Growing signs Biden may face a 2024 nomination challenge in this key state in an early primary

PORTSMUT, New Hampshire – If President Biden has a major challenge to face, if he is expected to run for re-election in 2024, New Hampshire looks set to be the state where action will take place.

“Now you have everyone who wants to try Biden coming to New Hampshire to do it,” a longtime progressive strategist from Granite State told Fox News, pointing out that the state will almost certainly hold an unsanctioned Democratic presidential election next year. . . “New Hampshire is where it happens.”

A veteran of multiple presidential campaigns, who wished to remain anonymous in order to speak more freely, predicted that when it comes to the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024, “there is a huge appetite for everyone but Biden, and once it is realized, you see it explode.”

With recent news that marginal 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Marianne Williamson is heading to New Hampshire in the coming weeks, and this week it was revealed that environmental lawyer and COVID vaccine campaigner Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will hold an event in the state early next year. month, the possibility of potential major problems for Biden is getting a little closer to reality.

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A sign outside the New Hampshire State Building in Concord, New Hampshire commemorates the nation’s coveted first presidential election. (Fox News)

Kennedy, son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, will host an event on March 3 at the New Hampshire Policy Institute that has been mandatory for nearly a quarter of a century. stop in the Granite State for potential or actual White House contenders.

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New Hampshire, which prides itself on its well-informed electorate and its emphasis on small-scale and mass retail politics, has held its first primaries in the race for the White House for a century. While Republicans are making no changes to their presidential nominating calendar for the 2024 election cycle, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted overwhelmingly last week to approve a new calendar top promoted by Biden that flips the traditional timetable.

Under the new schedule, New Hampshire will now vote second on the DNC calendar along with Nevada, three days after South Carolina.

President Joe Biden speaks at the Winter Meeting of the Democratic National Committee on Friday, February 3, 2023, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) (AP)

But Granite State Democrats warn that New Hampshire will still come first — thanks to a long-standing state law that mandates the primary — and that a non-DNC-sanctioned primary in which Biden doesn’t run could pose problems for the president. .

“President Biden will not be running in the New Hampshire primary, which will still be the first,” said longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley ahead of the DNC calendar vote. And he warned that “it would create what we believe is an awkward situation where the country’s first primary is won by someone other than the president. This will only fuel the chatter about the divisions of the Democrats.”

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State Senator Donna Susi, the leader of the Democratic Party in the State Senate, predicted Friday in an interview with local radio station WFEA that “no doubt there will be candidates.”

The infighting within the Democratic Party over the calendar has given Republicans in New Hampshire plenty of ammunition.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who is considering a GOP nomination in 2024, reiterated that “we go first no matter what.”

“He really opened up… to rivals,” Sununu said of Biden on Thursday in an interview with Politico. “And I firmly believe there will be contenders.”

“They will have to let it play out. But there is no doubt that someone will step in and become a real rival to Biden, because he tried to push the primaries away from [New Hampshire],” Sununu stressed.

New Hampshire is the state where progressive champion Senator Bernie Sanders of neighboring Vermont defeated eventual candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary. Sanders’ resounding victory pushed him into a bitter battle with Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden files his candidacy with New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner to appear on the ballot for the 2020 New Hampshire presidential primary at the State House in Concord, New Hampshire, November 8 2019. REUTERS/Mike Segar-RC277D93L93A (Reuters)

Four years later, Sanders defeated New Hampshire again, and Biden finished in a very disappointing fifth place in the nation’s first primary. Biden rebounded with a second-place finish in the Nevada caucuses followed by a landslide victory in the South Carolina primary, leading him to the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Nine months later, Biden edged New Hampshire, the general election battlefield state, by seven comfortable points when he defeated then-President Donald Trump in the White House.

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But former Rep. Paul Hodes, a two-term progressive Democrat who served in Congress, told Fox News that the change in the DNC’s nomination calendar “really creates problems for all kinds of fringe candidates with all sorts of ideas – some good, some bad, often people, not those with experience in government or how government works are participating in unsanctioned primaries.”

And he predicted that the primaries could end up being “sort of free for everyone.”