MILFORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE – SEPTEMBER 4: 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy greets people while walking in a Labor Day Parade on September 4, 2023 in Milford, New Hampshire. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Last week, virtually every 2024 Republican presidential candidate was in New Hampshire, converging on the first-in-the-nation primary state for a big GOP summit and criss-crossing the state for town halls and other events while they were there.
NBC10 Boston has been tracking these visits to the Granite State in our New Hampshire Primary candidate tracker, and with the primary three months away, we took a look at who's spent the most time there since Labor Day weekend, when campaigning for the primary typically ramps up.
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According to the data collected for the 2024 candidate tracker, Vivek Ramaswamy has held the most campaign events in New Hampshire since Sept. 1 by far, with 33, triple the number of the closest runners-up, Nikki Haley (11) and Mike Pence (10).
Chris Christie has held eight New Hampshire events in that time, followed by Tim Scott and Doug Burgum with six, Ryan Binkley with five and Ron DeSantis and Asa Hutchinson with four.
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Those stops include filing for the primary at the Secretary of State's Office and speeches and events at last week's First in the Nation Leadership Summit in Nashua, at which 10 Republican presidential candidates spoke.
Former President Donald Trump, who is leading the GOP pack by wide margin in the polls, has made only one New Hampshire stop during that time, a campaign event held Oct. 9 in Wolfeboro. He was the only major Republican candidate who chose to skip last week's First in the Nation Leadership Summit.
Trump is scheduled to make two more stops in the state on Monday, when he files for the primary and then holds a campaign rally in Derry.
On the Democratic side, President Joe Biden hasn't been to New Hampshire since April, when he spoke at the New Hampshire Port Authority in Portsmouth. That's not particularly surprising, since the Democratic National Committee has been working (unsuccessfully, so far) to remove New Hampshire from its traditional place in the presidential primary pecking order.
Marianne Williamson, who is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has held 11 events in New Hampshire since Sept. 1.
And Robert F. Kennedy, who was running as a Democrat but has since decided to run as an independent, has made four stops of his own.
But do the number of visits a candidate makes in New Hampshire even matter? That's a good question.
"Putting in hours and days is no guarantee it's going to translate into increased poll numbers," Dean Spiliotes, a Southern New Hampshire University political scientist, told us ahead of the 2016 primary. And that still appears to apply today.
Leading up to that year's primary, Trump trailed Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Rick Perry in total New Hampshire campaign events, and all three of those candidates dropped out before the primary even happened. And Chris Christie led the field in 2016 visits with five times as many events as Trump. But Trump won the 2016 New Hampshire primary easily, while Christie finished sixth.
On the Democratic side, however, Bernie Sanders slightly outpaced frontrunner Hilary Clinton in total New Hampshire events and wound up defeating her by a wide margin in that year's primary.
According to our 2020 candidate tracker, Democrats Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard held the most New Hampshire events, with 133 and 130, respectively, followed by Pete Buttigieg at 90, Amy Klobuchar at 89, Bernie Sanders at 87 and Elizabeth Warren at 78. Sanders wound up winning, although he just narrowly beat out Buttigieg. Joe Biden finished fifth in that year's primary, though he entered the race late and was only able to rack up 46 New Hampshire stops.
Trump, the Republican incumbent, made only four stops in the Granite State and won the primary easily, but his only competition was former Massachusetts governor and Libertarian vice presidential candidate William Weld, who made a whopping 151 stops in New Hampshire during that campaign cycle.
The date of the 2024 primary has not yet been set, as Secretary of State David Scanlan is waiting for things to settle in other states before scheduling the contest.
New Hampshire, with its state law requiring its primaries to be held first, is defying the DNC's new primary calendar, which calls for South Carolina to kick off voting on Feb. 3, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada. The shift came at Biden's request in a bid to empower Black and other minority voters crucial to the party’s base.
NBC10 Boston's candidate tracker compiles campaign visits collected from media reports, candidate schedules and plans confirmed by the station. Did we miss an event? Email marc.fortier@nbcuni.com with details and we'll add it to our list.
