Weird Voting in New Hampshire

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Dec 20

New Hampshire was one of the states I thought Trump would flip in 2020.  He didn’t, and Fox News called the state for Biden much earlier in the evening than it called the state in 2016.  In 2016, there was a hotly contested Senate race in the state as well as the presidential election, and the vote was running neck-and-neck all night.  The failure of Trump to flip the state and the early call by Fox prompted a comparison of the 2016 results with 2020.  The results were surprising.

In 2016, Trump got 345,790 votes and Hillary Clinton, 349,526, carrying the state.  In 2020, Trump got 365,660, and increase of almost 20,000 over 2016, and Joe Biden, 429,938, an increase of 80,000 votes over the Clinton tally of 2016.  Such a large increase by Biden is odd inasmuch as there was no Senate race in New Hampshire this year, and so one might expect fewer votes, not 100,000 - dramatically - more votes in the state.

Digging further, in the 2016 primaries, the contest between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton produced a total of 251,000 primary votes.  In 2020, in which there were more than a dozen candidates for the Democratic nomination, the total Democratic vote was 297,000, an increase of 46,000 votes.  Joe Biden placed fifth in New Hampshire, with 24,921 votes.  It might make sense that 46,000 more Democratic primary votes would translate into that many more votes for the Democratic candidate in the general election, but what accounts for an increase of 80,000?  Joe Biden was weighed by the primary voters and found wanting – considerably; but how could he pull all those additional Democratic primary votes and then add 44,000 more?

One major change between 2016 and 2020 was the adoption by New Hampshire of mail-in voting.  Is it possible the mail-in ballots found 80,000 Democrats too lazy to vote in a primary?  New Hampshire takes pride in its first-in-the-nation primary, and a lot of time and money is spent attracting New Hampshire voters for their open primary.  The sheer native enthusiasm for presidential elections suggest that the most people are already engaged.  The 2020 results found 100,000 more people than were engaged in 2016, about 15 percent more.

Trump campaigned in New Hampshire, and Biden did not during the general election.  It seems hard to believe that Biden could do so much better than Hillary Clinton, especially in the absence of a Senatorial race.  We are left with two reasons for the weird Democratic vote tally in New Hampshire: either Trump created more outright hostility among white New Englanders than he created supporters; or there was voter fraud, creating votes for Joe Biden.

Given the numbers, my inclination is towards voter fraud.  Maybe Biden would have won anyway, but the margin is suspiciously large.

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