DOVER, N.H. ― President Joe Biden won the Democratic primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday, securing a symbolic victory in spite of his absence from the ballot and the state’s irrelevance to the official nominating process.
Enough New Hampshirites wrote in Biden’s name on the ballot for him to triumph over U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), self-help author Marianne Williamson, and 19 other contenders who took advantage of the ease with which candidates can qualify for the presidential ballot in the Granite State.
The outcome meets the marker set by Biden’s allies in the state, who mounted both a grassroots campaign to write him in, and ran a super PAC to advertise the effort to voters.
“A win is a win,” Aaron Jacobs, a veteran Democratic strategist advising Granite State Write-In, the grassroots arm of the write-in campaign, told HuffPost at a write-in event in Dover on Sunday. “If he wins his primary without even being on the ballot, that’ll be a really impressive feat. Winning a write-in campaign is a really hard thing to do.”
Biden did not campaign in New Hampshire or appear on the ballot in keeping with the Democratic National Committee’s decision to punish the state for refusing to change the date of its Democratic presidential primary.
At Biden’s direction, the DNC had made South Carolina ― a more racially diverse state and home to top Biden ally, Assistant Democratic Leader Jim Clyburn ― the first contest on the Democratic schedule.
But New Hampshire’s Republican-controlled state government refused to change the state law codifying the state’s first-in-the-nation (FITN) status. It’s not clear how differently a Democrat-controlled state government would have acted; New Hampshire Democrats remain furious about the DNC’s decision as well.
As a result, the DNC stripped the state of its convention delegates and threatened to punish any presidential candidates who campaign there.
With the Democratic primary slated to occur anyway,…
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