampshire point to continued rock-solid support by Republicans for Trump. Democratic support seems to be faltering with some looking at independent candidates,” Lesperance said. “As long as questions remain about Biden’s ability to go forward, the President will continue to bleed support, putting the Granite State in play.”
While New Hampshire Republican Party Chairman Christopher Ager told the Washington Examiner that New Hampshire is “definitely a battleground state after the debate — you can feel the momentum shifting in favor of President Trump,” Republicans have their work cut out for them. With wins in every presidential race in New Hampshire since before 9/11, Democrats hold a significant infrastructural advantage over the GOP. The Biden campaign has 14 offices across the state. The Trump campaign has only one field office.
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Meanwhile, Levesque warns that in New Hampshire, “the good news for Biden is he’s weak with the people who self-describe as very liberal. Just 67% support. That means, in the end, most likely many of those people are going to vote for Biden even if they don’t want to admit it right now.”
New Hampshire voters are famously independent. As 2023 came to a close, Republican Jay Ruais successfully challenged four-term Democratic Mayor Joyce Craig in Manchester, flipping the city red for the first time in years, and proving neither party can afford to take votes for granted in the Granite State
