No candidate has made more visits to New Hampshire than former Maryland Congressman John Delaney, who has hosted 111 events in the state since he began his campaign in July 2017. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who announced her candidacy almost two years later in March 2019, is second with 55 events.
I saw both candidates last week at small meet-and-greet events in the Monadnock region, the southwestern corner of the state. I was hoping to figure out why Delaney and Gillibrand, two candidates with strong credentials for the job, have struggled to break out of the pack and languished at the bottom of national and early state polls. I came away with few answers, thoroughly impressed with the performances of both candidates.
And I was not alone. New Hampshire is famous for its emphasis upon "retail politics" — face-to-face interaction between candidates and voters in intimate settings — and voters at both small events walked away with nothing but good things to say.
After sitting though a speech and Q&A with Delaney, Valerie Mayetta, an independent from Keene, described the former businessman and Maryland Congressman as "open and honest" and praised his "respectful" message. She even put Delaney on her first-choice ticket. "I'd like to see him paired with a strong woman," she said.
Members of the audience for Gillibrand, who spoke for less than forty minutes in a fast-paced session, spoke even more highly of the New York Senator. Margi Anderson, a retired woman from Chesterfield, found Gillibrand "much more appealing" in person after describing her performance in the debates as "a little bit jarring."
Anderson said she and her husband were leaning toward South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, but "now we need to think of someone else." Deyna Robuck, 33, of Brattleboro, Vermont echoed similar sentiments, nodding with a serious tone that she would have to "look into [Gillibrand] more and do a lot of research."
And while, because crowds for campaign events are self-selecting, it is not surprising that voters would leave with positive impressions of the candidate, Anderson made clear that she and her husband were not uncritical. "We weren't impressed with Beto," she said.
So something about Gillibrand resonated with Anderson, just like something about Delaney resonated with Mayetta. My working guess is that both candidates are extraordinarily comfortable with who they are and what they do. They have no need for soul-searching on a solo cross-country road trip. They have a well-practiced stump speech, but their public appearances are somewhat of a total package, from their demeanor when they walk in the room to their pace of speech to their choice of venue.
In these ways, Delaney and Gillibrand couldn't be more different.
Delaney hosted his meet-and-greet in the new multi-purpose space at the Keene Public Library, a relatively large room with a semi-circle of folding chairs in the first third of the available floorspace. The room was strangely quiet as I entered minutes before Delaney began on a Tuesday evening, my footsteps echoing over the soft conversation of the people waiting.
When Delaney arrived, like a good businessman, he went around the room, looked everyone in the eye and shook their hand. He also asked for and repeated each person's name. He spoke slowly and sincerely. He sounded rational — "I'm for fixing what's broken and keeping what's working" — if slightly exasperated by the leftward shift in the Democratic Party.
But he was sincere. As I left the almost hour-and-a-half-long event, that was the word that kept coming to me. He was honest, patient and most of all, sincere. When several voters pushed back against his invocation of John F. Kennedy for post-partisanship or expressed skepticism about his ability to pass bipartisan bills with Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader, he maintained that he genuinely believed it was both possible and right.
When I asked him about his decision to start his campaign two years ago in July 2017, he nodded his head and said, "It was the right decision for me."
Gillibrand, in a very different way, was also true to herself. She hosted her meet-and-greet in the cafe room of an upscale restaurant and chocolate confectionery in Walpole, New Hampshire. The room was small but tightly-packed and buzzing with loud conversation when I arrived. Gillibrand was several minutes late and perhaps because of that, seemed most concerned with locating the microphone and getting started right away as a round of applause bounced around the room.
The energy of the small place of business on a Friday morning perfectly suited Gillibrand, who fed off the crowd and ticked through a series of well-timed punchlines. The "humor-repellant literalness" that a Washington Post feature from Monday observed couldn't have been further from the truth. A joke about how "Sure enough, we all jiggle" in particular won a big laugh from the room of mostly elderly women.
Maybe I am judging Gillibrand against the standard of the humorless Bernie Sanders and the earnest Delaney from earlier in the week, but in all seriousness, I walked away thinking that humor was a secret weapon for Gillibrand. I had seen the Dartmouth College alum who plays beer pong with her staff and describes whiskey as her comfort food to the New York Times.
While Gillibrand spoke and answered questions for less than forty minutes total, it was an action-packed forty minutes. The only question that remained at the end was whether Gillibrand, or Delaney or for that matter anyone, could replicate such a complete performance on a debate stage when the lights are the brightest.
With Gillibrand as well as Delaney, I think Anderson, the first woman who talked to me after the Gillibrand meet-and-greet, was right to blame "the nature of the debates" for making the candidates into the worst versions of themselves. "You get a different view of a client when you see [them] in person," she said.
This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.
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