Republicans for "Anybody but Bush":
SLIP SLIDING AWAY
Bush Slips -- Among Republicans
by John Nichols
The record-high turnout in the New Hampshire Democratic primary -- 219,787 Granite
State voters took Democratic ballots Tuesday, shattering the previous record of 170,000
in 1992 -- is being read as a signal that voters in one New England state, and most likely
elsewhere, are enthusiastic about the prospect of picking a challenger for George W.
Bush. And the turnout in the Democratic primary is not even the best indicator of the
anti-Bush fervor in New Hampshire, a state that in 2000 gave four critical electoral votes to
the man who secured the presidency by a razor-thin Electoral College margin of 271-267.
Many New Hampshire primary participants decided to skip the formalities and simply vote
against the president in Tuesday's Republican primary. Thousands of these Bush-bashing
Republicans went so far as to write in the names of Democratic presidential contenders.
Under New Hampshire law, only Democrats and independents were permitted to
participate in Tuesday's Democratic presidential primary. That meant that Republicans
who wanted to register their opposition to Bush had to do so in their own party's primary.
A remarkable number of them did just that.
One in seven Republican primary voters cast ballots for candidates other than Bush,
holding the president to just 85 percent of the 62,927 ballots cast. In some parts of the
state, such as southwest New Hampshire's Monadnock Region, a historic bastion of
moderate Republicanism, Bush did even worse. In Swanzey, for instance, 37 percent of
GOP primary voters rejected Bush. In nearby Surry, almost 29 percent of the people who
took Republican ballots voted against the Republican president, while a number of other
towns across the region saw anti-Bush votes of more than 20 percent in the GOP
primary.
Few of the anti-Bush votes went to the 13 unknown Republicans whose names appeared
on GOP ballots along with the president's. Instead, top Democratic contenders reaped
write-in votes.
U.S. Senator John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, who won the Democratic primary, came in
second to Bush in the Republican contest, winning 3,009 votes. Kerry name was written
in on almost 5 percent of all GOP ballots. Who were these Republicans renegades for
Kerry? People like 61-year-old retired teacher David Anderson. A Vietnam veteran,
Anderson told New Hampshire's Concord Monitor newspaper that he wrote in Kerry's
name because the senator, also a veteran, understands the folly of carrying on a failed
war. "I feel a commander, the president of the United States, ought to be a veteran,"
explained Anderson, who says his top priority is getting U.S. troops out of Iraq
Kerry wasn't the only Democrat who appealed to Republicans. In third place on the
Republican side of the ledger was former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who won 1,888
votes, more than 3 percent of the GOP total. Retired General Wesley Clark secured
1,467 Republican votes, while almost 2,000 additional Republican primary votes were
cast for North Carolina Senator John Edwards, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, Ohio
Representative Dennis Kucinich and the Rev. Al Sharpton.
In all, 8,279 primary voters wrote in the names of Democratic challengers to Bush on their
Republican ballots.
That's a significant number. In the 2000 general election, Bush beat Democrat Al Gore in
New Hampshire by just 7,212 votes. Had Gore won New Hampshire, he would have
become president, regardless of how the disputed Florida recount was resolved.
The prospect that Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters in New
Hampshire, and nationally, might be developing doubts about whether Bush should be
reelected is the ultimate nightmare for the Bush political team. White House political czar
Karl Rove begins his calculations with an assumption that Republicans will be united in
their support of the president's reelection. But the president's deficit-heavy fiscal policies,
his support for free-trade initiatives that have undermined the country's manufacturing
sector, and growing doubts about this administration's military adventurism abroad appear
to have irked not just Democrats and independents, but also a growing number of
Republicans.
The Bush White House is taking this slippage seriously. U.S. Senator John McCain,
R-Arizona, who beat Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire Republican primary, was
dispatched to the Granite State before Tuesday's primary, in order to pump up the
president's prospects, as were Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and New York
Governor George Pataki. And Bush, himself, jetted into the state on Thursday, effectively
acknowledging that state Republican Party chair Jane Millerick was right when she said,
"What we have recognized is that New Hampshire is a swing state."
But can the president pull independent-minded Republicans, and Republican-minded
independents, back to him? That task could prove to be tougher than the job of finding
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
No one doubts that Democrats in New Hampshire, and elsewhere, are angry with the
president. Indeed, if there was one message that has come through loud and clear during
the first stages of the race for the Democratic nomination, it was that Democrats in the
first-in-the-nation primary state -- like their peers in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of
Iowa -- have proven to be less interested in ideological distinctions between Democratic
contenders than they are in picking a candidate who will beat Bush.
Exit polls conducted on Tuesday in New Hampshire did not merely sample the opinions
of Democrats. They also questioned independent voters, who make up almost 40 percent
of the New Hampshire electorate. A Democratic primary exit poll conducted for
Associated Press and various television networks found that nine in ten independents
were worried about the direction of the U.S. economy. Eight in ten told the pollsters that
some or all of the tax cuts pushed by the Bush administration should be canceled. Forty
percent of the independents questioned in the poll said they were angry with Bush, while
another 40 percent said they were simply dissatisfied with the president.
Bush aides are quick to dismiss the polling numbers.
But how will they dismiss the results of the New Hampshire Republican primary, where
every seventh voter cast a ballot for anyone-but-Bush?
John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, has covered progressive politics
and activism in the United States and abroad for more than a decade. He is currently the
editor of the editorial page of Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times. Nichols is the author
of two books: It's the Media, Stupid and Jews for Buchanan.
Copyright © 2004 The Nation
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