My first event with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was always going to be different. As soon as she announced the location of her first appearance in New Hampshire since her well-received debate performance, I knew that much. The visit — a town hall on Monday, July 8 — was scheduled for Peterborough, a town of 6,000 people on the eastern edge of the Monadnock region in the southwestern corner of the state.
I am not a New Hampshire native. My family and I — my parents are college professors in the Philadelphia area — are summer people in the Granite State, which is sometimes worse than being an outsider if you talk to the wrong person. But New Hampshire is, quite literally, a second home for me. Our neighbors are like family and my second-grade year (when my parents were on sabbatical and we stayed year-round in the state) was my favorite year of school.
And then there is Peterborough, a nearby town where I attended a Recreation Department day camp for eight years before volunteering as a counselor-in-training for two years and eventually working as a full-time counselor for two more. More than anywhere else in New Hampshire, I feel attached to Peterborough, grateful to the town for investing in recreation and indebted to its people for welcoming me.
With all of those memories floating around in my head, I made the familiar 25-minute drive to Peterborough to see Warren, a top-tier candidate rising in the polls.
At that point, I already had some experience around the Warren campaign. I attended a debate watch party with her New Hampshire staff and a handful of local supporters in Manchester on my first night in the state. I was impressed in my conversations with her staffers that night, about how they were meeting with elected officials and advocacy groups in New Hampshire to work out the details of their candidate's famous plans, about how they were deploying their volunteers in an ambitious door-knocking operation and about how they personally connected to their candidate through her life story and her big ideas.
I also saw the Warren campaign a week later at the Fourth of July parade in Amherst, where they had by far the largest contingent of any candidate. So I knew that the Warren campaign was well-staffed and sophisticated. But I didn't know if its efforts were beginning to pay off on the ground among New Hampshire voters.
Peterborough answered that question. I arrived an hour early just to be safe and my jaw dropped at the scene in the downtown district. With police officers directing traffic, I turned onto Grove Street, where the town hall stands at the corner with Main, and saw lines and lines of people stretching several blocks back on the jam-packed sidewalks in the hot afternoon sun.
With street parking out of the question, I tried a usually well-hidden parking lot before throwing my hands in the air and parking a half-mile away at a shopping mall. After speed-walking back to the town hall, I hopped on the end of the line and started to worry that I would not get in. The line was shorter, as several hundred people had already been allowed to enter the building. But small-town New Hampshire fire marshalls are notoriously strict — unwilling to make exceptions for student researchers from small liberal arts colleges.
As I waited and worried with the other people in line, the Warren campaign worked its magic. Staffers with clipboards took my name, zip code, email address and phone number. Supporters who had not signed in with a staffer were sent to the back of the line. While vendors sold merchandise in sidewalk booths, other staffers handed out stickers and paper fans for inside the stuffy town hall that read "I'm a Warren Fan!"
The line inched forward and while all the seats on the first floor were taken, space in the standing-room-only balcony remained. I must have been one of the last fifty people admitted into the building before the crowd reached its capacity at 650 people. The Warren campaign later reported a total of 850 people for the event, with 200 additional voters in overflow outside, a total only matched by California Senator Kamala Harris and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the more populous Seacoast region the following weekend.
The scene inside, especially up in the balcony, was exciting, with some people standing and craning their necks and others sitting on the ground in groups and waving their "I'm a Warren Fan" fans. It was a no-frills setting for a campaign rally that had the feel of a start-up movement. Hype music and speaker systems aside, we could have been there for the first meeting at the town hall, built in 1918, over a hundred years ago.
After introductions from a local supporter and New Hampshire Congresswoman Annie Kuster, Warren appeared and launched into a stump speech that put her biography at the center of her campaign. She detailed her hardscrabble Oklahoma upbringing and her roundabout journey through commuter colleges, special education classrooms and childcare facilities to become a Harvard law professor.
Her message about attending a $50-a-semester commuter college and a $450-a-semester public law school — that her story was "also a story about government" — seemed to resonate in Peterborough, the town with the first tax-supported free public library in the United States. It resonated for me. I thought of the Recreation Department day camp, which offers eight weeks of summer childcare to town residents for only $548.
Between making that connection and seeing such a large crowd take over the familiar streets and sidewalks of Peterborough, I began to realize why campaign visits are so powerful. Candidates bring government closer to the people, but they also bring people closer to their government, providing a lens to think about national and local issues alike.
With her biography and story-telling, Warren, especially, is good at providing that lens. "I can relate to her," Abby Mather, an elementary school teacher from Keene, told me. "It's not just the 'I have a plan.'"
This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.
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