Less than a dozen show up for de Blasio in state capital

CONCORD, N.H. — Less than a dozen people showed up for a meet-and-greet with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio at Gibson's Bookstore, a popular stop on the campaign trial, in the state capital of Concord, New Hampshire on Sunday morning.

De Blasio originally entered through the cafe area in the front, where two disability rights activists waited with a staff to ask the New York City Mayor a question and film his response in the otherwise empty room. After turning to the camera and answering the question, de Blasio proceeded to a space in the back of the bookstore where five armchairs were arranged in a semi-circle. Only three of the five armchairs in the opening were filled.

At a bookstore in Concord, New Hampshire, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke to less than a dozen voters, two members of the media and couple staffers.

One of the seated attendees, a young person from Massachusetts who is seeing all the candidates, wanted de Blasio to sign his paper. Another was the state legislator scheduled to introduce the New York City Mayor. A couple others stood around, including an older man, a middle-aged woman, two young men and the two disability rights activists who had followed de Blasio to the back. Two members of the media, one seated and one standing, rounded out the audience.

Off to the side, de Blasio chatted with the state legislator, Representative Ryan Buchanan, for a couple minutes as the crowd waited but did not grow. Buchanan has already endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. When de Blasio finally approached the semi-circle, he told one of his staffers to "go gather people from the cafe." Only a few more turned up from the search and the long-shot candidate eventually repositioned himself over on the left side of the semi-circle where most of the small crowd had gathered as a camerawoman scrambled to move her equipment.

While the embarrassing spectacle of the mayor of the largest city in the country talking to less than a dozen voters in New Hampshire defined the day, de Blasio remained enthusiastic, appreciative and gracious throughout the appearance. He thanked Buchanan — "an incredibly strong, clear, progressive voice" — for the introduction and led the audience in a round of applause for the freshman lawmaker.

"Extra credit to everyone," he turned to the small crowd. "Yes, it's a Sunday morning and this was when the schedule allowed but anyone who comes out to talk about their state and their country on a Sunday morning, extra credit."

He then began to explain why he is in the race. "We are used to years and years of what we see is a very narrow bandwidth of possibilities and it kind of gets amplified and it gets reinforced," he said. "People telling us what's possible in very, very limited boundaries. And bluntly, over time, if you're only told we change a little bit, you start to believe it."

While he waited for one of his staffers to gather more voters from the cafe area, de Blasio chatted with first-term state Representative Ryan Buchanan, who has endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

One of the far-left candidates in the race along with Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, de Blasio has aggressively challenged those boundaries in the debates, an ideological warrior punching back at moderates like Colorado Senator Michael Bennet to continue the party's leftward lurch. To some degree, he is fighting not for votes, but over the location of the Overton window, a concept that refers to the range of policies on the ideological spectrum seriously considered in public discourse.

Like top-candidates Sanders and Warren, de Blasio believes the Overton window, a term coined after a conservative think tank executive, was too far to the right for a long time. But he told the audience that since the Great Recession, times were changing. "We were all miseducated to believe that we had to accept a certain set of ground rules and what's happened the last few years is people are rethinking the whole thing and I think it's incredibly good," he said.

"A lot of people have opened up their minds to change," he continued.

His 2013 mayoral election after twenty years of Republican rule in the liberal city, which followed the Occupy Wall Street movement but predated the 2016 Sanders campaign, provided one of the first signs of that change. The accomplishments that followed provided many more and ultimately convinced de Blasio to run for president.

"The reason I'm running for president is I know change can happen because I have been able to see it and make it happen in New York," he said. Above all, he touted his signature achievement: universal pre-kindergarten as emblematic of his efforts to change the conversation.

"I, as a candidate for mayor, said we should do pre-k for all," he said. "People were not talking about that before. I said we should have a tax on the wealthy to pay for it. People were not talking about that before. By the end of the campaign when I won, the people of New York City for demanding pre-k for their children."

When de Blasio arrived at the cafe area, two disability rights activists who contacted his campaign ahead of time filmed his response to a question on accessibility. One remarked immediately remarked on his height.

He likewise ticked through his more modest successes on paid sick days and health care, which he described as a model for the country in a tacit admission that more ambitious policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal are difficult to pass. "These are things we've done, or things we're doing right now, but they're all real things that are reaching real people and they're all models for what we should do in this country," he said.

He even apologized, as a New Yorker, for President Donald Trump to friendly laughter before taking questions from almost every voter in attendance.

After the event, he stuck around and answered difficult questions from a New York-based reporter, who quoted a Queens-based activist who tweeted she would have killed for the chance to meet with the Mayor in such a small setting. Although he is reputed to have a frosty relationship with the press, he remained patient and sincere for an almost ten-minute gaggle with the two journalists.

"This is New Hampshire," he responded to the reporter. "This is the way things have always been and that's a very good thing. You, in the end in this state, have to meet people very individually. It's the ultimate in retail politics and it's well-known."

In short, he did almost everything right — except one thing.

"I didn't see this event on any of the local lists, which is maybe why it was small," said Deodonne Bhattarai, one of the disability rights activists. An employee at the New Hampshire office of the Disability Rights Center, she said she reached out to the de Blasio campaign prior to his visit to arrange a time for her question.

Despite the small crowd and another appearance on his schedule that afternoon, de Blasio spent almost fifty minutes talking and answering question. He took an additional ten minutes to speak to the media.

Buchanan, the state legislator who also serves a chair of the Concord Democrats, similarly said the event was "a little bit last-minute so that's why it's smaller."

All in all, the small crowd, especially the day after Montana Governor Steve Bullock spoke to a hundred voters at the home of a former state Senate President in the same city, reflected badly on the de Blasio campaign for its failure to publicize the event more than on de Blasio himself.

Asked by the author where his campaign in New Hampshire would go from such a small event, de Blasio indicated that he would also rely upon the national media appearances that he has access to as New York City Mayor.

"It's a lot of different pieces that make up a campaign," he said. "The two times I was on the debate stage, those were very obviously vast audiences. Just in the last week or two, something like the Daily Show has 1.7 million people, Sean Hannity to go and have a tough conversation and spar with him, that's 3.3 million people including a lot of people who live in New Hampshire. So it's a mix of the media opportunities and the retail."

This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.

Bennet chooses Tea Party and Bernie as foils for middle-of-the-road campaign

MILFORD, N.H. — In a church basement in the mid-sized town of Milford, New Hampshire, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet wrapped up a long day of campaigning with repeated swipes at the Tea Party movement to the right and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to the left on Saturday night.

The choice of foils — not Democratic frontrunner and former Vice President Joe Biden with whom Bennet is most likely competing for moderate voters, not Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren who is surging in the polls and for the most part, not even President Donald Trump who visited the state for one of his signature rallies two days before — more than anything else introduced Bennet to the crowd as a middle-of-the-road candidate, a sober and reasonable figure in a crowded field.

Colorado Senator Michael Bennet spoke to a church basement of 30-50 local Democrats in Milford, New Hampshire on Saturday night after a long day of campaigning.

While he hit both targets before several dozen voters at a potluck dinner hosted by the town party committee, Bennet reserved his harshest words for the Freedom Caucus, the lasting result of the Tea Party movement more than ten years later. "They're a minority of a minority in the House of Representatives," he said. "They call themselves the Freedom Caucus. I think that's a very ironic title for a bunch of people who believe they have a monopoly on wisdom, for a bunch of people who thought they were channeling the founding fathers when what they were really channeling was Sarah Palin's cartoon version of the founding fathers."

"They're the most fiscally irresponsible people to show up in Washington D.C. in decades," he continued, his voice rising. "Nobody believes me when I say this but it is a fact and it is true."

Yet in response to the first question of his question-and-answer session and several times after that, Bennet contrasted himself with Sanders, unprompted. The first question, which asked about his views on student debt, actually made reference to Warren and her plan to wipe out student debt for 75 percent of people. But Bennet pivoted to Sanders, who outflanked his progressive rival with an universal student debt cancellation policy in June. 

"I do not support Bernie's plan to write off all the student loan debt in this country," he said. He added that people would come knocking and start asking about their mortgage — "Bernie doesn't have an answer for that" — and warned that debt relief would not reduce the cost of college — "There's nothing in Bernie's plan to actually make college less expensive." A former superintendent of the inner-city Denver public school system, Bennet also reminded voters that most Americans do not attend four-year college.

Bennet shook hands with voters as he arrived at the potluck dinner and briefly sat down at the table next to a state legislator when town party committee chair introduced him.

Bennet returned to Sanders, who has advocated a Medicare-for-All system, on health care several minutes later. The Colorado Senator told voters he wanted to "finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act" by passing a public option, a provision that was removed from the original bill after Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman threatened a filibuster. "I think that's a much easier way to deal with prices than what Bernie's proposing," he said.

He praised Sanders for his "honesty" and his "ideological commitment" on the abolition of private insurance, but warned that millions of people would lose their Medicare Advantage and union-negotiated plans. He also reprised a familiar attack on the Vermont Senator, effective in a room of local party members but generally not effective in a state that backed him 60 percent to 38 percent in the 2016 primary. "Bernie, to be honest and candid about it, won't even call himself a Democrat," he said. "No, he calls himself a democratic socialist."

The criticisms of Sanders, while memorable on a campaign trail that has largely avoided the conflict of the debate stage, all led back to Bennet's crusade against the Tea Party movement and the Freedom Caucus. The Colorado Senator, who was the only swing-state Democrats to win back-to-back reelections in the disastrous cycles of 2010 and 2016, feared that a far-left candidate at the top of the ticket would not win battleground areas.

"Everybody's trying to outmaneuver each other to the left in the primary," he said. "My view is that it's really important that we nominate someone that says the same things in the primary that they say in the general election. When you represent a state like Colorado or a place like Milford, that's a kind of discipline that's built in to our politics."

His reference to Milford, a town that narrowly voted for Trump in 2016 and flipped several seats in the state legislature in 2018, showed that, at the bottom of the polls and not yet qualified for the third or fourth debates, Bennet is going all in on retail politics. He also invoked former state Speaker of the House Bill O'Brien, a Tea Party legislator who represented the neighboring town of Mont Vernon, New Hampshire and once compared Obamacare to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, as a local example of the problem several times.

Bennet trained his attacks on the Freedom Caucus and the Tea Party movement, but also repeatedly criticized the far-left approach of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

For all his attacks on the Tea Party as an extremist minority with outsized influence in Congress, Bennet however remained an institutionalist: he does not support the elimination of the filibuster in the Senate, a rule that allows a 40-vote minority to block non-spending legislation. His fellow westerners in the race, Montana Governor Steve Bullock and Washington Governor Jay Inslee, have both campaigned on scrapping the procedure.

Bennet's response to Democrats who dislike when Republicans filibuster their legislation was both very straight-forward and not straight-forward at all: "My answer is what the Milford Democrats did," he exclaimed. "You got to win elections! You have to win elections. You can't lose elections."

With that standard, a benchmark that Democrats care about more than usual in 2020, Bennet spoke from a place of authority. "I'm the only person in this race that's won two national elections in a purple state, in a tough state," he said after the event in brief one-on-one interview. "I'm used to running from behind. We only have close elections in Colorado. And I just need to be in it long enough for it to start to click."

Whether his message will start to click one church basement of local Democrats in New Hampshire at a time is unclear, but Bennet pointed to a history of come-from behind candidates.

"What needs to happen is history has to be our guide," he said. "If history is our guide, the leading candidates [in the polls in the early stages of the campaign] in New Hampshire and Iowa never are the people who win. There's a lot that happens between now and the election when people start to make their decisions about how they want to exercise this incredibly solemn responsibility that they take as seriously as they do [and] that has a way of rewarding of candidates that keep showing up."

This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.

After late start, Bullock plays inside game with house parties

CONCORD, N.H. — At the home of former state Senate President Sylvia Larsen in a leafy neighborhood of the state capital, Montana Governor Steve Bullock spoke to about one hundred voters on Saturday morning to conclude his second visit to New Hampshire since he became one of the last candidates to enter the 2020 presidential race in May.

The house party was the second of trip for Bullock, who also met with voters at the home of Rochester, New Hampshire Mayor Caroline McCarley on Friday night. The appearances, both free and open to the public, were the only two events scheduled for Bullock over the weekend. 

Montana Governor Steve Bullock answered a question on the opioid epidemic at a house party in Concord, New Hampshire. During the question-and-answer session, Bullock also said that he wanted to "get rid of the filibuster."

The stop at the home of the former state Senate President in particular — an audience with one of the most influential women in the state and her politically-engaged friends — showed that as the Bullock campaign plays catch-up to the rest of the field, it is beginning with the party insiders who are most likely to appreciate the message of a battle-tested Democratic governor from a red state.

In his remarks, Bullock highlighted the success story of his three consecutive statewide election victories in Montana, a state that backed President Donald Trump 56 percent to 36 percent in the 2016 election. He argued that his experienced as a voter-getter in conservative areas made him the best candidate to defeat Trump and offered a critique of the national party.

"If we don't change our strategy, if we can't win back some of these places we lost, if we can't give people a reason to vote for us and not just against him, he's going to win again," he said in a booming but always optimistic voice. "I think it can be done. I've seen it done."

Like many red-state Democrats, Bullock opened by "soundly rejecting" the "behavior" of the President, but quickly reminded his audience that the 2020 election was about more than one man. He said that he wanted to "make our economy and our democracy work for us," a near-universal sentiment that he expanded upon later with the story of his face-off with the Koch brothers over  Medicaid expansion in the state.

Former state Senate President Sylvia Larsen introduced Bullock. She had previously met one-on-one with the Montana Governor in advance of the house party to learn more about him for the purpose of the speech.

He defended the population of Montana as "bigger than Vermont or Delaware, just throwing that out there" and described his state as one with a history of bitter conflict between "copper kings" who bought politicians and "regular folks" who fought for good government laws in the early 1900s. As the author of the anti-Citizens United legal brief that many liberal-leaning states signed on to, he placed himself firmly in the latter tradition, which he pitched as a model for the nation. "If you can stop the Koch brothers in Montana, you can stop them in New Hampshire, you can stop them in Washington," he said.

George Embley, a Bullock supporter from Webster, New Hampshire, attended because he watched the 2018 documentary Dark Money, a PBS film that explored the post-Citizens United campaign finance scandal in the Montana state legislature. His wife, Sally Embley, who served on the board of the Coalition for Open Democracy, a New Hampshire-based campaign finance reform group, also liked Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

"The economy is a huge issue and that's where she comes in," he said about the Massachusetts Senator. But while corruption in the economy was a longtime priority for the pair, they also considered electability. "You want to pick the winner," he said. "You want to pick someone who could beat Trump."

When asked about former Vice President Joe Biden, she defended the frontrunner from the charge that Bullock has the same appeal to middle America. "Personally, I'm not convinced Bullock has a better chance," she said.

Bullock spoke to voters one-on-one in a photo line after his speech. One voter told him not to run for Senate. "You may be the first that's ever said that," Bullock laughed.

Six months before voters head to the polls in New Hampshire, the first step for Bullock to have any chance in a primary or a general election is to raise his name recognition in the early-voting states. Rich Thuma, the New Hampshire political director for the Bullock campaign, said that he was working to familiarize voters with his candidate. "Our focus is making sure that voters really get a chance to hear from Governor Bullock," Thuma said.

He stressed the role of retail politics in building towards election day. Bullock has not yet qualified for the third or fourth debates. "The good thing about Iowa and New Hampshire is they're small states and have a very politically-engaged electorate," Thuma said.

In a post-speech gaggle with media members, Bullock himself emphasized the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire and pointed out that former Democratic nominees Barack Obama and John Kerry all trailed in the early stages of the campaign. "It's not the debates that actually nominate the candidates, it's you," Bullock told the small press corps.

He referenced another past nominee, former President Bill Clinton, in his stump speech as an example of a candidate who also entered the race late and faced similar obstacle. "'Oh Bullock, you're so late! How could you do this?'" he mimicked. "Let's forget about the fact that Bill Clinton didn't even announce until October." While Clinton also served as a small-state governor, he introduced himself to voters at the 1988 Democratic National Convention and headed the Democratic Leadership Council as the face of the party's moderate wing in the early 1990s.

About 100 voters gathered on Saturday morning beside a pool in the backyard of the home of former state Senate President Sylvia Larsen. The crowd skewed older than most in the state.

Former President Jimmy Carter emerged from obscurity as a small-state governor, but invested significant time and energy on the ground in Iowa to jumpstart his campaign, an expensive strategy more associated with multi-millionaire and former Maryland Congressman John Delaney than Bullock in the 2020 election cycle.

Without the resources of a former businessman like Delaney, Bullock seemed to make the most of his short visit to New Hampshire. One voter told him not to run for Senate as he posed for a picture after the speech. "You may be the first that's ever said that," Bullock laughed before he huddled to talk more with the supporter.

The interaction, beyond discussion of state-by-state strategy or even messaging around campaign finance reform, showed what Bullock needs a lot more of in New Hampshire to have a shot.

"These house parties offer an opportunity to the candidate to get to know people on a one-on-one basis," said Larsen after the event. "[They] don't raise the candidates money, but they certainly raise their awareness."

This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.

Yang takes high fives and freedom dividend to ACLU forum at law school

CONCORD, N.H. — The second-floor lecture hall at the University of New Hampshire Law School buzzed with anticipation on a Friday afternoon as a young crowd awaited the appearance of a long-shot candidate who has defied the odds to qualify for the third and fourth debates ahead of senators and governors with an army of small-dollar donors, a New York businessman who calls himself "the opposite" of the New York businessman who occupies the White House.

The dean of the law school, Megan Carpenter, had just concluded her remarks on civic engagement when entrepreneur Andrew Yang burst through a side door into the lecture hall, arms outstretched to high five audience members as he jogged up and down the aisle steps. Clipped to his suit jacket, his body microphone carried his fast-paced greeting through surround-sound speakers that dangled from the ceiling. He bent his knees and clapped back at the crowd like a basketball coach on the sidelines.

New York entrepreneur Andrew Yang addressed a law school lecture hall at a forum hosted by the American Civil Liberties Union in Concord, New Hampshire. He spoke for about 19 minutes and answered questions for additional 45.

It was an uncommon but refreshing scene on the campaign trail, more Apple CEO Steve Jobs or Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr than Montana Governor Steve Bullock. And it immediately highlighted that in a crowded field of almost two dozen candidates, Yang, for better or worse, is one-of-a-kind.

The Venture for America founder, who attended the prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire before Brown University and Columbia Law School, softened the edges of his privileged upbringing with a disarming honesty and a casual humor. "I didn't really have a good time here," Yang told the crowd about his four years in the Granite State.

He also distanced himself from his classmates with a stinging rebuke of their role in the 2008 financial crisis, a defining moment for his own career.

"I thought I knew why the financial crisis had happened, at least in large part: that all those smart kids out of Exeter and Brown and Columba had become Wall Street whiz kids and created the financial instruments that had wound up crashing the economy," he said. "And I thought well that's a disaster, what can we come up that would be a better use of their energies and ambitions and knowledge than becoming Wall Street whiz kids? So the idea I had is that they should move to places like Providence or Detroit or Baltimore or St. Louis or New Orleans to start a business."

In the controlled setting of his stump speech, Yang managed to better explain what the organization he founded actually does than in either of his two debate appearances, when he received three and nine minutes of speaking time respectively. He suggested a simple analogy, effective for an audience of mostly Democrats far away from the worlds of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Yang jogged up and down the aisles when he entered the room, arms outstretched to high five voters. He talked quickly through a body microphone that projected through surround-sound speakers.

"They could work at an early-stage company in one of those cities, get seasoned for two years, contribute and then maybe start a new business," Yang said. "Does that remind anyone of a program that they've heard of? Teach for America, right? It's Teach for America for entrepreneurs. So I thought to myself, what do you call Teach for America for entrepreneurs? Venture for America!"

More than anything else, it is Yang's association with the left-behind cities of the Rust Belt through Venture for America, his diagnosis of the problem in those places and his prescription for a solution for the whole country that has made him impossible to ignore in the Democratic primary. He cast himself as an outsider and a truth-teller, the candidate who best understands supporters of President Donald Trump — "a few people in this room likely were happy about [his election] because the odds are someone here supported Donald Trump," he said.

He asked members of the audience what they hear from cable news as explanations of Trump's unexpected victory. "Russia, Facebook, racism, Hillary Clinton, the FBI," Yang repeated before offering his critique. "They missed the central driver of his victory and the central of his victory is this: we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa — all the states he needed to win and did win," he said.

And he stressed that the problem is getting worse. He started with retail clerks, the most common job in New Hampshire and across the country, and predicted that Amazon would soon wipe out most of the sector. A middle-aged man attending his first political event after living in the first-in-the-nation state since fourth grade confessed the same fears in the lobby before the speech, when he noted that McDonald's is already replacing its minimum-wage workers with touchscreens.

Yang moved to call center employees — "In two or three years, the software's going to sound like this: 'Hey Andrew, how's it going?'" — and truck drivers — "My friends in California are working on trucks that can drive themselves" — next to underline his point.

Yang sparred with ACLU moderator Jeanne Hruska, who wanted the New York entrepreneur to commit to reducing the prison population by 50 percent during his administration.

The alarming prognostication, delivered from a place of authority by a well-connected entrepreneur, provided a built-in justification for drastic change. Yang was ready with the proposal. "If you're here today, at some point you heard this: There's an Asian man running for president who wants to give everyone $1,000 a month," he said.

After a laugh from the crowd, he defended the policy, which he refers to as a freedom dividend, as "a deeply American idea," supported by revolutionary writer Thomas Paine, civil rights leader Martin Luther King and libertarian economist Milton Friedman. He told the crowd that the U.S. House of Representative twice passed a guaranteed minimum income bill in the early 1970s and that one state has already implemented the plan.

"And what state is that?" Yang asked. What followed provided the best evidence that the New York entrepreneur has connected with a subset of voters, as members of the audience answered him, each time louder and faster, in a call-and-response.

"Alaska!"

"And how do they pay for it?"

"Oil!"

"And what is the oil of the 21st century?"

"Tech!"

Yang later that night appeared at a one-room public library, packed wall-to-wall with people, in Plaistow, New Hampshire. To his credit, the forum in Concord, New Hampshire, sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), did not allow him to continue with friendly questions from supporters all throughout the question-and-answer session.

The favorite candidate of many libertarian-leaning Democrats notably committed to reducing the prison population, but declined to put a number on his proposal. Both the ACLU moderator and a member of the audience pressed him to lower the incarceration rate by 50 percent.

"We love when people respond because they're thinking about our issues," said ACLU political director Jeanne Hruska. "The advantage of this forum is we have a forum where we get to talk exclusively about civil rights," she added later.

Yang answered questions about privacy rights, LGBTQ rights, disability rights and abortion rights in the ACLU forum. The toughest question of the afternoon asked whether his freedom dividend would cause inflationary pressure.

He answered questions about privacy rights and LGBTQ rights before fielding a difficult question on the inflationary pressure of his signature proposal to give every American adult $1,000 a month. His answer went back to the financial crisis, when he said the bank bailout did not cause inflation. "The inflation concern really is a fiction, more or less, because we've been printing money for the banks for a long time and there's not been inflationary pressure," he said.

Yvan Lamothe, a Haitian-American immigrant from Weare, New Hampshire who asked the question, described Yang as "fresh, genuine [and] down-to-earth," but said he is "looking for common sense" and "not over-promising."

Charlie Martone of Concord, New Hampshire similarly praised Yang as a "thoughtful individual" with "carefully considered positions on virtually every issue," but said for New Hampshirites, "that doesn't equal a vote." He said Yang is "doing the right thing" if he wants to break into the top tier of candidates by traveling across the Granite State and meeting with voters.

"He's becoming better known."

This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.

Trump holds rally in Manchester, weighs into Democratic primary

​​MANCHESTER, N.H. — In the largest arena in the largest city in the state, President Donald Trump hosted one of his signature rallies on Thursday night in New Hampshire, where he weighed into the first-in-the-nation Democratic primary, renewed his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and doubled down on his defense of gun rights.

Trump, who last appeared at the 12,000-seat SNHU Arena the night before the 2016 election, spoke for over an hour and a half to a crowd that lined up at least eight blocks down the closed-off street three hours prior to the scheduled start time on a hot afternoon. His arrival was preceded by remarks from local Republican elected officials and his 6-foot-8 campaign manager — "one of the tallest human beings I've ever seen — Brad Parscale.

President Donald Trump polled the crowd on whether his 2020 campaign slogan should be "Make America Great Again" or "Keep America Great" after picking up a hat from an audience member.

Supporters in the second level struggled to hear the Republican lawmakers, a preview of technical difficulties to come as many cleared out of their upper-deck seats to find a better place to listen during Trump's speech. Others yelled "Louder!" through the first couple minutes of his speech, but apparently remained satisfied enough to stay.

Parscale, who strode down the long walkway to the podium hurling Make America Great Again hats into the stand, said that he expected to flip New Hampshire in 2020. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton carried the state by two thousand votes four years ago. He told the crowd that the President was backstage and left them with a simple instruction: "Enjoy the music."

A sequence of classic rock songs followed as the supporters turned their attention to a small black curtain in the corner of the stadium. A long walkway stretched to the middle of the floor, where a small stage stood in the middle of a sea of red hats that extended back to the large roped-off media section. The lower bowl of the minor league hockey stadium was almost completely full and the upper bowl, despite patches of empty seats that some television cameras captured in the background, buzzed with excitement.

As each song ticked into its third or fourth minute, all eyes returned to the back corner. All cameras, lifted above the crowd, were trained on the black curtain. "The animals are getting restless," one supporter in the second deck said after the third song passed and the President had not yet appeared.

The arena darkened for a light show during the ear-splitting song "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC, which immediately preceded the entrance of Trump to "Proud to Be An American."

The eerie synthesizer and anticipatory lyrics of Phil Collins — "I can feel it coming in the air tonight" — first set the audience on edge. The foreboding sound of the Rolling Stones — "Don't play with me, cause you're playing with fire" — blared over the speakers next. And finally, a blinking and flashing light show for "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC, blasted at an ear-splitting volume, brought the crowd to its feet. The black curtain was ripped away to reveal a flag-draped background and within seconds, Trump entered as the warm and patriotic "Proud to Be An American" washed over the crowd.

After several minutes of cheering as Trump waved from the walkway and paced the stage, the President thanked the Granite State for its role in his unprecedented rise to the White House in 2016. "You remember those primaries?" he asked. "That primary came around and remember what happened during the primary? Trump should come in third or fourth, and we came in easily number one, and that was the beginning." 

The double-digit victory legitimized the New York businessman as the Republican frontrunner following his surprise loss to Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the Iowa caucuses and kickstarted his momentum into Super Tuesday.

While Trump later returned to the 2016 campaign, he quickly pivoted to the 2020 contest. He told the crowd that he was there to launch his reelection bid in New Hampshire and bashed a series of head-to-head polls that showed Democratic candidates "tied" with him in the state. A Fox News survey released that day found all four top-tier Democrats leading Trump nationwide. 

Trump applauded his supporters, gathered around the stage in a sea of red "Make America Great Again" hats, on the long walkway as he entered the arena.

The President has one of his lowest approval ratings in any swing state in New Hampshire, which is considered more difficult for him to carry than the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin because of its not-insignificant population of independents and Never-Trump Republicans.

One supporter in the second level, a Manchester resident who attended with his wife, doubted whether Trump would pick up New Hampshire. He said he was "embarrassed" that the state is no longer a conservative foothold in the liberal New England region and blamed recent arrivals — "I won't say from where" — to cities along the Seacoast for tilting the balance.

Trump himself claimed without evidence in his speech that he only lost the state because of large-scale voter fraud. "I hate to tell you we should've won New Hampshire," he said. "That was taken away. New Hampshire was taken away. It was taken away from us." He told reporters before the event that "thousands and thousands of people, coming in from locations unknown" swayed the outcome. "But I know where their location was," he added.

In the early days of his presidency, the conspiracy theory drove Trump to assemble a short-lived voter fraud commission headed by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. The commission reportedly found no evidence to the support the claims. The renewed allegations on Thursday night, which called into question whether the President would accept the outcome of the 2020 election if he lost, drew a strong rebuke from the chair of the Federal Election Commission.

As expected for his visit to the home of the first-in-the-nation primary, Trump continued his running commentary on the Democratic contenders, his possible opponents for the general election. "You got Pocahontas is rising. We got Kamala. Kamala is falling. You got Beto. Beto is like gone," he said as he mimicked a cuckoo sign next to his head. The former Texas Congressman suspended his campaign to respond to a mass shooting in his hometown of El Paso, Texas earlier in the month. O'Rourke has also escalated his verbal attacks on the President in recent weeks.

Trump thrilled the crowd with his attacks on his Democratic rivals, his defense of the Second Amendment and his shout-out to former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who is mulling a Senate bid in the Granite State.

But Trump zeroed in on his most likely opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. "Is there anything better than a Trump rally?" he asked rhetorically. "What about a sleepy Joe Biden rally? Well he's made some beauties. I sort of hope it's him." He later offered a prediction: "I think sleepy Joe may be able to limp across the finish line." 

The comments echoed the feelings of his supporters in line hours earlier, who could not wait for Trump to debate Biden in the general election. One repeatedly told others that the part of the line that looped around the block was actually for a Biden event, a punch line that hit close to home for a campaign that has struggled with crowd size. Another complained that the Democratic Party had shifted far to the left and called Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren "just like Hillary but more socialist."

With Democratic candidates hammering his record on trade and inequality every day on the campaign trail, Trump tried out an economic argument for his reelection at the rally. "You have no choice but to vote for me because your 401(k)s, down the tubes," he said. "Everything's going to be down the tubes, so whether you love me or hate me, you got to vote for me." 

But the crux of his message came back to cultural grievance. He complained about the treatment of police officers and sneered that "the radical Democrats" are looking down at his voters. "They view everybody as fascist and Nazis. They used the term Nazi. This was a term, you couldn't even use it. Now they use it like on a regular basis. Nazi," Trump annunciated at the crowd. "He's a Nazi. Think of that. He's a Nazi."

His loudest applause line came when he defended the Second Amendment — and seemed to shut the door on new gun control legislation in the wake of several mass shootings. "It's not the gun that pulls the trigger," Trump repeated from his White House address. "It's the person holding the gun." He instead proposed reopening mental institutions closed during the 1970s and 1980s.

The crowd on the floor thinned considerably and large sections of the upper deck sat empty as Trump continued into the second hour of his speech. He eventually spoke for over one hour and thirty-five minutes.

He acknowledged seated attendees including New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. His former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, a Windham, New Hampshire resident who has teased a Senate bid in recent weeks, also received a shout-out but did not take the stage as some expected. Trump seemed to endorse the lobbyist and political operative's primary campaign. "He would be fantastic," he said. 

"You talk to your family, you talk to your wife and you make a decision," he added. "They're all saying, 'Are you going to support him?' I said, 'I don't know if he's running.' So Corey, let us know please."

As the President continued into his second hour on stage, when he touted his accomplishments on longtime Republican wish-list items like abortion, the individual mandate, Supreme Court justices and military spending, some of his supporters seemed to leave early. Some second-deck sections were largely empty by the end and the floor noticeably thinned out.

Yet with the attacks on his Democratic rivals, voter fraud conspiracy theories and applause lines on hot-button issues, one thing was for sure: one year and three months before election day, Trump is now running.

This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.