Someone identifying as a different gender than their biological sex isn't sexualizing them. If you all want to join in on this conversation, you need to stop associating homosexuality and transgender folks with sexual deviancy. No one is thinking about them in a sexual manner but you guys.

>It would certainly be a great way to get to boston for sporting events and concerts without having to drive to the commuter rail.

I live on the Seacoast and it's super convenient to take the Amtrak down to Boston. Driving down to Boston is a nightmare, but taking the train down is relatively painless by comparison since you just get plopped at North Station. It's one big benefits of living on the Seacoast instead of living off the I-93 corridor where I grew up.

Hell, even taking the C&J to Logan is much more convenient than driving down.

I think you overestimate how much voters care about the primary and underestimate how much they care about actual policy. Case in point, the Republicans straight up canceled a bunch of their primaries going into 2020 and voters did not punish them for that.

If Biden is running again, he's the de facto nominee and Democratic primary turn out would be low regardless. If he opts not to run, then maybe this has a small impact. Furthermore, the primary really only impact Democratic voters or Democratic leaning independents, not potential swing voters who don't vote in the primary anyways.

Regardless, whatever small spat happens over the primary will largely be forgotten by the general election. It's actually better to pull off this band-aid now with a sitting Democratic President running for a second term rather than later when the primary actually matters.

This was going to happen sooner or later. I understand where the DNC is coming from, Iowa was a poor representative of the general electorate and are a poor predictor of what the national election would look like. NH isn't great either, but at least we're more representative of suburbia/college educated voters.

I think you're eyeing this a bit too vindictively. The DNC's purpose here is not to specifically spite NH, but make a more dynamic primary process that will respond to electorate and more relevant to the general election. Hence why you have Georgia and Michigan moving forward since both of those states are more relevant in the general election. In future years they'd likely move other states forwards or backwards based on the general election results. That's a good thing.

I also don't really care what happens with RNC. Their party and their primaries are way more of a shit show than the DNC. Their winner take all system is atrociously bad and it's partly the reason why we ended up with Trump in the first place.

So NH can indeed go second if they were to go along with the rules? That's not Super Tuesday.

Basically, they're going to throw out our primary results entirely in favor of this law? As an NH Democratic voter, that's far more annoying than NH being moved a week behind SC which is effectively no different than a week after the Iowa caucus.

Did they move NH further back? The original proposition I read was SC and then NV and NH the same day followed by MI after. It was Iowa that got booted way back.

I don't really know if it it'll impact the Democratic party at a federal level, but it may have a big impact at the state level with how much revenue the primary brings to New Hampshire.

Personally, I hope New Hampshire relents. We're still going second which isn't really all the different than before considering Iowa's caucus happened before NH's primary. I've personally always thought that NH, SC, and NV should all vote on the same day since that's a fairly diverse sample size and all three states are small enough media market wise that small time candidates wouldn't necessarily get boxed out by the campaigns with the big war chests.

Not really.

State level elections tend to shake out differently than federal elections. That's due, in part, to the fact that the state is gerrymandered in favor of Republicans at the state level. Republicans have also done well coasting off of Sununu's popularity. Democrats did manage to win the House/Senate in 2018, and narrowly lost the house this year (despite it being Republican favored). It's not like the Democrats haven't held the Governors mansion in the past 20 years. Lynch, Shaheen, and Hassan were Democratic governors. Republicans actually had a bit of a rocky time with their candidates up until Sununu.

If you look at federal election results, things are actually pretty dire for Republicans. You can see the results most strikingly in Hillsborough County which contains about 1/3rd of the state's population. Historically, Republicans have done well in suburbs around Manchester, but they've shifted pretty drastically leftward. Goffstown, Bedford, Hooksett, etc. All shifted ten points towards Democrats since 2016. The most striking results is Merrimack, which has shifted 15 points. It's emblematic of how much Republicans have lost in elections nationally. Derry, is also of note since it's pretty deep red and Democrats only lost it by about 2 points this year.

Also of note, Dover, which is one of the bluest cities in the state, has also shifted 15 points towards Democrats and had some of the highest turn out in the state this cycle. That's bleeding over to Rochester, formally a red stronghold, as residents from Portsmouth/Dover are priced out of Dover and move to Rochester. Rochester is pretty purple now which is kind of crazy.

I'm also not convinced that the NH Republicans, which seem to have zero idea of what an electable candidate looks like, won't nominate a Trump candidate for Governor and get blown out by a moderate. If you look at the candidates they've ran for our House and Senate elections, since 2018, they're all crazy people. The strongest people on their bench are like Gatsas and Edleblut, who are both terrible statewide candidates.

Well, she's not a governor, she's a mayor. She's also only been mayor since 2017 so about six years? Gatsas was mayor from 2009 until he lost to her in 2017 so he was in office for longer than she had been.

edit: I should probably clarify, she started her term in 2018, she was elected in November of 2017. She's still serving her second term and will be up for reelection again this year.

Wait, I'm wrong and my math is bad. It's three terms.

She's been fine in Manchester. She was dealt a bit of a shitty hand since Gatsas was a terrible mayor, and the homeless problem accelerated due to no fault of her own. She's also been left to tackle the school redistricting issue that Gatsas completely ignored while he was there. Manchester has a bit of a weird system where the Mayor is also head of the school board.

My parents live in Manchester and do a lot of volunteer work. They like her quite a bit.

I believe most of the Dems that have run against Sununu are pro-legalization. I would argue that Hassan/Pappas are running far to the right on the state's lean on issues like minimum wage/marijuana legalization.

NH GOP is pretty much on life support anyways. They're pretty much just coasting on Sununu's coattails. The state has lurched pretty far leftward the past six years. Once Sununus out of office, Dems will take the House and the Senate and likely legalize weed. Executive Council may be out of reach since it's pretty horrifically gerrymandered.

As long as Pappas doesn't run for Governor, we should be fine. Pretty sure he'll be running for Senate once Shaheen retires in 26. She'll be almost 80. I imagine our next Governor will end up being someone like Joyce Craig.

What is this perpetual needs to both sides the issue? Republicans tried to overthrow the government two years ago. Democrats pointed out that Russians interfered with our election. Those are two vastly different thing in both scale and severity.

You know, one of my predictions was that NH actually shifted ever so slightly bluer through the pandemic and I might be right here. It's like the opposite of Florida where retires flooded the states en masse, NH gained a small bit of blue work from home voters from greater Boston.

This is unusual since a lot of immigration into the state are red voters from Mass seeking to move to NH as a tax haven. It's one of the reasons why Salem and Derry are such red strongholds relative to swingy cities like Manchester.

I'm fairly convinced that once Sununu retires that the GOP in NH is just going to implode entirely.