How New Hampshire Voted on Foreign Policy

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

February 12, 2020

Interlude featuring archival audio

MARK HANNAH: Hello and welcome to another episode of None of the Above from the Eurasia Group Foundation. This is your host, Mark Hannah. Today, we're going to do something a little bit different in honor of the primary election in New Hampshire last night. We sent our producer, Caroline Gray, up to Manchester, New Hampshire, ahead of the primary to interview voters and better understand their foreign policy preferences.

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CAROLINE GRAY: The plan was to go to New Hampshire to talk to voters and volunteers about what they thought about foreign policy. But there was one problem. Do voters even care about foreign policy?

PROFESSOR CHRIS GALDIERI: I don't think so.

GRAY: That's Professor Chris Galdieri of Saint Anselm College. He laid out the problem pretty neatly.

GALDIERI: I think historically, it’s not that most Americans don't care about foreign affairs, but I think most voters, regardless of party, regardless of ideology, are mostly interested in those bread and butter, meat and potato issues—a roof over your head, food on the table—that sort of thing.

GRAY: When I went around asking New Hampshire voters what the top three issues were that they care most about, those issues were health care, education, student debt, and climate change. Foreign policy didn't rank high in voters’ minds up there.

HANNAH: And that seems to be consistent with a lot of national polls in which people around election time get asked what it is they care deeply about. Oftentimes foreign policy or national security doesn't even break the top ten.

GRAY: That's right. It wasn't surprising to me that folks up in New Hampshire aren't talking and thinking about foreign policy. That's not what's driving them to the polls.

Take Shay. Shay is a twenty-four-year-old undecided voter.

SHAY, NH CONSTITUENT: I think I tend to care most about social issues and responses to the things that are most important to me and the people I care about—health care, education, and things like views on whether or not we should criminalize border crossing.

GRAY: Then I met Lauren, who was a twenty-nine-year old Warren supporter. I met Lauren at Manchester Community College waiting in line to see the senator give a pump-up speech to canvassers who are about to go out into the freezing New Hampshire cold to knock on doors.

LAUREN, NH CONSTITUENT: I would say the economy and housing are really connected. And I want to hear people talk more about housing. Racial justice is a big thing for me and also reproductive justice. That would be my third.

GRAY: Professor Galdieri actually summed up the anxieties of millennial and Gen-Z students really well.

GALDIERI: I think a lot of them are worried about climate. They are the ones who are going to have to deal with it for a lot longer than folks who are, say, in their forties or older. There's also the issues of college education. They're all looking at starting off and starting careers when they graduate, and they're worried about, “Where am I going to live? Will I be able to afford to live someplace that is nice, safe, and clean?”—that sort of thing. I think they're worried about being able to create what we generally consider a normal life, in which you might get married and have a family and send kids to school and all the rest of it, because so many of those things seem unattainable and unaffordable, even to a young person with a college degree.

HANNAH: So, Caroline, Bernie Sanders obviously won big last night. What percentage of that victory do you think is attributable to foreign policy views of New Hampshire voters?

GRAY: I think the results from the New Hampshire primary last night are obviously based mostly on domestic policy.

HANNAH: So, what you're saying is people don't care—or profess not to care—about foreign policy. Is that right?

GRAY: Well, Mark, not exactly. When I asked New Hampshire voters what they cared about, foreign policy was rarely mentioned, but when you talked about it specifically and pressed people, most of them actually had strong opinions.

HOWARD WOODRIDGE, NH CONSTITUENT: Well, I'm certainly not happy with our interventionist policies of the last century, starting with Bush forty-three attacking Iraq, Obama jumping into Libya, Egypt with their coup d’états, and continuing the crazy war in Afghanistan. I'm not happy about it because I saw this as a youngster in Vietnam. We didn't belong. We just killed people, and then we left for absolutely no gain. The same thing is going to happen in Iraq, and the same thing is going to happen in Afghanistan.

LIZZIE, NH CONSTITUENT: It's definitely incredibly important, obviously, because we are spending way too much in the military. Our military budget is crazy. And that money is not going to veterans. It's not going to people who are actually out there fighting. It's going to putting more money in combat.

HANNAH: Caroline, what did you think of Manchester, or as we used to call it, Manchvegas?

GRAY: Manchvegas. Manchester is a great town, I have to say. It was freezing and raining and…

HANNAH: By New Hampshire standards, it's a city, right?

GRAY: It's a city. Manchester is a great city. There are a lot of—people in Manchester are really welcoming and lovely and willing to talk to you and willing to engage with you, even if you're from out of town. Every restaurant, bar, and cafe was packed with media, reporters, canvassers, and your average New Hampshire voter. Every corner you turn, you run into another rally or political event for a different candidate, even the ones who didn't make it to the debate stage on Friday.

I definitely needed someone to help me make sense of all this great Democratic commotion. So, I decided to talk to a New Hampshire expert.

PROFESSOR ANDY SMITH: My name is Andy Smith. I'm the director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, and I'm a political science professor at UNH, which is over in Durham, New Hampshire.

GRAY: Once every four years, this little city of Manchester briefly becomes the center of the political world.

SMITH: We turn back into pumpkins on Wednesday.

GRAY: That's great.

SMITH: New Hampshire's an old state, a small state. Historically, it has been a relatively blue collar manufacturing state. If you go along the river on the banks of the Merrimack River, Manchester once had the largest manufacturing complex in the world, and you can still see the remnants of that. There's very little manufacturing going on. Now, it's primarily universities, tech companies, and so forth occupying those mills.

GRAY: And is it fair to say that states like New Hampshire are representative of the rest of the country?

SMITH: Of course not. Not at all. New Hampshire is a very small state, small population. It's an overwhelmingly white state. Ninety-six percent or so of the population is white. It's an upper income state. Most of the population essentially lives in the suburbs of Boston. But it's a highly educated upper income state.

That said, the thing that distinguishes New Hampshire from the other states is the turnout in the New Hampshire primary, which is significantly higher than it is in any other of the state contests. The record turnout for the Iowa caucuses is sixteen percent. The Secretary of State expects our turnout this year to be fifty percent, and that's with only one competitive primary.

GRAY: With how passionate everybody was, I didn't have any trouble believing that. You felt that energy everywhere you went, and despite what the studies might have indicated, when I asked specifically about foreign policy, that level of passion and involvement was still there.

HANNAH: Which foreign policy issue do you think really got the people you spoke with in New Hampshire the most energized?

GRAY: I would say it's the issue of the military and how militarized American foreign policy has become.

JENNY BIZOCO, NH CONSTITUENT: Foreign policy—I totally believe in having a conversation. I think there are ways to come to an agreement with our enemies—let's put it that way. I don’t think we should be thinking about going to war. I’m a firm believer in diplomacy. I don't believe in arguments. I think there's a peaceful way to come to an agreement and something that would be beneficial for both parties.

JOHN SENEAU, NH CONSTITUENT: I don't support—like I said, we don't have to be the cops of the world. We just need to provide help with other nations when they need it and assistance and whatever we can. We don't need to fight every war. For the last few years, we've been too quick to go in and be the policemen. We don't need to do that. We can do it in other ways without endangering our troops.

GRAY: Voters are sick and tired of how much money the United States government spends on our defense and the lack of investment they're putting into things like diplomacy, development, education, and health care.

HANNAH: I'm sort of surprised by that because there are so many bases and such a military footprint within the borders of New Hampshire.

GRAY: Well, that's right, and Professor Smith, our New Hampshire expert, actually brought that up when I asked him if voters here wanted an end to our ongoing wars.

SMITH: I think not only does it resonate with my understanding of the New Hampshire voter, I think that's the way most people across the country think about things. We're not jingoistic in the United States most of the time, and we certainly aren’t in New Hampshire. New Hampshire also has a high percentage of military. It's a small state, but it has a high percentage of military families in the state. So, we see the downside of active military engagement. Personally, a friend of mine lives three doors down the street. Their son was a Navy SEAL and died in Iraq. The small towns in this area really know that.

There are a couple of large military bases in New Hampshire. The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is a big employer. So, we like the employment part of the military. Pease Air Base is also over in Portsmouth, which used to be a SAC base. There's a lot of military background in the state, but even the people in the military don't want to be actively out there engaged in these things because they know the consequences of it.

GRAY: And that matched my experience on the ground. All of the veterans I met were cautious at best about America's involvement in foreign conflicts.

Take Bill, for instance, a veteran from Manchester who is in his forties. We asked about Bill's views on foreign policy, and the first thing he jumped to was that we have to end endless wars.

BILL PICCOLO, NH CONSTITUENT AND VETEREN: I think as a world leader, we have a responsibility because we were the best—and not even the best country. But we can offer help to other countries around the world. And I think we do have the responsibility to do that, but I don't think we have a gigantic responsibility to go around and influence people when they're living their own lives. We can protect people, but I don't think we need to stay there for year after year after year after year. And yeah, people die. If it's a world war, it’s probably a good idea that we participate, but if it's a little conflicts around the world, I'm not sure we need to be involved with that. We have enough problems here at home we need to deal with.

GRAY: And then there was Kelly. I met Kelly inside a cafe on Elm Street, one of the busy main streets of Manchester.

KELLY, NH CONSTITUENT: I think a lot of people think they know something about foreign policy. They're flag wavers. I mean, the kind of things you see in the press, the everyday press—that's all it's about. Most of it is fables anyway. You know, “What a wonderful thing the United States is doing.” They don't see the numbers, what our real accomplishments are as far as death is concerned. Destruction. I mean, we're the best. So, I believe in diplomacy—not shotgun diplomacy or bomb diplomacy or anything like that, but instead people who actually have some intellectual capacity talking about things that benefit all. I mean, there's always give and take, but…

Being a Vietnam era vet, I have some strong feelings about those things. I'm a member of Veterans for Peace as well. So, I guess that is how I view our foreign policy.

HANNAH: What do people think about the threat of China?

GRAY: Most people kind of scoffed at that question. No one thinks China is a big enough threat to really do much about.

SHAY: It makes me uncomfortable when people say China is a threat and a problem. If industry is leaving the U.S. to go to China so that workers in China can be exploited because they don't have the protections we have, and they have suicide nets around Foxconn factories there, I don't think people in China are winning. I think the issue is human rights in America and in China, and I don't think that can be solved in an adversarial way.

WOODRIDGE: China is an adversary, same as Russia is an adversary—both economically. Well, China, economically and militarily. Russia has a military situation we need to contain by staying strong with NATO, but we should treat them as an adversary. Cordial. Let's talk. Let’s solve some mutual problems and respect each other. But we should not be out there trying to cross swords, if you will, and be provocative. Let's just maintain our spheres of influence and deal with this whole thing economically.

RYAN HIRSCH, NH CONSTITUENT: The idea of China posing a threat assumes they don't have a right to be an economic superpower. They have a right to be an economic superpower. All countries have a right to be an economic superpower.

HANNAH: Yeah, that seems to be somewhat consistent with some findings of our recent report, “Indispensable No More.” Especially with Democratic voters, when asked about what to do in the face of a rising China, more wanted to diminish our footprint in East Asia than wanted to increase. It sounds like that reluctance extends to the voters in New Hampshire, right?

GRAY: That's right, and that was a surprising thing for me as someone who works in the foreign policy space. As you know very well, there's so much commotion about China. There is so much fear in Washington and from policymakers both on the left and the right about a rising China, and voters just don't have those fears.

HANNAH: Let's talk for a minute about the war in Afghanistan. Just this last weekend, there was an attack on American troops that killed two and injured six others, and it's unclear what national interest is being served by the continuation of this war. Are people paying attention to the fact that this war is still going on?

GRAY: Well, Mark, you have to remember, for a lot of these young first time voters, the war has been going on their entire lives. It's really shaped their political consciousness. They're sick and tired of war, and they do care a lot about this.

NH CONSTITUENT: I think having such a big military presence in the Middle East is making more enemies than allies. We keep going one way. Think about the war in Iraq. We went in with the idea of defeating al-Qaida and making America safe, and now out of the power vacuum the U.S. created, there's ISIS. And so if we defeat ISIS, what's next to fill that power vacuum? It's just it's a flawed approach in general to making America safe.

ZACH BROUSSEA, NH CONSTITUENT: Even though I do support the reinsertion or implementation of troops in some regards, I think pulling out boots on the ground is a good idea. I believe we should not venture into Afghanistan in the way we have done. We should transition to—not even transition—revert back to what we had been attempting to do under Obama in those last few years and what Clinton was promising to do before she did not get elected—transitioning our approach and supporting the Afghani government more than putting boots on the ground and putting millions and millions of dollars in. I think we should transition our approach and be very wary of getting into new ventures and simply support our old commitments and try to phase them out and support our allies with our dollars instead of our lives.

GRAY: Isaac, an organizer from Dover, New Hampshire, expressed this growing awareness shared among young people of just how much damage our militaristic policies can do.

ISAAC GRIM, NH CONSTITUENT: I think the entire Washington consensus and the general understanding Americans have and our political conversation around American foreign policy is mostly mythical. Most candidates will talk about how America is the greatest nation ever or the most democratic nation ever, but the reality of why we're so wealthy is mostly exploitation of other countries. I've been in Central America a lot. I lived in Columbia, South America, for about five years. I learned the reality of how the United States has, hundreds of times, invaded countries—especially in Central and South America, but really all over the world—propped up dictators, and overturned democratically elected officials, and most of that is not really in the public awareness.

So, I think it's crucial that we have a presidential candidate who is not putting forth those same lies about what the United States is in the world and actually has a critique of American foreign policy and is someone who is not pretending America is simply a force of good in the world, but that we actually, just like every other nation, are looking out for our own self-interest and building power and acting like every empire has throughout human history.

HANNAH: One of the key findings of our recent survey of Americans was that the younger generation was less interested in a more expansive foreign policy, and we speculate that probably has something to do with the fact that this generation, the young people, haven't lived through the heady successes of the Cold War, let alone World War Two. They've only experienced American military might through these inconclusive and unsuccessful wars.

GRAY: That's exactly right. I saw that expressed over and over.

So, then we're back where we started. If people have these really sharp critiques of our policy, why don't they vote on it?

SMITH: They care about foreign policy when they have to, and that is typically when there are bullets flying. Then we pay attention to foreign policy. When there is a shooting war like there was in 2004 with both the Afghanistan invasion and the Iraq invasion, then we pay attention to these things. When those are off stage, even though those wars are still going on, we pay very little attention.

GRAY: And I was struck by that comment because, well, the United States is at war. We've been at war for eighteen plus years. So, why wouldn't New Hampshire voters care?

HANNAH: Right. Unless they're a military family, it's not really touching their daily lives, or at least they don't perceive it as such, right?

GRAY: You know, maybe, but I think at least for some people, it's a little more than that. For some voters, I think the distinction between foreign policy and domestic policy isn't quite so rigid.

GRIFFIN: I think everything is connected. With every new policy that comes up, can we pay for Medicare for all? Can we pay for this? And meanwhile, we're paying for endless wars in the Middle East. It's all taxpayer money that's put being put into the military to solve a problem the military really can't solve. It's a problem of diplomacy. It's a problem of instability and economically, and it’s partially due to climate change. Everything is connected.

GRAY: I met this woman, Nikki, who is in her thirties.

NICOLETTE BERISHELF, NH CONSTITUENT: I'm Nicolette Berishelf, and I am here in New Hampshire canvasing for the Bernie Sanders campaign. We are here on a Bernie journey. We were in Iowa, and now we're here in New Hampshire. We're going to drive on to Nevada, and then we are going to South Carolina and then home to California for Super Tuesday.

GRAY: Nikki was in a wheelchair. She has cerebral palsy. She was with her husband on this journey, going to all the primary states until Super Tuesday.

CLAY BRAGGART: It's the most important thing we can think of to be doing right now.

GRAY: Last year, Nikki lost her medical benefits, California's Medicare.

BRAGGART: She lost that last year for essentially no reason. She had a massive gap in her health insurance coverage, and there's no reason for that. We figured this was the most important thing we could be doing to help people like us who may be falling through the cracks.

GRAY: To my surprise, one of those issues driving Nikki to travel across the entire country was foreign policy.

BERISHELF: I think for years and years—as long as I've been alive, at least—we have lived under a government that thinks it's OK to take our money and spend it on wars and then tell us to stop whining for free stuff when we ask for the receipts.

I think for years now—years and years and years—the government and the president have been allowed to declare war without the say-so of Congress, which in itself is a dangerous thing. But for years and years and years, I think our government has not connected engaging in a lot of foreign regime change wars abroad with the way things are at home. They have not connected the cost it takes on all of us. And we're expected to bear that cost and hand over our tax dollars without a say on what they're being spent on.

GRAY: None of these voters I spoke to are one-issue voters. None of them are one-dimensional. They care about a host of issues that, they say themselves, are all interconnected and all tie into each other. So, maybe what we're missing is that the electorate focus on improving life here is in itself essentially a statement about what they want abroad.

HANNAH: Thank you for listening to this episode. If you're interested in not just what New Hampshire voters think about American foreign policy but what voters throughout the country think about America's role in the world, you can visit our study on our website at egfound.org/indispensable-no-more. Those words have a hyphen in between them.

This has been another episode of None of the Above. I am your host, Mark Hannah, here along with my producer, Caroline Gray, of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Thank you for listening. Catch you next time.

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