In the Deep North at Midnight on Primary Day
Memories of Dixville Notch during the New Hampshire Primary
Every four years on New Hampshire Primary Eve, my thoughts drift back to my adventures there in 1992, and particularly to Dixville Notch.
Ever since 1960, the tiny number of voters in Dixville Notch, which is about 20 miles from the Canadian border, have all cast their ballots at midnight as the date of the primary starts. A state law allows a town to count and report its vote as soon as all eligible voters have cast their ballots.
National media came to descend on the location to cover the vote and see whether the result was predictive of the outcome after sunrise across the state. It often has been, though sometimes it has been very different from the result the next evening.
As a political junkie from my teenage years, I was intrigued by Dixville Notch. I pictured it, as I’m sure most people across America did, as a tiny town in the Great North Woods where the locals gathered in a general store around a potbelly stove before they cast their ballots.
In the mid-1980s, I became intrigued by New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who seemed to be the most charismatic progressive since FDR, or at least since Bobby Kennedy (the Elder). I saw him as the likely Democratic nominee in 1988 and I persuaded him to agree to cooperate with me in gathering information and interviews for a biography I would write.
The work on the biography was a fascinating journey, but that’s another story. Mario Cuomo: A Biography was published by Scribner’s in the spring of 1988, at just the time that Mario announced that he would not seek the nomination.
We remained in fairly frequent contact over the next few years. With George Bush the Elder having defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988, Mario was the clear frontrunner for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. On the final day to register for the 92 New Hampshire primary, a plane in Albany was ready to take the governor to New Hampshire to file the necessary papers. Then he said once again that he was not going to run.
I remember sitting in my office at Millsaps College when that decision was announced. After a few minutes, I reached for the phone on my desk to call Little Rock and offer my services to Bill Clinton. I had interviewed all the potential Democratic candidates for 1988, and Clinton was the only one other than Cuomo and Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt who would actually listen to my questions and answer them and engage in real give-and-take conversation.
But then I put the receiver (phones had them in those days) down. I said to myself, the decision from Mario can be reversed. A couple of days later, I got a call from Phil Krone, a political operative close to the Daley machine in Chicago. He had read my biography of Mario and told me he was trying to organize a Draft Cuomo campaign and wanted me to join the effort. I readily agreed, and the adventure began.
Our hope was to have a large write-in vote for Mario in the New Hampshire primary. Phil and I spent parts of a few weeks early in 1992 in New Hampshire. It was amazing. Every corner one turned, it seemed, we ran into a presidential candidate.
We decided to focus on Dixville Notch, with the idea that a victory there at Midnight for a write-in candidate would be the headline story in the morning papers and prominently reported on television news programs on the morning of primary day. That, we hoped, would convince large numbers of New Hampshire Democrats, many of whom preferred Mario, that the write-in campaign could succeed.
We arrived in Dixville Notch on our first trip there at night during a raging snowstorm a few weeks before the primary.
My shock was to discover that it’s not a quaint little town, but a luxury hotel ski resort, The Balsams. I concluded that reporters love to spend time there and allow the assumption of the little general store to continue so they can continue to spend time there.
In 1992, there were something like 37 registered voters in Dixville Notch. (Tonight there will be only six.) As Phil and I wooed them, so did all the other candidates. Pat Buchanan was challenging Bush for the Republican nomination. One morning, I found myself sitting with him in the hotel as we were both interviewed on a radio program. Other Democratic candidates passed through.
One morning when I was having coffee at The Balsams with a woman who was a voter there, trying to get her to commit to Mario, a staff member came up and told her that President Bush was on the phone to ask for her vote. Oddly, she chose to take the presidential call rather than continue chatting with me.
We thought we had several voters solidly committed to write in Cuomo. Everyone gathered in a wood paneled room that appears on television like it could be a country store. When the ballots were counted, no one had written in Cuomo.
There are reasons why what had been a promising campaign didn’t succeed, but I don’t have time to get into that here.
It was a great experience. I’ll be watching on television later tonight.