It’s primary season, and New Hampshire is first on the electoral docket — as usual. Like the Iowa caucuses that precede it, the New Hampshire primary routinely invites a storm of media attention both for what some criticize as “unfairly” holding the earliest position in the primary-election cycle as well as reliably forecasting the Democratic and GOP nominees — with 60 and 80 percent accuracy, respectively.
The mystery that baffles most about the impressive predictive abilities of the New Hampshire primary is grounded in the fact that the state is largely rural with a relatively tiny and demographically homogeneous population. New Hampshire’s roughly 1.36 million residents are 93.2 percent white, compared with the nation’s 76.5 percent. Those two simplifications summarize why critics so readily dismiss the state as “unrepresentative” of the U.S. and therefore unworthy to serve as the first litmus test for effectiveness of a candidate’s platform.
But when a state is reduced to a couple of general traits, the reason for its importance becomes less discernible. Ahead of the initial primary election on Feb. 11, WalletHub compared the Granite State’s demographic characteristics and stances on various issues with those of the U.S. to demystify once in for all the enigmatic significance of the New Hampshire primary. Scroll down to learn how closely New Hampshire mirrors the U.S. — overall and across individual social categories — how we determined their similarity and what experts have to say about its role in the presidential-nominating race.
