Human Rights Campaign Fails Clinton in NH

BY KEVIN FRANCK | FEBRUARY 12, 2016

If the Human Rights Campaign’s goal in Iowa and New Hampshire was to flex the electoral muscle of the LGBT community, the nation’s largest LGBT rights organization may need to go back to the gym.

Last month, HRC waded into a competitive Democratic presidential primary for the first time when they announced their support for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Citing their view that Clinton has better chances of winning a general election race against the eventual Republican nominee, the organization promised to boost Clinton in the early primary states as part of “an unprecedented organizational effort to register and mobilize the nation’s pro-equality majority.”

It didn’t work. While the Iowa Democratic Party is still trying to sort out caucus results, that contest was, at best, a draw. In New Hampshire Clinton was walloped by a surging Sanders campaign.

To be fair, HRC’s efforts for Clinton faced some pretty strong head winds. Aside from an electorate seemingly eager to support an anti-establishment revolutionary, Clinton and Sanders have remarkably similar positions and records on LGBT issues.

HRC’s Board of Directors may have unanimously decided that Hillary Clinton is the better candidate for LGBT Americans, but in conversations with Democratic voters on the phone and at their doors, making that argument is a tougher task.

Though HRC’s efforts for Clinton in New Hampshire proved unfruitful, their campaign in the Granite State was indeed unprecedented and may lay the groundwork for the organization to be a major player in the presidential race.

For the first time in a federal race, HRC reached beyond its membership to pitch Clinton to the broader Democratic electorate. They looked at voting records and other data to create a universe of Democratic voters who likely support LGBT equality. The staff and volunteers reached out those voters to persuade undecided folks and identify solid Clinton supporters.

This strategy is a smart recognition that LGBT voters are no longer the only group who are likely to support a pro-equality candidate over one of the haters. For the first time, a majority of Americans say they are less likely to support a candidate who opposes marriage equality according to public polling released by HRC.

HRC’s National Field Director Marty Rouse points out that, in addition to holding the first-in-the-nation primary election, New Hampshire is friendly territory for the LGBT community — and it’s also expected to be a swing state in the fall.

“We’re probably not done in New Hampshire,” Rouse told me a few hours before the polls closed on Tuesday.

Rouse wrangled staff and volunteers out of a non-descript storefront a few doors down from a smoke shop and directly across the street from Clinton’s Manchester headquarters. In the week leading up to Election Day, more than 200 volunteers visited the office plastered over with “HRC for HRC” signs, making somewhere north of 14,000 phone calls and knocking on nearly 4,000 doors.

When November rolls around, Rouse and his crew will be able to draw from the data they have collected from thousands of voter contacts and deploy the hundreds of volunteers they have recruited to reach out to the majority of voters in New Hampshire who support equality.

Unlike the primary race between two LGBT champions, the race to succeed President Barack Obama will come down to a choice between a Democratic candidate who supports LGBT equality and a Republican candidate who does not. That’s an easier sell for HRC’s volunteers to make to their friends and neighbors who support us.

HRC’s work in the early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada might not affect the Democratic primary, but it could set the LGBT community on a path to exercise real influence over the election of our next Commander-in-Chief.

Kevin Franck is a political consultant and former Democratic Party spokesman