Once Granite New Hampshire GOP Crumbles

Laconia, N.H. — During the French Revolution, angry mobs were not content to just chop off a monarch's head. They attacked the royal tombs and buried the remains of long-gone kings in quicklime, lest any earthly bits of the old rulers survive.

With similar passion, though in a nonviolent manner, New Hampshire voters seem intent on removing the last traces of the Republican Party in their state. Last year, they threw out their two Republican congressmen. They ended Republican control of both houses in the legislature. They re-elected their Democratic governor by the largest margin in state history.

What made the transformation remarkable was that New Hampshire had long been a Republican stronghold. Not in 122 years have Democrats held both the legislature and governorship.

Republicans used to praise fast-growing and tax-averse New Hampshire as a northern Sunbelt state, one of their own. They were so overwhelmingly in charge that Democrats often couldn't find candidates for state office. Here in conservative Belknap County, in the Lakes Region, they once recruited a homeless person, just to have a name on the ballot.

Now, even in Belknap County, Democrats are getting elected in good numbers.

"The Democrats have evolved from lovable losers to very aggressive partisans who believe they can win any electoral contest they put their minds to," Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, told me.

I asked several newspaper editors whether they thought the repudiation of all things Republican was a flare-up of frustration with the Bush administration (over the Iraq War, deficits and social conservatism) or reflects a more lasting trend. That, the editors all said, is the $64,000 question.

After all, Republicans faced a tough 2006 election for local as well as national reasons. And many of the Republicans who lost office were the sort of fiscally conservative social moderates that independents and many Democrats tend to like.

The answer has national import, because New Hampshire holds the first presidential primary.

Some 43 percent of its registered voters are unaffiliated with any party. Because independents may vote in either primary, they can easily influence the outcome of one or both races. They will surely respond to the results of the Iowa Caucuses, a mere five days earlier. Thus, the possibilities of what will happen here on Jan. 8 are many.

The question again: Do the recent elections reflect temporary choler at the Republican leadership or a more fundamental shift? The changing demographics certainly don't bode well for the Grand Old Party.

"There used to be places that would vote Republican no matter how bad a year it was," Scala said. "Nowadays, those reserves are really depleted."

Many of the old-time Yankees — the "genealogical Republicans" — are dying off. They are being replaced by fairly liberal retirees from other states. New Hampshire has long attracted blue-collar Republicans, angry over taxes, from Massachusetts. But they are now being outnumbered by an influx of more educated, politically progressive workers to the state's booming high-tech industries.

New Hampshire Republicans still have the state's two U.S. senators. One of them, John Sununu, is up for re-election next year and trailing badly in the polls against former Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen. If Sununu gets knocked off, Democrats will quickly train their sights on Sen. Judd Gregg, who faces the voters again in 2010.

Revolutions do come to an end and often set off reactions. That happened in France. And New Hampshire's independent streak makes its electorate somewhat unpredictable.

But New Hampshire Democrats seem too busy to fixate on such concerns. As they see it, the tumbrels are still rolling to the guillotine.

To find out more about Froma Harrop, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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