Waffling in the Granite State

WITH the New Hampshire primary only 15 days away, voters in the Granite State remain a remarkably undecided bunch. None of the five major Democratic candidates--not Bob Kerrey, Paul Tsongas, Tom Harkin, Jerry Brown or Bill Clinton--has successfully won the hearts of a wide swath of New Hampshire voters.

The polls that show Gov. Bill Clinton and former Sen. Paul Tsongas leading the pack with 20-30 percent of the vote are deceptive: the percentages cited in the polls reflect preferences--they do not specify the candidates' established support. There is a little-under-stood but crucial distinction between people who plan to vote for a candidate and people who are leaning toward a candidate. The numbers reported in most polls account for the percentage of voters who, when pressed, express a preference; they are not--and should not be read as--evidence of firm support for any candidate.

In a recent Boston Globe poll establishing Clinton and Tsongas in the lead, the most notable statistic was the percentage of undecideds, the proportion of registered voters who have not yet made up their minds. That figure--a striking 79 percent--illustrates that almost eight of ten New Hampshire voters are still wavering. Although most voters are leaning toward a particular candidate, only 20 percent know for whom they will be voting in two weeks. Of course, some candidates do have broader support than others. But that support--particularly for the front-runners--is decidedly shallow.

It's difficult to determine exactly why New Hampshire voters are having such a hard time making up their minds. It would seem that President Bush's failure to revitalize New Hampshire's sagging economy--among the worst in the nation--would provide an environment conducive to competition among the Democratic candidates.

Perhaps a later-than-usual start to the campaign season gave citizens of New Hampshire fewer opportunities to hear the candidates. Maybe everyone is so busy being mad at George Bush that few New Hampshire voters have given serious effort to distinguishing among the president's potential Democratic opponents. Whatever the reason, most voters are still undecided--and decidedly so.

NASHUA, N.H.: One of the Granite State's cities hardest-hit by the recession. When I went to Nashua for a day to canvass for Tom Harkin last week, I fully expected that the economy would be the most important issue on the voters' minds--and it was. But I was surprised by the voters' near-universal indecision about which candidate to support.

Of the forty to fifty people I spoke to, only four had made up their minds: I found one Tsongas supporter, two Clinton backers, and one who planned on voting for Harkin. Nearly all of the Nashua residents I met claimed that they planned to vote in the February 18th primary, but 90 percent had not decided on a candidate. Many didn't even know who was running. Here are profiles of some of the voters I talked to:

. Sharon, a young single mother, had just returned from the grocery store with her six-year-old son when I arrived at her apartment. She had not chosen a candidate yet, but was very interested in what Harkin would do for the economy and the health care system. In her neat lower-middle class apartment, Sharon told me that although she resented Bush's handling of the economy, she "hadn't gotten around to looking into all the candidates."

. Jill, an articulate and well-informed woman in her thirties, was supporting Tsongas for the nomination. Harkin was her second choice.

. Jim, an annoyingly talkative older man, identified health care as his number one concern. "Fifteen minutes in a doctor's office shouldn't cost 95 dollars," he told me. "We need to get rid of the career politicians in Washington and put somebody in there who can really make a change." Who was Jim's candidate of choice? Ironically, it was the candidate with the least commitment to reforming the health care system: Republican Pat Buchanan. Buchanan's virtue as a candidate, according to Jim, was that he wasn't a "career politician" who played to the special interests.

. Esther, whose family recently emigrated from Israel, was leaning toward Clinton. She and her husband were impressed by Clinton's centrist message and were concerned that the Democratic nominee should be electable in November. Esther was happy, however, to hear of Harkin's strong pro-Israel stance.

. Cecile, a sharp middle-aged woman with an attack dog at her side, stayed behind her screen door as she expressed her disappointment with the Democratic field. While Clinton was too much a shifty politician, Kerrey was too boring, Tsongas too technocratic, and Harkin too short on details. She wanted the candidates to elucidate their messages with more specifics.

. Barbara, who also stayed in her doorway as she talked to me, was primarily concerned about the environment and the economy. She said that she seldom votes in primaries, and did not like any of the candidates in the race; she was waiting for a Green Party candidate. But for her good intentions, Barbara was badly uninformed about the presidential candidates. When I started discussing Harkin's environmental record, she asked: "Is Harkin a Democrat or Republican?"

AT THE end of my day going door-to-door in one of Nashua's very white, very middle-class neighborhoods, I was disillusioned. It's not that the people were apathetic; many expressed anger toward President Bush's bare domestic agenda and uncaring attitude about the economy. But very few people had committed themselves to a candidate. And those leaning toward certain candidates did not have strong reasons for supporting them.

Pre-primary polls are notoriously poor predictors of how the vote will turn out. This year is no exception. For all the media attention and candidate effort and money poured into New Hampshire's primary campaign, the voters aren't doing their part yet. They recognize the issues, but aren't choosing candidates. In these next two weeks--with a barrage of television commercials, debates, and candidate tours of the state--New Hampshire voters will have their final look at the five Democrats vying for their party's nomination. Whether today's preferences will turn into tomorrow's votes is impossible to say.

The only predictable outcome is that George Bush won't do so well. The sole voter I talked to who supported George Bush was a woman who would only speak to me through her living room window. I asked her which issues led her to choose Bush as her candidate. Her answer? "None."

Steven V. Mazie '93 is the associate editorial chair of The Crimson. He was formerly the President of Harvard for Harkin.