Former U.S. vice president Mike Pence speaks at a dinner hosted by Palmetto Family in Columbia, S.C., on April 29, 2021.Meg Kinnard/The Associated Press
No one missed the significance of the visit to New Hampshire Thursday night from an ambitious guest. It may have been a tactical move – Mike Pence’s effort to avoid fading into the deep shadows of the post-vice-presidency. It may have been part of a strategy – the Indianan’s move to set out on his own, out of the shadow of Donald Trump. But there was no mistaking the meaning of his trip here: It marked, astonishing as it may seem, some 32 months from the next New Hampshire primary, the beginning of the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign.
The most famous short story set in New Hampshire is a harrowing tale by 19th-century novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Ambitious Guest. Like the protagonists in that story, who perish in a rock slide, the hopes of most of the ambitious political guests who venture here have died in the rocky hills of this state. And yet they keep coming – some, like Mr. Pence, to send a signal of their intentions; others, like those who will follow, to lay the groundwork for campaigns in 2024 or even 2028.
Had the 48th vice-president touched down in any of the other four Manchesters in New England – the one in Massachusetts, which was the setting for the 2016 Kenneth Lonergan film, or the one in Vermont, which is home to the American Museum of Fly Fishing, or the one in Maine, in which 2,580 souls are scattered over a sprawling 58.6 square kilometres, or the one in Connecticut, which this week held a “walking book club,” a 3.2-kilometre stroll with stops for literary discussion – no one would have paid any mind.
But this was an unmistakable signal that New Hampshire’s most cherished tradition – to hold the first primary of the presidential-election cycle – has begun anew, sprouting like the lupines and the northern blazing star, wildflowers that are nature’s signal of the beginning of a fresh season here.
“Pence is the first person to put his toe into the pool and to start a campaign in person,” said Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics. “This is what the New Hampshire primary is all about: You come in, you meet people, you meet the local activists, you test your message.”
Mr. Pence – generally ranked behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the top choice among GOP voters here if Mr. Trump does not run – said he and the 45th president were “a little different.” He told the audience gathered Thursday night that Jan. 6, when the Capitol was besieged and Mr. Pence spurned the demands of Mr. Trump to overturn the election results, was “a dark day,” adding, “I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye to eye on that day. But I will always be proud of what we accomplished for the American people over the last four years.”
But mostly Mr. Pence’s appearance at the Hillsborough County Republicans’ annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner – where he attacked “the Biden administration’s wholehearted embrace of the radical left’s all-encompassing assault on American culture and values,” expressed support for “state-based election reform,” which critics describe as voter suppression, and criticized “a explosion of runaway spending” – was significant because it came in some of the most travelled political terrain in America.
It was just down the street that 1972 Democratic front-runner Edmund Muskie was described as crying after his wife was pilloried by Manchester Union Leader publisher William Loeb. It was blocks from where Bill Clinton salvaged his 1992 campaign by claiming that a second-place finish in the state’s primary qualified him as the “comeback kid.” And it was across town that John F. Kennedy began his 1960 general-election campaign speaking of the need for leadership of “men of character and responsibility, who have some understanding of the revolutionary and changing times through which we move.”
This week it was not the figure at the rostrum of the DoubleTree Hilton who dominated the conversation – and the hopes of Republicans – but the man he once worked for, Mr. Trump. The University of New Hampshire Survey Research Center found that 59 per cent of Republicans here said they want Mr. Trump to run again.
“Trump is the dominant force here,” said Dave Carney, the veteran GOP political operative with deep New Hampshire roots, in an interview. “But all the others have to come and test the waters here. If Trump decides to run, they will have set the stage for 2028.”
The visit from Mr. Pence – who introduced himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order” – underlined a dramatic change in the rhythms of U.S. presidential elections.
In 1952, Estes Kefauver, the initial leading Democratic candidate, began his campaign six months before the party convention. By 1976, Jimmy Carter began his campaign 19 months before the convention, and four years later Representative Phil Crane of Illinois began his Republican campaign almost two full years before the convention. Senators Howard Baker, a Republican, and Edward Kennedy, a Democrat, said their delayed campaigns accounted in large measure for their failures to win their respective nominations in 1980.
The Republican-controlled State Senate adjourned to spend time with New Hampshire’s latest early-arriving ambitious guest, and Governor Chris Sununu tweeted out a picture of the two of them. And though the dinner menu included chicken, Mr. Pence served up raw meat for an audience where the invocation by education commissioner Frank Edelbut spoke of “rights not given to us by government”; where the first toast of the evening spoke of the need to resist “big-government socialism”; and where from the rostrum came the word that the men in the ballroom should stand and help the ladies to their seats.
“I believe we are on the verge of another great Republican comeback,” Mr. Pence said to great applause.
He won a standing ovation when he said that “it is past time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic racism once and for all. America is not a racist nation. America is the most just, righteous, noble and inclusive nation ever to exist on the face of the Earth.” But perhaps the greatest cheers came when, speaking of “the agenda of the radical left,” he said, “Enough is enough.” That’s the rhetoric of an ambitious guest.
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