With the field of candidates narrowing for the 2000 presidential race, a new Dartmouth study shows that New Hampshire voters do not get the level of personal interaction with candidates that is widely assumed.
The study, conducted by government Professors Linda Fowler, Constantine Spiliotes and Lynn Vavreck and based on data collected from the 1996 presidential race, shows that only 2.5 percent of voters receive three or more contacts from any candidate.
Contacts are defined as meeting a candidate, seeing him or her at a rally, receiving a phone call from a campaign or receiving literature from a candidate in the mail.
Candidates who engage in close contact with the voters are practicing "retail politics," and Spiliotes said there is a longstanding political science belief that voters in New Hampshire, the first primary state, make up their mind through meeting candidates.
However, Spiliotes said, "In reality, most voters don't go out to meet the candidates to decide who to vote for."
Spiliotes said the people who go to rallies to meet candidates are often those voters who are already partial to that particular candidate.
According to the study, most New Hampshire voters had no contact with a presidential campaign between October 1995 and February 15, 1996.
Fifty-six percent of voters never received a phone call, mailing or handshake from a candidate. Twenty-nine percent said they had one contact with a campaign.
Spiliotes said the survey data was collected by the College's Rockefeller Center and will be collected again for the 2000 race.
The paper is the beginning of a longer look at "how voters make decisions, how candidates and voters interact and how the media is filtered into the equation," Spiliotes said.
Spiliotes said New Hampshire residents guard their status as the first primary state and that the study could change the idea of the state as the ideal campaign environment.
"New Hampshire is always going to be important because it really is a microcosm or our ideal of representational democracy, a small town where you can exchange views with candidates," he said.
New Hampshire is a good way to see how candidates handle themselves in a closed environment, Spiliotes said.
New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen even touted New Hampshire's unique campaign environment in The Boston Globe. "The opportunity for personal, retail campaigning is lost in larger states, where campaigns are played out in television commercials and on airport tarmacs."
In the future, more attention will be paid to other states, however, he said. "New Hampshire will be the stage where voters and candidates interact, but it will be projected to national audience."
Candidates with money or high name recognition will also feel less need to get out and practice retail politics, Spiliotes said. This is already being seen with George W. Bush and Steve Forbes, two candidates who have not visited the state a great deal.
Moneyed candidates like Bush or Al Gore "will focus more on big, media buys, and a few large well-choreographed rallies in a state," he said.
