Source: Politics<\/p>\n
Bill Gardner is leaving, but New Hampshire isn’t going to be any less militant about protecting its legendary perch in presidential politics.<\/p>\n
Gardner has for several decades served as the chief defender of New Hampshire\u2019s first-in-the-nation role at the top of the presidential primary calendar. Gardner, a Democrat, announced on Monday that he would soon be stepping down<\/a> as the state\u2019s secretary of state, a role he has held since 1976. <\/p>\n He has sometimes gone to extreme lengths to defend the small northeastern state\u2019s role as presidential kingmaker \u2014 something Gardner has said he viewed as one of his main responsibilities, with state law giving the secretary of state authority to set the primary date and thwart other states\u2019 efforts to jump the line.<\/p>\n During a 2012 jailbreak by a handful of states looking to shift their contests forward during the contested Republican primary, Gardner threatened to schedule New Hampshire\u2019s contest in December 2011 if that\u2019s what it took to preserve New Hampshire\u2019s spot as the first primary state. (POLITICO\u2019s headline at the time<\/a>: \u201cN.H.’s Gardner to Nevada: Drop dead.\u201d)<\/p>\n In a meandering retirement press conference on Monday \u2014 where he touched on everything from a recent visit from a North Carolina state legislative leader to pulling the state\u2019s original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights out of the walls of the state House \u2014 Gardner said his retirement doesn\u2019t mean New Hampshire will be any less aggressive about defending its spot.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, it\u2019s not a bad day\u201d for the state\u2019s status, he told reporters. \u201cOur primary is stronger every four years, because every time we have one it makes it stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no reason to think that this primary is in any more difficult position than it has been,\u201d he continued. \u201cThere will be challenges. They\u2019ll find new ways to attempt [it], but it should be okay.\u201d<\/p>\n Some Democrats have been agitating to shake up the primary calendar ahead of the 2024 election, arguing that the predominantly white New Hampshire and Iowa \u2014 which holds its caucuses before the Granite State\u2019s primaries \u2014 are unrepresentative of both the Democratic electorate and the country as a whole. <\/p>\n The late Sen. Harry Reid long tried to maneuver Nevada to the front of the line, which Gardner noted in his farewell press conference. Nevada\u2019s Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak signed a law in 2021 that switches the state from a party-run caucus system to a state-run presidential primary that will be held on the \u201cfirst Tuesday in February,\u201d a bid to dethrone New Hampshire that Gardner brushed aside at the time.<\/p>\n \u201cHarry Reid\u2019s been doing this for over half a century now, and we\u2019re just waiting for him to run out of steam,\u201d Gardner said in June<\/a>, noting the state has regularly held January primaries.<\/p>\n And some of the push to shake up Democrats\u2019 primary calendar has already lost momentum, with some state party chairs recently predicting to POLITICO<\/a> that the party will punt the contentious question down the road. <\/p>\n Prominent New Hampshire politicos from both parties highlighted Gardner\u2019s bulldog defense of the state\u2019s primary in farewell statements \u2014 Gardner \u201cfiercely protect[ing]\u201d its status was the first thing GOP Gov. Chris Sununu noted in his statement \u2014 and many said they were confident that his retirement wouldn\u2019t imperil the state\u2019s first-in-the-nation role.<\/p>\n Gardner is hardly the only New Hampshire figure invested in the first primary \u2014 and politicians of both parties are expected to defend it just as furiously as he has. <\/p>\n \u201cI think that the four early states working together with our Republican counterparts and elected officials and RNC and DNC members and other interested parties, I think we have a strong case to be made, and I think ultimately successful,\u201d said Ray Buckley, chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. \u201cCertainly, Bill Gardner has played a very prominent public role in the last 44 years defending New Hampshire\u2019s status, but there was an enormous amount of people behind the scenes that will still be around.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, national Republicans have shown much less of an appetite to change the calendar than there\u2019s been on the Democratic side, with potential 2024 hopefuls already flocking to both Iowa and New Hampshire.<\/p>\n Fergus Cullen, a former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, said \u201cthe laws which Bill helped shepherd through over the decades give us a certain amount of protection.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCertainly, the rest of state government and his successors will be well-versed in the different levers and tools that are available to them,\u201d Cullen said.<\/p>\n Still, Cullen acknowledged that forces outside of any secretary of state\u2019s control could undermine New Hampshire\u2019s status. \u201cUltimately, it is the candidates who decide whether New Hampshire has a first-in-the-nation primary and whether it is meaningful,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they keep showing up, we\u2019ll have one. And when they stop \u2014 because they don\u2019t think it\u2019s in their strategic interests or they don\u2019t have a level playing field \u2014 that\u2019s how it ends.\u201d<\/p>\n Gardner\u2019s retirement means that Republicans will likely now control the office in the state. He said on Monday that he would be succeeded by David Scanlan, a former Republican state legislator who has been deputy secretary of state since 2002.<\/p>\n Gardner has also clashed with Democrats in the state and nationally. The conservative Democrat joined a commission formed by then-President Donald Trump in 2017 that was intended to chase voter fraud, which angered Democrats in the state and helped fuel an intraparty challenge<\/a> that almost unseated Gardner in 2018. He seemed to defend his decision to sit on that commission \u2014 and reiterated his criticism of Washington Democrats\u2019 sweeping voting rights proposals \u2014 during his farewell press conference.<\/p>\n The entire membership of the state legislature elects a secretary of state every other year. Republicans backed Gardner during his contested reelection bid in 2018, and he ran unopposed in 2020. The GOP controls both chambers of the state legislature, which are both up later this year.<\/p>\n