This week, WGBH Radio is looking at how the New Hampshire primary is playing out in two very different communities. Yesterday we sized up Berlin, an old mill town where Democrats usually win — but where Hillary Clinton barely fended off Donald Trump in 2016. Today, a very different community: Hanover — where Clinton cruised to victory four years ago. This story is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.
In Hanover, a picture-postcard town of about 8,500 located right by the Vermont border, Hillary Clinton didn’t just beat Donald Trump in the 2016 general election — she crushed him, getting seven votes for every one that Trump got.
It was Clinton’s best showing in the Granite State — and Deb Nelson, a former high school teacher who chairs the Hanover-Lyme Democratic Town Committee, has some theories about why it happened here.
"It is a community that thrives on the arts, on inquiry," Nelson said. "There are popular lecture series, film series."
And according to Nelson, those perks attract a certain kind of resident.
"A lot of former foreign service experts," she explained. "People who’ve worked for the federal government. People who are committed to the values of a democracy. And so it was pretty easy for them to see a candidate that they wanted to support in the last election."
Hanover is an outlier in other ways, too. According to U.S. Census data, 83 percent of residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 37 percent for New Hampshire as a whole. The median home value tops $575,000 — more than double the median value statewide.
And then, of course, there are the students at Dartmouth College — including Riley Gordon and Gigi Gunderson, the current and past presidents, respectively, of the Dartmouth College Democrats. If the presence of Dartmouth itself helps explain Hanover’s other defining traits, the students there are a political force in their own right — and they know it.
Case in point: the 2018 midterms, when both Gordon and Gunderson dedicated themselves to registering as many students as possible and making sure they showed up at the polls.
'We elected a current [Dartmouth] senior to the New Hampshire State House, which we’re really proud of, all the way up to Annie Kuster, who’s our federal congressional representative," Gunderson said. "In Hanover, we same-day registered over 1,000 people, and we can assume that most of those people were Dartmouth students."
So come the primary, which fortunate Democrat will reap the benefits? Try as I might, I couldn’t get either Gordon or Gunderson to tip their hands about who they plan to back in February. But Gunderson made a point that seemed telling, about a candidate who’s no longer in the race but whose campaign style and focus impressed her.
"Jay Inslee came and was the first candidate to sit down in a room in a circle with about 20 of us and [say], 'I don’t care what we talk about. I want to talk about what you want to talk about,'" she said. "And then [he] sat back and waited for us.
"That was a revolutionary experience, and from then on as an organization we became a lot more vocal about telling candidates what young people want to hear about."
Asked what, exactly, the Dartmouth Dems started telling people to talk about, Gunderson didn't miss a beat.
"Talk about climate change," she replied. "If you come here and you don’t talk about climate change, you’re wasting an opportunity."
One more detail worth noting for anyone trying to handicap Hanover: A new state law whose implications are still unclear could impose new obligations on students who aren’t from New Hampshire but want to vote there, like getting a state driver’s license if they drive a car.
Critics have called the law an attempt at student-voter suppression. Gordon, the Dartmouth Dems president, doesn’t disagree, but also says he doesn’t think it will work.
"The whole purpose is to intimidate college students from voting, and ... it doesn't seem to me like that’s going to kick in," he said.
Unlike her fellow Democratic activists at Dartmouth, Deb Nelson has settled on a candidate. When Nelson introduced Elizabeth Warren during a recent visit to New Hampshire, she also gave her candidacy a public thumbs up. Nelson says she’s impressed by the passion of Warren’s supporters — and, that Warren’s experience as a teacher was a big plus, too.
"I spent 27 years in a classroom working with students in the middle of a classroom, in the back of the classroom watching them, and you can’t be a lone cowboy in the classroom," Nelson said. "And in my introducing her [in New Hampshire], I said that I thought she was the person to send to Washington, D.C. to work with the unruly classroom that is the US Congress. And I really do think that."
Whether it's Warren or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, it seems likely that a majority of Hanover residents will embrace a progressive next month. Back in 2016, before Clinton crushed Trump here, she lost big to Sanders, who beat her two to one.
Of course, this time around, voters who want to tack left have to make a choice.
