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As The Associated Press reported Saturday, such a change will be proposed at a party meeting next month by Bruce Breton, a Windham selectman, who says that, “It is my strong belief that the New Hampshire GOP bylaws should be changed to reflect that (the party) will support an incumbent president.”
The idea has support from some other Granite State Republicans who played roles in Trump’s 2016 New Hampshire campaign, including state Rep. Fred Doucette of Salem and state Rep. Al Baldasaro of Londonderry. And the front-runner to become the party’s new chairman is state Rep. Steve Stepanek, an early and loyal Trump backer.
We infer from this attempt to tilt the playing field in Trump’s favor that his supporters in the state are none too confident and are seeking to do all they can to head off a damaging primary challenge. There is ample precedent for such insurgencies. Both presidents George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter had competitive primary fights in New Hampshire, waged respectively by Pat Buchanan and Sen. Ted Kennedy, and failed to win re-election. President Lyndon Johnson ended his 1968 re-election effort when Sen. Eugene McCarthy finished a close second in the New Hampshire primary.
Not all Republicans are on board with this hijacking of the campaign bus. Gov. Chris Sununu isn’t. And Jim Merrill, a longtime Republican operative, wonders, “What’s he afraid of? … (Trump) should take on the challenge and embrace it.” One possible answer to Merrill’s question is polling that suggests that Trump’s grip on the state’s voters is not as tight as his backers might like.
A University of New Hampshire survey conducted in August found that while 56 percent of Republican voters said they would support Trump in the 2020 primary, 20 percent said they would vote for a challenger and 24 percent were undecided. And, of course, New Hampshire is an open primary state, in which independents and even Democrats can cast ballots. (Democrats, though, are likely to be engaged in a lively contest of their own come 2020.)
Who might surface to take on Trump? Outgoing Ohio Gov. John Kasich is regarded as the most likely prospect, with Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, who is leaving office, and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse also being mentioned as possibilities. Kasich, an experienced hand with solid conservative credentials, ran in 2016 and finished a distant second to Trump in New Hampshire, but he is said to have a residual network of supporters in the state.
Merrill told the AP that he opposes the rule change because primaries are “contests of ideas and vision” and 2020 presents an opportunity to “make a different case for conservatism.” Although we fear that “contests of ideas and vision” are a charming anachronism in the age of Facebook and Twitter, we would welcome being proved wrong in 2020 by a candidate who espoused a conservatism at odds with Trump’s authoritarian concoction of lies and ego.
To that end, we hope the state GOP will adhere to its traditional pre-primary neutrality and not succumb to the temptation to crown Trump the winner in advance of the voters having their say. With more than a year before the New Hampshire primary, there’s ample time for circumstances to arise that could make an early endorsement of Trump’s re-election highly embarrassing to the state party and to New Hampshire itself.