Letters to the Editor
Zootsuiter
Published Letters: 11 Editor's Choice: 2
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New Hampshire has changed
[Read the article: Yankee Republicans, go home!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As a Boston-area resident, I read your article with interest. I think you did miss one big point: Southern New Hampshire is now really Northern Massachusetts. And southern NH is where most of the growth has been.
In the last two decades, cheaper housing and the promise of lower taxes has drawn large numbers of people to southern New Hampshire. I suspect that is actually the biggest driver of New Hampshire's steady drift from the kind of right-wing iconoclastic politics that was best captured by The Manchester Guardian.
Interestingly, New Hampshire seems to have mirrored many of the trends that northeastern suburban voters are struggling with. For example, New Hampshire's promise of no income taxes turned out to also include very high property taxes and uneven public schools. For many who moved to New Hampshire, as they progressed from being single condo owners to heads of families, this has created some dissastisfaction. The tax discussion is not the same in NH as it once was.
While much of what you reported on was real, I suspect the real point is not that Yankee Republicans are not what they used to be, but that suburban voters are not what they used to be. Richard Nixon set the Republicans on the road to dominance by adopting a platform that promised "benign" neglect of minorities to Southern whites, lower taxes to affluent suburbanites, and social order to older urban workers put off by the '60s. The elder Bush weakened support among workers with his indifference to their plight. The younger Bush has shattered the alliance between affluent suburbanites and conservative southerners with his doctrinaire positions on abortion, stem cell research and foreign policy.
Even in the 2004 elections, there were many blue islands in the red states where urban and near-urban suburban voters registered dissatisfaction with the rigidly right-wing social and foreign policies of the administration. 2006 saw that ratchet up, in NH and elsewhere.