WASHINGTON – New Hampshire Democrats were furious at President Biden when he shook up the party's nominating calendar last year, diminishing their state's political importance by pushing its primary election behind South Carolina's.
Kicking and screaming, they defied the Democratic National Committee and refused to move back their primary. This year, they warned that the upheaval could come back to haunt Biden and cause him an embarrassing loss in the state's primary.
In turn, the national party stripped the state of its delegates. Biden declined to campaign in New Hampshire or even place his name on the ballot.
Now a range of the state's influential Democrats, including Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, are coming around to the idea that they need to swallow their pride and help Biden win their primary despite his snub of their state.
"It's up to us in New Hampshire to fix a problem that his advisers and the DNC made for the president," said Kathleen Sullivan, a former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair who is leading a write-in Biden super political action committee.
Sullivan's super PAC is one of two groups of Democrats in the state organizing campaigns to promote Biden as a write-in candidate in the Jan. 23 primary election.
For the Biden-backing Granite Staters, the write-in efforts amount to a bit of a tail-between-their-legs moment after months of howling objections about the president's decision. Like Sullivan, they find themselves blaming the DNC or Biden's aides rather than a president whom they still support.
Their goal is a substantial Biden victory over the two Democrats running protest campaigns against the president, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota and self-help author Marianne Williamson. Both of them, unlike Biden, will appear on Democratic ballots in the state.
"People here, quite frankly, don't care about the DNC or their rules," said Terie Norelli, a former speaker of the New Hampshire state House and a leader of Granite State Write-In, a grassroots group supporting Biden. "The vast majority of Democrats and independents in New Hampshire do support President Biden."
The group hopes to use its modest budget – $50,000 to $70,000 – to inform New Hampshire Democrats and independents, who are allowed to cast ballots in the state's primary elections, about how to vote for the president in a contest in which he is not participating.
Beyond obvious details, like making sure voters know that his name is spelled B-i-d-e-n and that they have to check a write-in box on the ballot, the group is recruiting a team of volunteers. They will partake in the small-town New Hampshire experience of standing outside voting sites and holding signs urging voters to write in Biden's name.
The group also plans to have its members write letters and place opinion essays in New Hampshire newspapers and appear at town Democratic club meetings before the primary.
Norelli said she was not worried that Biden would lose to Phillips or Williamson. The aim, she said, is to give his campaign – with which her group is not coordinating – momentum to defeat former President Donald Trump in the general election, assuming he is the Republican nominee.
"It's not like it's a big, contested race," she said.
This month, the group distributed stickers at a New Hampshire Democratic Party fundraising dinner where, in a public-relations triumph for the effort, Shaheen, the state's senior senator, expressed her support.
"Let's kick off 2024 by writing in Biden and making our first in-the-nation primary the very first victory for the Biden-Harris reelection team," Shaheen said at the dinner. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who is widely seen as having presidential ambitions of his own and has publicly lamented Democrats' decision to place New Hampshire after South Carolina on the nominating calendar, dialed into one of the group's video conferences, which Norelli said were held every two weeks and usually attracted about 85 people.
A Biden campaign spokesperson declined to comment.
Florida's Democratic Party has already canceled its presidential primary. Democratic officials in other states have moved to list only Biden on their ballot, which has led to complaints from Phillips and Williamson.
Sullivan said that by all but ignoring the New Hampshire primary, Biden ran the danger of allowing the challenges from Phillips and Williamson to become competitive. She pointed to 1976, 1980 and 1992, when incumbent presidents lost reelection, and to 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was driven out of the race. In all of those years, the presidents faced tough primary opponents in New Hampshire.
"I don't think it would be good for him if he does poorly in New Hampshire," Sullivan said of Biden.
Ray Buckley, the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party since 2007, said Biden retained support from a vast majority of the state's Democrats, but cautioned that a significant percentage would be likely to vote against him.
"About one-third of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters are cranky people who always want to be contrary," said Buckley, who added that he had not communicated with the write-in groups. "Anyone who is not the main person starts off with a third of the vote."
Buckley himself plans to stay neutral – sort of.
"Ever since I became state party chair, I have consistently written in Jimmy Carter," Buckley said. "Maybe this time I'll write in Rosalynn to honor her. That's really the choice for me."
Lou D'Allesandro, a New Hampshire state senator who has known Biden for decades, said he would reluctantly write the president's name on the ballot despite lingering anger about how the Granite State had been treated.
"People felt slighted," he said. "But what he's done for the country overrides that decision."
D'Allesandro said he saw Biden this month at a Boston fundraiser where musician James Taylor played a concert. D'Allesandro said that he had embraced Biden, and that the president had invited him to the White House.
But D'Allesandro didn't bring up his grievances about New Hampshire's primary.
"It wasn't the time or the place to do that," he said.