For generations New Hampshire has traded in one unusual commodity: the first word on who might rule the country. Men and women who want the White House come to its diners and town halls to be looked over, and the state looks them over with the calm of a buyer who knows the goods will keep coming back. This autumn they came early, and they came with a pretext.
The pretext is Chris Pappas. He is a four-term congressman and the Democratic nominee for the Senate seat Jeanne Shaheen is giving up, and, as the Boston Globe reported, he is better known for a low-key manner and center-left politics than for winning news cycles. At least seven prominent Democrats have now campaigned at his side. The latest was Kamala Harris, a two-time presidential candidate who is weighing a 2028 run and who came through over the weekend. Before her came Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom and Mark Kelly, the three who lead early New Hampshire polls of the possible 2028 field, and then Andy Beshear, Ruben Gallego and Raphael Warnock.
The procession
It began in the summer of 2025 with Gallego, the Arizona senator, who arrived on the strength of his 2024 victory in a state Trump also carried. Buttigieg, still well liked here after his narrow second place in the 2020 primary, came twice. In February he and Pappas greeted voters at Puritan Backroom, the Pappas family’s well-known restaurant in Manchester. Earlier this month, at the Rochester Opera House, he probably drew the largest crowd of any of the possible candidates, speaking for Pappas and also for Cinde Warmington, the nominee for governor, and Stefany Shaheen, the nominee for Congress. Newsom came the weekend before Harris to a lot of excitement among activists and volunteers, and he said he was simply “supporting other people’s campaigns all across the country.”
Harris also stayed away from the future in public. She talked about this year.
For the last year and a half, we have been pissed.
The friendly crowd murmured in recognition. One woman had brought along Harris’s campaign memoir, 107 Days. The coming election, Harris said, was the “moment where the people get to speak… and that is so darn exciting.”
Nobody says the year out loud. Everybody hears it anyway.
A demotion in Austin
The visits matter so much because New Hampshire has just lost its place on paper. At its summer meeting in Austin in August, the Democratic National Committee approved a 2028 calendar that opens in South Carolina. According to ABC News, South Carolina votes on Jan. 22, Nevada on Feb. 1 and New Hampshire on Feb. 8. Earlier, in the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, South Carolina beat Nevada 26-19 for the first slot, and New Hampshire’s own bid won only four votes, two of them from its own members on the panel. New Hampshire law, meanwhile, requires the state to hold the first primary. The two sets of rules collided in 2024 and left confusion behind, and local Democrats are bracing for it to happen again.
Pappas criticised the decision in a video at the time and admitted it put the state in a “tough position.” His answer was to carry on as before: “But we’ve got to continue to do what we do best: keep inviting national Democratic leaders to come to New Hampshire,” he said. “I expect that they’re going to continue to show up between now and the Nov. 3 general election.”
A reflection, not a finding: when a small place loses a title it has held for a long time, it often goes on behaving as though it still holds it, and waits to see whether the powerful will play along. So far the powerful have played along.
“California Chris”
Pappas’s opponent is John E. Sununu, who was in the Senate from 2003 to 2009 and is running on a comeback that runs through towns like Bedford. The national environment has turned against the GOP, and Republicans have quietly come to see this purple state as a place to go on the attack. Sununu has drawn heavy outside spending even though he trails in most polls. A Saint Anselm College survey released last week put Pappas ahead 50 percent to 43. TIME has reported that Republicans are still putting money into the state.
Sununu has tried to make the visitors a weight around Pappas’s neck, above all the ones most associated with coastal liberalism. Walking quickly past the booths at a pumpkin festival in Laconia on Saturday, he told the Globe: “It’s like California Chris. He’s bringing in these people from California, which is not a model for the country. The state is doing very poorly. It’s certainly not a model for New Hampshire.”
His own side has sent nobody. New Hampshire still holds the first Republican primary, yet no top-tier Republican 2028 hopeful has come to campaign for him, which may reflect his decision to present himself as an independent. His brother Chris Sununu, the popular former governor, said John was “trying to really keep this campaign local.” “He doesn’t rely on all these big outside national folks coming in because that’s not New Hampshire, right?” he said. “They don’t know what’s best for New Hampshire.”
Raymond Buckley, chairman of the state Democratic Party, laughed at the attack and said Republicans were “out of gas” with Trump unpopular. He said a well-known Democrat speaking at a canvass launch “does increase the number of people, not only at the kickoff, but going and knocking on doors afterward.” The visitors have also raised money for the whole ticket. “All our national friends,” he said, “have been terrific.”
Jesse Lehrich, a Democratic strategist who runs a newsletter and podcast about 2028, sees nothing surprising in it. “He’s a pretty run-of-the-mill Democrat, and New Hampshire is one of the few states on the 2026 Senate map where the national Democratic Party isn’t entirely toxic,” he said. Whatever happens to the calendar, he added, “going to New Hampshire is still a surefire way to get some attention and turn some heads.”
After November
Local Democrats hope the visitors keep coming after Nov. 3, once there is no Senate race to give them a reason. In Portsmouth, after Harris spoke, a retiree named Rita Bowlby left without asking for a handshake or a selfie. She had met Harris before and wanted others to have their turn. This year she had also met Beshear on his trip and called him “impressive.” She was glad they were all coming, she said, and hoped to see more. “We have a lot of good candidates — including Kamala.”