On the 50th anniversary of New Hampshire passing a law to protect its first-in-the-nation presidential primary, those who created and defended it for decades spoke with confidence about its future.
“We are going to be first, no doubt about that,” said Jim Splaine, a longtime former Democratic lawmaker from Portsmouth who was the sole sponsor of House Bill 73, the law mandating New Hampshire will hold the first presidential primary. It passed on May 27, 1975. “New Hampshire can hold our date whenever we want because we pay for it. And the Republicans are going to come so the Democrats need to come in order to be competitive in November of ’28.”
Jim Splaine, a Portsmouth Democrat and former state representative and state senator, speaks May 27, 2025 at the State House during an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary law.
Gov. Kelly Ayotte spoke of the importance of the primary to the state and nation during a ceremony in Executive Council Chambers.
“When you come into New Hampshire and you campaign you have to actually talk to people, you have to go shake their hands, you’ve got to answer their questions,” Ayotte said. “You don’t get to just make a speech on a tarmac. You actually have to meet the people and hear their real concerns. People in New Hampshire I think have a great (ability) to size up the candidates.”
NH’s primary status has faced challenges, including 2024
New Hampshire held its first primary in 1920 and has managed to hold the leadoff position since then, but not without fierce challenges from competing states and the political parties.
Most recently, in 2024, the Democratic National Committee tapped South Carolina to lead off the Democratic presidential primaries. After Joe Biden was trounced in the 2020 New Hampshire primary, coming in fifth behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, Biden scored a major political comeback en route to the presidency by winning South Carolina, championed in that state by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn.
The DNC said it had given South Carolina the leadoff position because the state better reflected the nation’s racial diversity, but analysts have also suggested the national party wanted to give Biden’s re-election campaign an easy victory. Whatever the reason, Biden didn’t campaign in New Hampshire (he still won due to a write-in campaign orchestrated by state party leaders). Biden therefore did not face the vetting a candidate forced to do retail politicking in New Hampshire would normally be forced to do. Following a disastrous debate performance, he dropped out of the race prior to the Democratic National Convention, which nominated Kamala Harris to be the party’s mantle bearer.
“For the national Democrats, the lesson they should have learned is that we need a strong attendance of candidates at the New Hampshire presidential primary in 2028,” Splaine said.
Chris Ager, a former GOP chair who is helping to form a nonprofit committee to promote the primary, said he expects Republicans will campaign in 2028, as they did in 2024.
“The Republican side looks very good for the first in the nation for New Hampshire,” Ager said. “There’s been no organized opposition and our former speaker, Bill O’Brien, is on the RNC Rules Committee, and we have a very good relationship with the RNC … but we don’t want to become complacent.”
Why New Hampshire passed primary protection law in 1975
Gov. Kelly Ayotte speaks May 27, 2025 at the State House during an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary law.
The presidential primaries grew out of a wave of progressive initiatives aimed at taking power away from party bosses and returning it to the people. Other significant reforms of this era included constitutional amendments mandating the direct election of U.S. senators (1913) and women’s right to vote (1920).
While the New Hampshire presidential primary went largely unchallenged for decades, by the late 1960s, questions began to arise.
As Splaine tells it, in 1968, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, running on an anti-Vietnam War platform, nearly defeated president Lyndon Johnson and won 20 of New Hampshire’s 24 delegates. This weak showing influenced Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election in 1968.
The 1972 primary saw a bruising fight between Maine’s Edmund Muskie and South Dakota’s George McGovern. Nixon’s trouncing of McGovern in the general election was followed closely by the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation and an unease settled over American electoral politics, Splaine said.
“Leading up to the 1976 presidential election, there was a lot of discussion regionally among Democrats and Republicans to hold a ‘New England primary’ in early 1976,” Splaine wrote in a history of his bill published in the 2021 N.H. Manual for the General Court. “Many Democrats and Republicans in our state, burned-out because of infighting and the results of Watergate, liked that idea since it would take some of the ferocity from our internal politics.”
Splaine did not like the idea of a regional primary and filed a bill to set the New Hampshire presidential primary one week earlier. The bill morphed as it went through committee hearings, but Splaine said it never would have become law without the efforts of Republican Gov. Meldrim Thomson. Thomson used his political muscle to move the bill forward and advised Splaine against having a committee pick the date of the primary because it would become a partisan fight.
Splaine recalls Thomson telling him: “Pick one. Don’t make it a committee. Pick one.”
After deciding the “one” shouldn’t be the governor or any other politician, the bill’s supporters determined the Secretary of State would choose the date and from 1976 to 2022, that meant Secretary of State Bill Gardner made that critical decision.
What experts expect for NH primary in 2028
“If you think about what happened this time you can make the case that the rigors of participating in the New Hampshire primary play an important role for future potential presidents because they learn from the people here,” Gardner said. “It’s an education for both sides. It educates the candidates and it educates the voters.”
Beyond tradition and engaged voters, Gardner points to the ease with which candidates can get on the presidential primary ballot in New Hampshire. It costs $1,000 or if you’re indigent you can get on the ballot without paying with 10 signatures from each of the 10 counties.
Gardner retired in 2022 and now his successor, David Scanlan, bears the responsibility for setting the primary date. And he’s not taking anything for granted.
“Right now, what we know is it’s going to be a wide-open primary for both parties,” Scanlan said. “In terms of what the DNC is going to do and what the RNC is going to do in terms of scheduling, we don’t know yet. We will just watch closely and once we know what the landscape looks like we will take the appropriate steps.”
Scanlan credits New Hampshire Democrats for running a write-in campaign for Biden and having their delegates seated at the convention despite threats from the national party.
“I consider that a success,” Scanlan said on a recent podcast. “We held on to the presidential primary first in the nation status for another year and look forward to doing the same thing in 2028.”
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Defenders of NH primary honored; experts bullish on 2028
