Golly Toto, I Don't Think We're in New Hampshire Anymore

 "All politics is local."

--Tip O'Neill, former Speaker of the House

Before the internet, Mr. O'Neill's quip likely was more accurate, but one thing our connected information age has done is to nationalize politics. Just go on Twitter and see comments from Michigan, Texas, California, Oregon and you cannot distinguish them from people writing from New Hampshire.

Hampton Falls, NH

Which is not to say, we do not have local issues or that announcing you want to cut the corn ethanol in gasoline program will go unnoticed in Iowa, but if Donald Trump has taught us anything it's that the creepy crawlies are distributed from sea to shining sea, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. 

There is some commonality which connects the junkyard owner in Wisconsin to the Hispanic who lives along the border in Texas to the guy down the street from Mad Dog in Hampton, who still flies his Trump flag, and who drove around for months with Trump flags flying from his Ford F 250.

Beautiful Downtown Hampton

Analyzing what connects these folks, across state lines, geography and even social class should be the first priority of political thinkers, but Mad Dog sees no signs the public intellectuals who might do this analysis have the tools or modes of thought to do it.

Jill Lepore might have a chance, but she is more historian than analyst. 

Certainly  Nate Silver is just guessing.

David Brooks might eventually figure it out, but Mad Dog is not holding his breath.

If Trump appealed to only the white male who barely got out of high school, worked a succession of uninspiring jobs--delivering auto parts, stocking shelves, changing oil at Jiffy Lube or tires at Town Fair Tire, or maybe, if he was a little more successful, working in a garage or in the trades, then one could go to work understanding the phenomenon. Losers in the meritocracy, who felt humiliated in school, who ran with the wrong crowd in high school and were never going to be seen by their peers as anything but ordinary at best and losers at worst. And along comes Trump.

But that doesn't explain the rich folks in Bonita Springs, Florida or up at Frye Island in Maine who love Trump.

And now we know it's not just some subterranean 40%. It's 50% or very nearly.

Obadiah Youngblood, Salt Marshes North Hampton

The only real comfort is history: Read Howard Zinn, or "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," or "A Bright and Shining Lie" or even "Gone with the Wind," and you will see that Trump part of America--resentful, feeling cheated, violent, every bit the same crowd who worked themselves into a frenzy over Adolf, right here in the USA. This hate, this intractability matches anything seen in Northern Ireland ("Say Nothing") or Palestine. 

Now, we are faced,  unexpectedly, with a Republican governor, Executive Committee, state House of Representatives and Senate, and we have no real explanation for this, in a state which sent a woman to the US House and another to the US Senate and a gay man to the House. 

What happened in New Hampshire?

Mad Dog has some idea, mainly what he wants to believe, that the powers that be in the New Hampshire Democratic party have failed to recruit the best candidates. But that's too simple. The best candidate or at least one of the very best for state House, Katherine Harake, a woman of poise, intellect and enormous promise did not make the House.

And the Pig Shall Lie Down with the Lamb

Then again, New Hampshire sent Maggie Hassan to the US Senate and to the governorship when it could have chosen Jackie Cilley.

And when it had the  choice between Terence O'Rourke, a sharp witted former federal prosecutor, a bronze star captain in the Airborne, and a man so mild mannered he tends to disappear into the woodwork, Chris Pappas, they chose Pappas. 

This may just be what makes politics an art, not a science. But it does not augur well for our future.