Today’s addition to the GPD Lexicon is made in honor of my Dad.
It will come as no surprise to anyone that after years of keeping up this blog, people now have a tendency to seek me out when they have heard a particularly irritating statistic or reference during the week. This week it was my Dad, who heard a rather famous columnist (Liz Bruenig) mention on a podcast that “even conservative New Hampshire is considering getting rid of the death penalty”. He wasn’t irritated at the assertion that NH is looking to get rid of the death penalty (they are), but rather the assertion that NH was representative of a “conservative state”.
You see while NH certainly has a strong Republican presence, it is most famous for being a swing state and has actually gone for Democrats in every presidential election since 1992, except for the year 2000. Currently their Congressional delegation is 4 Democrats. Their state legislature is Democrat controlled. Slightly more people (3%) identify as Democrat or lean that way than Republican. The Governor is a Republican, and it is definitely the most conservative state in New England, but calling it a conservative state on a national level is pretty untrue. Gallup puts it at “average” at best.
What struck me as interesting about this is that New Hampshire actually did used to be more conservative. From 1948 to 1988, a Democrat only won the Presidential election there once. From 1900 to 2000, the Governor was Republican for 84 out years out of the century. In other words, it wasn’t a swing state until around 1992 (per Wiki).
It’s interesting then that Liz Bruenig, born in 1990, would consider NH a conservative state. NH has not been “conservative” in nearly her entire life, so what gives? Why do things like this get repeated and repeated even after they’ve changed? I’ve decided we need a word for this, so my new term is Broken Record Statistics:
Broken Record Statistic: A statistic or characterization that was once true, but is continuously repeated even after the numbers behind it have moved on.
In the course of looking this up btw, I found another possible broken record statistic. If you ask anyone from New Hampshire about the blue shift in the state, they will almost all say it’s because people from Massachusetts are moving up and turning the state more blue. However, the Wiki page I quoted above had this to say “A 2006 University of New Hampshire survey found that New Hampshire residents who had moved to the state from Massachusetts were mostly Republican. The influx of new Republican voters from Massachusetts has resulted in Republican strongholds in the Boston exurban border towns of Hillsborough and Rockingham counties, while other areas have become increasingly Democratic. The study indicated that immigrants from states other than Massachusetts tended to lean Democrat.” The source linked was a Union Leader article (“Hey, don’t blame it on Massachusetts!”) name but no link. Googling showed me nothing. However, the town by town maps do indicate that NH is mostly Republican at the border.
Does anyone know where these numbers are coming from or the UNH study referenced?
graph paper diaries 
A topic of endless fascination for me. I am one who has indeed blamed it on Massachusetts, but the alternative explanation you give does sound plausible.
NH always had a strong Democratic presence in the cities, especially among the mill populations, especially French-Canadian. Concord, Portsmouth, and the Upper Valley have also long been Democratic. It was just seldom enough to outnumber the Republicans. Democrat John McIntyre was Senator for most of two decades, though he was not especially liberal. Only Concord was particularly liberal until recently – more of it was union voting and those who felt they were the little guys at the mercy of the powerful WASPs. Those latter two are much less pronounced now. Just about everything north of Concord has been heavily dependent on tourism, and thus very anti-sales tax, trending conservative on the basis of that issue alone..
That Broken Record statistic might also hang on because we are bordered by Vermont and Massachusetts, and we seem more conservative by comparison. The New England definition of where the center line is between liberals and conservatives is likely different than how much of the rest of the country sees it. We might be more like Minnesota and the Pacific Northwest in our perceptions.
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