Oh, blue Hampshire! New Hampshire will be, as usual, the site of the first presidential primary in 2008. Is it significant that in the elections of this past November, Democrats ruled in this Republican stronghold?

In a last look at last November's election results, we caution readers that each area of the country has its own voting idiosyncrasies, its own reason for voting for a specific candidate or political party. Generally speaking, in voting out the Republicans in congressional races across the country, voters were not rejecting conservatism but the failed policies of George W. Bush, particularly his Iraq policy. But other issues, including local issues, also applied. Take New Hampshire, where, as usual, the first presidential primary will be held.

The Granite State, that rugged Republican stronghold tucked in among liberal Massachusetts, "crunchy granola" Vermont, and former bellwether Maine in the northeast corner of the United States, has, or will soon have, a Democratic governor, a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, a Democratic Governor's Council and two Democratic U.S. representatives. This is an April Fools' joke, right?

No, this was the outlook in the early morning hours of November 8, 2006 after voters swept Republicans out of office and turned the formerly "red" Republican Granite State a deep Democratic "blue." For Democrats it was, "Happy Days Are Here Again." For Republicans, it was some variation of the Crystal Gayle hit of the late '70s, "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue."

What happened? Well, New Hampshire was still part of America in 2006, and the nation as a whole went Democratic in the electoral earthquake of '06. New Hampshire had at the top of the ballot John Lynch, a freshman Democratic governor who is very popular, either because of or in spite of being one of the most cautious, risk-aversive politicians on the planet. He took an unprecedented 77 percent of the vote against his Republican opponent.

Judd Gregg, the state's former congressman and governor and now its three-term U.S. senator, was not on the ballot this year to stem the hemorrhage of votes flowing to the Democratic side of the ballot. Neither was the state's junior senator, John E. Sununu, son of the former governor and White House chief of staff. The State House races offered some solid and capable GOP candidates, some of whom were conservative and a few of whom survived the "tsunami." But a great many voters, including many independents as well as Republicans, apparently expressed their discontent with the present course of human events by simply voting Democratic.

Lay of the Land

Yet this was not a one-time political convulsion in a land of such enduring Republican power. The national news media has, for the most part, missed the political changes taking place here over the last quarter century or more. That is hardly surprising. Visiting mainly the southern tier of the state (within an hour's drive of Boston) at the end of each election cycle, most reporters have been slow even to discover that the increasingly high-tech state with the first presidential primary every four years is no longer "Cow Hampshuh." It is also a long way politically from the state it was when more than one Democratic vote in town meant, "The bastid must've voted twice!"

Consider what has happened here since New Hampshire voters pulled Vice President George H.W. Bush out of the water in the Republican presidential primary in 1988. Bush, after finishing third in the Iowa Caucuses that year, won decisively over Kansas Senator and Iowa Caucus winner Robert Dole in New Hampshire eight days later. ("New Hampshire stands ready to correct the mistakes of Iowa," the supremely confident Gov. Sununu announced when the Iowa votes were counted.) Bush the Eider carried New Hampshire and 39 other states that November and declared "God Bless New Hampshire!" on election night. From a Republican perspective, God has been rather sparing in his blessings ever since.

Bill Clinton and John Kerry have placed New Hampshire in the Democratic column in three of the last four presidential elections, and the current President Bush barely carried the state against Al Gore in 2000. With the popular Governor Steve Merrill at the top of the ticket against a lackluster Democratic opponent, New Hampshire Republicans enjoyed the spoils of the big Republican win in the "Contract with America" election of 1994. But then the big slide started.

In New Hampshire, where the governor receives only a two-year term, Democrats have won five of the last six gubernatorial elections. The one exception was in 2002, when former Cabletron founder and multimillionaire Craig Benson won handily over a Democrat advocating an income tax. Two years later, Benson was ousted by Lynch.

The Democrats in 1998 captured control of the state senate for the first time since 1912, the year Republicans throughout the nation were divided by Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose rebellion. In the 1999-2000 biennium, the House, still with a Republican majority, passed a state income tax. The Democratic Senate killed the measure only after then-Governor Jeanne Shaheen made clear that she would not back down on her pledge to veto the bill. Ironically, it was Shaheen, a Democrat and an anathema to many of the state's conservatives, who saved the state from an income tax. She also saved New Hampshire's long-standing but rarely employed death penalty (no one has been executed here since 1939) by vetoing the repeal passed by a Republican legislature.

So what happened to the conservative New Hampshire that the rest of the nation hears about every four years? To a large extent, it has never existed. There have been times, like right after the Reagan landslide of 1984, when New Hampshire might arguably have been called the most Republican state in the union. But even then, there was more to the state's politics than can be displayed in red and blue graphics. New Hampshire is separated from Republican-leaning Utah by more than geography. Much of the state's Republicanism is of the Eastern establishment variety, in a party that still has many of the characteristics of an "old boys' club" of New England blue bloods, a party rooted more in inheritance than conviction.

Followers of the state's influential presidential primaries may recall that in 1964, New Hampshire voters in the Republican primary, given a clear choice between the Western-style conservatism of Barry Goldwater and the modern "progressive" Republicanism of Nelson Rockefeller, found a third way. They cast enough write-in ballots to give the New Hampshire primary win to Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, then in Saigon as the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. Though Goldwater went on to win the nomination on the first ballot at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, the famous "bump in the road" in New Hampshire was the beginning of the unraveling of his presidential hopes.

On the Democratic side, New Hampshire is the state where Bill Clinton became the "Comeback Kid" with his strong second-place finish behind Massachusetts neighbor Paul Tsongas in 1992. Clinton, as noted earlier, went on to carry New Hampshire in the general election that year and again in 1996.

New Hampshire still has neither a general sales nor an income tax. But the pressure for one, probably the income levy, has been growing since the state's Supreme Court interpreted the state constitution to require the state, rather than the local school districts, to shoulder the burden of paying for the "adequate education" provided by the public schools. In response to the court's mandate, the state's legislature passed a rather complicated state property tax, but has yet to define "adequate education" or come up with a constitutionally equitable way to pay for it. According to the latest edict of the high court, the lawmakers must do so by July 1, 2007 or face a possible takeover of the education-funding issue by the court itself.

While New Hampshirites pride themselves on their fiscal conservatism, their track record on social issues places the state arguably to the left of Massachusetts. During Democratic Governor Jeanne Shaheen's first term (1997-98), the Republican legislature enacted a repeal of the state's anti-abortion laws, an effort thwarted in previous years and decades by the vetoes of Republican governors. While Massachusetts retains a parental consent law, New Hampshire's one and only restriction on abortion is a parental notification requirement when the pregnant girl is a minor. That failed in several attempts, but was finally adopted in 2003 in extremely close votes in both houses after intense lobbying by Governor Benson. The law remains in abeyance, however, after the U.S. Supreme Court remanded the measure to the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston for a reconsideration of its constitutionality. Governor Lynch is opposed to the law, and there is a good chance the state's legislature, with its new Democratic majority, will repeal it in the next session, making the court challenge moot.

New Hampshire has not--yet--gone as far as Massachusetts in accommodating homosexual couples seeking "gay marriage." But with Republicans firmly in control in recent years, the state legislature has forbidden state agencies to discriminate against homosexuals in the placing of foster children. Several years ago, the lawmakers added "sexual orientation" as a forbidden basis of discrimination, notably with the support of the state's Roman Catholic bishop at the time, the late Bishop Leo E. O'Neil. Though the New Hampshire Republican Party platform has consistently called for strong pro-life legislation, efforts to ban even partial-birth abortion have repeatedly failed in Republican-majority legislatures.

Appearances Don't Matter

All of these facts appear not to fit the image of the Granite State of lore, the New Hampshire of former governor Mel Thomson, the home of solid Reagan Republicans, the place that a former U.S. Senator from the state, the solidly conservative Gordon Humphrey, called "the last stop on the freedom train."

"I think New Hampshire has never been as conservative as people say," said Charlie Arlinghaus, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in Concord. "It's been more Republican than Democrat, but the Republicans here are slightly more moderate than Republicans nationally." And the Democrats, often portrayed nationally as the party of big-spending liberals, have found a more moderate niche in New Hampshire as well.

"The Democrats over the years have started to learn their lesson," said Arlinghaus about what had always been the junior party in New Hampshire. "When they ran [candidates who are] open advocates of an income tax, they've failed in landslide elections. The Democrats have realized that mistake and when they don't run on an income tax, Republicans in New Hampshire can't figure out what to run on."

One of the enduring suppositions about New Hampshire politics is that the state has been made more liberal by people coming over the border from Massachusetts and other northern liberal states, bringing their voting habits and political affiliations with them. In fact, said Arlinghaus, the "Mass. migration" across the New Hampshire border appears to have increased the vote for anti-tax candidates in the state's southern tier, which votes Republican more than the state as a whole. Yet voters in New Hampshire are somewhat less conservative, he believes, than those in other states, where populism and old-time religion often combine to drive Republicans more sharply to the right.

"The kind of issues you have to talk about to win battleground areas like Iowa, Wisconsin, Arizona and New Mexico are going to be different than the sort that appeal to the sensibilities of Northeasterners who don't go to church," said the longtime political observer and policy analyst.

But whatever they say about those "other" issues, presidential hopefuls, especially Republicans, better talk right about taxes in New Hampshire. Said Arlinghaus, a Republican: "If the election is about taxes, we win. If it's about something else, we lose."

Jack Kenny is a free-lance writer living in New Hampshire.