My Trip to New Hampshire: January 16th and 17th, 2016 (Days 5 and 6)

January 16th, 2016

This morning, our class split up into two groups: those who planned to go to the Rand Paul town hall and those who planned to go to the Jeb Bush town hall. I chose to go to the Rand Paul rally in Manchester, NH with four other students. When we arrived, I noticed that the room was a bit smaller than the Carly Fiorina rally, which had an estimate of about 300 people attending. The Rand Paul town hall had about 200 people by the time the event ended. Unlike the other events we had been to, Rand Paul took pictures with us before he spoke, which made things easier and more efficient for everybody because there was no chaos and nobody got left out. After the pictures, Rand Paul started his speech by talking about foreign policy issues and solutions that made sense, which included not sending money to countries that hate us and not bombing everything in sight in the Middle East. Because there was another event in the hall soon after Rand's town hall, he could only speak for about 20 minutes. The only criticism I have was that he focused a little too much on foreign policy than anything else, but it was understandable because he was not given much time to speak. 

After the rally, not much happened. I was supposed to go canvassing with the Cruz campaign during the afternoon, but unpredicted events kept happening on the campaign's side, so I ended up not doing any campaign work for the day. However, because of this, I was able to experience some of New Hampshire's culture, specifically their love for the New England Patriots. Our class decided to go to Murphy's Taproom, which was swarming with Patriots fans. Being a Redskins fan and having an absolute hatred for the Patriots, it was very hard for me to sit there and watch the Patriots beat the Chiefs, but I hid in the background while the fans cheered loudly around me. Either way, it was fun to talk about our campaign experiences over dinner once again. 

January 17th, 2016

Today was a lot like the latter half of Saturday; nothing really happened politically except the Democratic debate. Sadly, I was only able to watch parts of the debate here and there. From what I noticed, it seemed that the debate focused mostly on the growing feud between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, while Martin O'Malley struggled to gain attention or speaking time throughout it. Bernie tended to stick with his strong topics such as going against Wall Street and talking about the top 1%, while Hillary Clinton decided to try to appeal to African-American voters by mentioning Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Flint water crisis. 

Concerning today itself, the plan was to either make phone calls in the Ted Cruz office or go to the Ted Cruz event in Milford, NH to volunteer. We did not get a call from our campaign supervisor until later in the day, so we eventually decided to take the hotel shuttle over to the office to make phone calls. We stayed in the office for about two hours making a little less than 100 calls each because we spent the first hour talking to a fellow volunteer about random political topics. One topic that stuck out to me was when we started comparing the endorsements between Republican frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. When I looked up Donald Trump's endorsements, I noticed that he has more celebrities behind him, including Gary Busey, Hulk Hogan, and Ann Coulter. Ted Cruz has higher-level political endorsements, including those from Steve King, Louie Gohmert, and Ken Cuccinelli. We learned in class that more endorsements does not mean more votes in the long run, but we determined that the higher-level political endorsements would benefit Cruz more than Trump's celebrity endorsements would benefit him. 

This weekend was a calm break from all of the craziness of the New Hampshire political world. I look forward to these next five days; I expect to start my week by going to see Donald Trump, and I expect to end my week (and my trip) by going to see Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, both of which I expect to be very interesting.

In Liberty,
Jacob Stech '18