The #1 Issue for New Hampshire Voters Gives Trump A Big Advantage

Hint: it's not the economy

The conventional media narrative about Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary goes like this: unlike Iowa, New Hampshire is a moderate state, a gift to centrists like Nikki Haley and a disadvantage for the polarizing Donald Trump.

This narrative, valued reader, is the product of what I like to call “media brain”: a harrowing condition where spurious ideas through sheer repetition in the news come to be accepted as common sense.

While it’s true that New Hampshire is significantly less Evangelical than other states, resulting in an electorate more moderate on abortion than that of Iowa, there’s one issue that unites Republicans of both states.

That issue is immigration.

New Hampshire primary voters identified immigration as their top voting issue, not crime, abortion, or even inflation, according to a Monmouth University/Washington Post poll. A raft of other polls echoed similar results, making clear that immigration is at the top of New Hampshire Republicans’ minds. Even in New England, far from the southern border, New Hampshire voters consistently cite immigration as their number one concern.

And Trump knows it. 

In his speech after winning the Iowa caucus, Trump employed some of his most extreme immigration rhetoric yet.

“We’re going to seal up the border because right now we have an invasion, we have an invasion of millions and millions of people that are coming into our country,” Trump said. “And they’re coming from prisons and jails…they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

We had a foreshadowing of this rhetoric from a little-noticed and surprisingly candid interview by a high-level Trump national security appointee, Kash Patel, as readers of this newsletter know. In that interview, Patel, who will in all likelihood serve in a top role in a second Trump term, said that Trump is “going to implement the largest deportation in U.S. history.”

Trump, in his Iowa victory speech days later, echoed Patel’s remarks: “We’re going to have to have a deportation level that we haven’t seen in this country for a long time since Dwight Eisenhower actually.” 

Trump’s immigration rhetoric gets scant attention in the media for reasons that are understandable but misguided. CNN refused to broadcast Trump’s entire victory speech for fear of spreading his “falsehoods and conspiracies,” as The New York Times reported. Trump’s rhetoric is indeed hair raising. But roughly half of Americans agree with it; and by refusing to offer a better explanation of how to solve an issue that the United Nations has deemed a “serious” “humanitarian situation,” the issue is ceded to Trump.

Citizens Count, a nonprofit that “provides the people of New Hampshire with the tools and information they need to make a difference,” one that is sponsored by everyone from Lindt Chocolate to Bank of America, has an issues page that tells the good people of the Granite State how to think about 50 issues from abortion to water — and doesn’t even mention immigration. 

Nikki Haley has little to say about Trump’s immigration policy, instead hitting him on his mental fitness — an attack President Joe Biden cosigned. 

And the issue just got supercharged. Today, the Supreme Court narrowly granted the federal government authority to cut down concertina wire designed to keep migrants from crossing the Texas-Mexico border. The decision immediately generated breathless coverage that will be wind at Trump’s back in New Hampshire.

That immigration tops the economy as Republicans’ number one concern is nothing short of astounding, and that the major media can’t see it is both nothing short of astounding and also par for the course.