good afternoon everybody Steve Marian for move the gold post on Wednesday afternoon the 11th of September I hope you all had a very good primary day got out and voted and U if you're like me you were very interested not just in who won and lost but maybe a little bit of how things went down why they went the way they did so I hope to save you some time of having to go through it all and I wanted to share five takeaways that I had from primary night and in order to allow this to happen most easily I'm going to share my screen uh with you and hope that this will uh give us a way to uh with a hat tip to New Hampshire Public Radio to show you some of the things that that happened on primary night that I thought were interesting let me start with number one the governor's race on the Democratic side uh as you could see Joyce Craig ended up winning by a solid Sixpoint margin uh by the midpoint of the evening that lead got to the mid to high single digits and it pretty much stuck there about 115 to 20 120,000 people uh voted in the Democratic primary that exceeded the Secretary of State's estimate by about 15 plus thousand so it was a a very solid turnout but a couple of things that uh went into Joyce's victory over Cindy as you can see from the map it looks a lot like a lot of these for lack of a better term establishment or Manchester Southern New Hampshire Centric candidate taking on more of the uh The Outsider often somebody with more of a cd2 uh profile in this case the backgrounds were very similar the positions the policies were extremely similar and so I think there was more made of any of these differences than actually existed and they will work together in the general but look at this you can see from the green these are the communities where Cindy won and you can see the dominance in the Southern and Southeastern part of the state and and a couple of points you could see here for example in Manchester Joyce's home turf she ended up winning by a very significant margin and it ended up uh providing a margin of over 3500 votes on the other hand when you go to conquer which was Cindy's home turf it's a smaller community and she came out about 1300 votes ahead so when they both got their home turfs out of the way Joyce started with the lead and that was something that I think was always going to be in play but here is where the advantage really kicks in a lot of times for the Southern New Hampshire based candidate if you look at uh a place like Hanover Cindy won it as you would expect uh but only won it by about 10 points and it ends up only being a a vote margin of about 157 votes uh and you might say okay well that's a solid win so uh that must mean uh that uh that it'll be hard to make up in these really red towns except for look at this take a place like Danville one of the reddest towns in the state Joyce won it by a significant percentage margin but it was about a 100 about a 90 plus vote margin for her in the town of Sandown so you can see when you take a few of these commuter Zone uh towns uh Kingston where she Joyce won by a 100 votes just Kingston plus Danville was exactly 157 vote margin uh added to Joyce which was coincidentally exactly the same number of votes as the margin for Cindy and Hanover so you can see in the Southeastern part of the state these margins get big they add up and you add that with Manchester Joyce also with a significant Advantage uh in nashaa that brought another 1,800 votes and it gave her a durable lead uh that ended up um was going to be able to survive Cindy's success you can see in a lot of these smaller CD two uh towns Kane and Enfield you can see she has these leads but you only get one to 200 votes at a time and then you get to a place like keen and that was one of Cindy's best communities she uh she won almost two to one there but really this is the power of Southeastern New Hampshire even though these are very red towns they also are um they're big and that means that even a small percentage of those populations coming out and voting was going to make a big difference uh in the case of of Joyce as she was trying to uh pull out this race a very quick look at cd2 I think by the end the prognosticators had Maggie goodlander likely to win the race I'm not sure that folks saw a margin of 27 points in their future um but uh you can uh see that it was a consistent lead across the various communities in the distri in the district conquered 6336 josua 6435 a place like Berlin which is a very different kind of democrat Maggie goodlander 71 to 29 and we can keep going around the state you've got places uh like Claremont uh and um and Claremont 6733 there was this margin Littleton 5641 Salem 6832 Peterboro 70 to 20 and so uh Colin narrowly won some of the big Upper Valley communities like Handover and Lebanon but obviously not nearly enough uh with the kind of two to one margins that Maggie was enjoying in most of the rest of the district and the main takeaway there whether it's Kean at 61% conquered at 63% Salem at 68% it it didn't really matter uh it was an across theboard dominance I think the spending Advantage allowed a broad base of Name ID uh to um to get embedded across the district uh there's definitely a gender advantage and I've talked about that before in in past broadcast uh for Democrats in low turnout primaries we saw that in the executive Council 2 primary which we'll get to in a moment uh but uh we certainly saw that at play here as well in a head-to-head matchup Maggie and Colin so this was not one where she had unique advantage in Nashua uh or in certain parts of the district this was a dominant performance that was unusual consistent across the district with the exception of the Upper Valley which takes us to the other congressional district Chris papis was not contested in cd1 cd1 uh Republicans though had a real dog fight with three candidates uh finishing within 2300 votes of each other and Russell Prescott the longtime former state senator and uh executive counselor uh from the Sea Coast Area the Kingston exitor area winning this primary so what happened here here's the big takeaway I think for Joe Kelly Lasser this was sort of his primary to win or lose and he lost uh not by much but largely because uh he did very little outside of Manchester he didn't do very much advertising at all spent very little money but you can see in Manchester complete dominance he got 57% of the vote in a large field uh he had a 3200 vote margin coming out of man Manchester versus anybody else he had a uh a 3450 vote advantage over the eventual winner Russell Prescott so how does somebody start with that big an advantage in the biggest city and not get there well you can see uh Joe Kelly um winning in a lot of the CER communities around Manchester you could see a more narrow victory in Bedford you can see uh that in gtown again about a 10-point victory uh but not coming out with huge vote advantage uh in hookset again that was a more substantial Victory but a relatively small number of votes with a lot of splitting of the vote uh you can see in some of the very Republican smaller towns just east of Manchester like Candia again Joe Kelly Lasser well known in the immediate Manchester area and able to uh to win those the problem was that and you can see Auburn same thing as he moved away from Manchester those numbers uh started going down very quickly exer which is a real stronghold uh for Russell Prescott you could see got 48% uh Joe Kelly unable to get to second place there and you can see that Holly uh noveski was able to get second place in a lot of these other parts and that got her almost to the finish line but not quite enough again Russell Prescott 47% in stratum but look at Joe Kelly Lasser 5% we go all the way out to the Sea Coast uh Portsmith obviously huge Democratic town but lot of boates there uh and you can see uh lavas are under 10% noveski and Prescott uh both doing pretty well there so that's an example an unusual race where we had such a Manchester Centric candidate that was able to be uniquely dominant but was unable to get enough Name ID to be able to represent and pick off some second or even third place finishes in other parts of the district uh if he had been able to do a little bit of that he probably would have won as it was he came pretty close so Russell Prescott the general election candidate in cd1 that was an odd-shaped uh performance by the various candidates uh the next point I want to bring up point four of five I want to bring up is executive Council District 2 uh the most important race that wasn't getting talked about Cindy uh warmington had vacated the seat to run for governor it is a very Democratic seat it's Jerry Mander the other four districts lean a republican this one a democratic leaning SE and I put together a sheet as the night went on and ranked them by the approximate size of the community relative to the district so you can see in 2022 the city of conquer was over 15% of the entire uh second executive Council district and you can see that Mike Liberty a newcomer to politics he was born in the Hollis area he left for school uh and was very successful uh in the tech industry eventually came back uh used a significant amount of his own resources uh taking on Karen leot Hill the former mayor of Lebanon longtime City councelor Uh current County Treasurer of Grafton County she's run campaigns and so it was a very interesting contrast Woman versus men Deep Roots and Democratic politics versus newcomer ability to sell fund versus somebody that did not have that ability uh Liberty ended up outspending Leo hill by more than 4 to1 and so this was very interesting and you can see what ends up happening uh Hill ends up winning by I believe low double digits when all the votes came in how did it happen well here it is if you rank these communities by size within the district uh Mike Liberty narrowly winning and conquered that's an impressive win for a first-time candidate but then look the second third fourth fifth and sixth biggest precincts or communities in the district Kean Hanover Lebanon Peterboro Hopkinton Karen Le oill winning all of those including look at that Kean 60 to 40 Handover 70 to 30 Lebanon almost 7525 and those are big margins as they add up and as we went down uh as the the communities get smaller you could see that in the conquered area uh Mike Liberty was able to uh to win uh by uh between 50 and 59% in places like Bo you see Claremont he narrowly won that but pretty much an even Steven race there and then as we go down the list you could see uh Mike also with the win in Plymouth but generally speaking in the dis in the communities in the district uh that uh were generally more Progressive generally more democratic and um and generally the biggest ones Karen despite the spending disadvantage uh clearly had the advantages of the nature of her Grassroots campaign uh 20 years of relationships within a lot of these communities as well as being a woman in a head-to-head contest at a Democratic primary doubtless a positive factor look at those wind margins and Hancock 2 to1 Chesterfield 2 to1 lime More than 70% and then you keep on moving down and you can see um that uh these get to be very small and was more competitive as we get to the smaller towns so that was an example where dramatic contrast in the two candidates uh Karen will now be prohibitive favorite to win the general election and to be the Democrat on the executive Council kind of the autopilot Democrat that'll be uh one of the highest ranking Democrats of state government and hopefully there'll be a few other Democrats joining her at a minimum to get Democrats back in the majority over there a couple of down ballot races I wanted to highlight before we finish up here that I was taking a look at uh one of them was uh a state Senate primary we had three excellent candidates uh Tara Reen who have former longtime State Rep a county commissioner uh she is U worked in state government as well known as anybody uh in the conquered Civic Community uh not even mentioning that her husband is the recently former ex- mayor of conquered Jim Boule you could see this was conquered Bo Hopkinson and I think a lot of folks thought Reen would run away with it Rebecca McWilliams State Rep from con came very close to winning very impressive performance I think and the way she did it you could see here Angela Brennan also a strong candidate Angela won her hometown of of Bo the challenge that she had was simply that it's it's a smaller Community relative to conquer you could see in Hopkinton a suburb of conquered MC Williams actually narrowly winning Hopkinton outright and but not with enough votes to make up the margin that was conquered where Aldo MC Williams with a really impressive second place there uh that margin of about 270 votes 280 votes was a little too much to overcome in the two Suburban communities around it so Reon will be a prohibitive favorite in the general that's uh the second most democratic State Senate District in New Hampshire obviously we had a lot of State Rep races very few of them had primaries in the Democratic side here is one that I spent some time in with move the goalpost and um this is an opportunity it's an R plus3 District it's moving mov towards the Democratic party and it involves three communities that are three very different ones ringe which is one of the reddest communities in that part of the State Dublin which has become uh kind of Peterboro West and is an extremely blue community and then Jeffrey which uh has moved from red to blue but remains one of the more purple districts in that part of the State uh Hannah bissex who I'm very uh bullish on she ran in the very difficult ringe District last time comported herself well but had no chance really in that very red District she's now running in a flaro the one I'm describing and she was a top vote getter in this primary uh and Tom and Jed also strong candidates but you can see Hannah and Tom emerging Victorious here you can see the three towns here in Jaffrey uh Tom actually winning that uh it's gonna be very important for the Democrats to max out performance in Jeffrey as it's moving in a democratic Direction ringe that's where Hannah lives uh here we don't expect either Democrat to win in this two- seat District but what we are looking for hopefully is to mitigate uh the potential losses in the district and that will allow uh Dublin to kick in Dublin is smaller but is very Democratic you can see Hannah and Tom doing very well there particularly Hannah and I would expect Hannah in particular to really crush it in the general election uh again uh I think women on the ballot particularly primaries tend to drive up interest and turnout uh particularly among folks that may not know much more about the candidates and Hannah's a great candidate as will be uh Tom so I'm excited about that a final note that I don't have a Graphic for Sullivan 7 which is a big flaro District in r+ one uh that includes a number of towns uh including planfield Newport and so forth um Jenny Ramsey had to be a right-in candidate for the Democrats in order to get to the general election and uh that so there was a little bit of holding your breath I know they did a lot of work there and she was successful and so she will be the general election candidate uh you can go to movethe Gold poost nh.com and uh you will see uh a full list that will soon be augmented with new candidates that I think have a chance and have and have done really well so far in this election season but Jenny was one that we've targeted early it's one of the most competitive house districts in New Hampshire it's a single seat District that we narrowly lost in 2022 and I think Jenny a former chair of the planfield school board which is a fantastic profile to run in a purple District like this I think she has a great chance to be successful but she achieved job one which was to uh get the right in and to appear on the general election ballot so that's a quick rundown little less than 20 minutes now you can don't have to go back and read everything you can go on my YouTube channel if you're not already there seeing this uh that's Steve marshand NH we've got a number of videos like this we have some from last night's uh live stream of the primary results and well a lot more as we go in the days and weeks to come and of course go to movethe gopost nh.com uh you can get a lot more content there uh and shame on me if I don't mention that you also can donate the C the we raise money to help the candidates uh we're very excited been able to get some pretty good checks out to candidates already and that will just continue in the next couple weeks as they try to finish up their fundraising goals and just focus on knocking on doors now that we're in general election season thanks very much guys look forward to seeing you all soon on the road bye-bye