While calls for a progressive challenger to President Obama in the 2012 Democratic primaries have all but subsided over the past several weeks, there still appears to be a substantial bloc of Democratic voters in New Hampshire who aren’t sure that they’ll support Obama in the state’s January 24 primary.
According to a Granite State Poll of 303 likely Democratic voters, as many as 31 percent of New Hampshire Democrats are unsure how they might vote if Obama faced a credible or quasi-serious primary challenger. Even more startling, a full nine percent of those surveyed indicated that they already plan to vote “for some other candidate,” presumably even a little-known protest candidate.
The poll, released last night, was conducted by the University of New Hampshire and showed that 69 percent of New Hampshire Democrats support Obama’s nomination for a second term.
While this is obviously good news for the Obama administration, it’s still worth noting that most seasoned political observers believed that the late Eugene McCarthy, the witty and erudite Minnesota senator whose courageous antiwar candidacy in 1968 helped to dislodge a sitting president of his own party, would be lucky to get ten to twelve percent of the vote in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary as late as January of that year — some six weeks before the state’s voters went to the polls.
McCarthy ended up getting 42 percent of the vote.
Coincidentally, Obama’s UNH poll numbers mirror almost precisely the level of support Richard M. Nixon received in the New Hampshire primary when seeking a second term in 1972, a year when Nixon not only faced a spirited challenge from dissident California Republican Paul N. McCloskey on his left, but also a challenge from ultra-conservative GOP lawmaker John M. Ashbrook of Ohio, who enjoyed the backing of powerful Manchester Union-Leader publisher William Loeb, on his right.
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