Pop quiz: after Michigan, what state had the closest outcome in the 2016 presidential election? No, it wasn’t Minnesota, which almost broke its 40-year Democratic voting streak… and it wasn’t Michigan’s fellow Midwestern “blue wall” neighbors Pennsylvania or Wisconsin… it wasn’t even famous former bellwethers like Ohio or Florida. Instead, it was New Hampshire, which came within 0.37 points of becoming the first New England state to vote for a Republican since 2000, when the Granite State was won by George W. Bush. 

It’s somewhat surprising, then, that New Hampshire has been almost entirely ignored as a “swing state” since 2016. The Washington Post’s in-depth swing state analysis in 2020 omitted New Hampshire entirely, even though it did, in fact, end up-swinging, albeit towards the left, awarding Joe Biden its four electoral votes by over seven points. And yet, that same year, New Hampshirites reelected Republican Governor Chris Sununu by nearly 32 points, and flipped control of the state’s House, Senate, and Executive Council (think of it as a kind of elected cabinet) to Republicans, even while they handed both of the state’s Democratic U.S. representatives relatively comfortable wins. Even as Democrats won statewide trifectas in Michigan and Minnesota, Republicans continued to dominate all state governments offices in New Hampshire, while simultaneously giving their Democratic representatives even larger percentages of the vote share, and reelecting Democratic U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan by over nine points.

So what’s going on in this weird little state? The simplistic version is that a significant portion of the state’s electorate consists of the much fabled “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” voter. Chris Sununu may be the heir to a conservative dynasty and an apologetic Trump supporter, but he’s also broadly supportive of abortion rights, marijuana legalization, and LGBTQ rights, even going as far as to publicly oppose a 2022 “parental bill of rights” that would have forced schools to out transgender students to their parents, despite other Republican governors embracing similar legislation. However, these strategic socially liberal pivots were not embraced by Republicans like 2022 Senate candidate Don Bolduc or 2022 House candidate Karoline Leavitt, who ultimately lost, and they don’t appear as though they’ll be embraced by Trump, either. Considering that Biden already won 58% of white women (and 69% of unmarried women) in New Hampshire in 2020, the national GOP’s intransigence on abortion figures to hurt them once again in this tiny New England state, especially as Democrats try to build off of the Dobbs effect they rode to some unlikely victories in 2022. 

Outside of these specific social issues, though, New Hampshire’s demographic trends are simply bad for Republicans. Even though it is an overwhelming white and substantially rural state, it is also a highly educated and fairly irreligious one, two demographics that have moved away from Republicans in the Trump era, and New Hampshire’s racial homogeneity means that Trump’s apparent improvements among Black and Latino voters won’t be able to offset these losses. It’s also worth noting that New Hampshire has the second highest median age of any state, and if recent polling crosstabs bare out, then Harris could very well end up winning seniors, an unlikely advantage that could also carry her in the Granite State.

If there was one New Hampshire specific issue that seemed like it would benefit Trump, it would have been the controversy over the state’s primary, which was held on its traditional “first in the nation” date despite the Democratic National Committee’s decision to shuffle the calendar to put South Carolina’s primary first. The ensuing flap between the DNC and New Hampshire Democrats sparked speculation that Biden, already unpopular, could suffer an embarrassing defeat at the hands of Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, but a successful write-in campaign managed to hand the president nearly 64% of the vote, and the national party seems to determined to let bygones be bygones and rescind the penalties to the state’s delegates it had initially announced as punishment for the unsanctioned contest. Of course, Biden’s departure from the race in favor of Kamala Harris has likely overshadowed this earlier controversy, and may serve to defuse the intraparty tension.

Given how close Trump came to winning New Hampshire in 2016, it’d be foolish to claim he has no chance at winning the state only eight years later. But in an ironic twist, the very things that may have made New Hampshire a prime flip opportunity for Republicans in years past – i.e., its status as the home of old, highly-educated white voters – have all of a sudden become a major liability for the national party’s prospects in the state. New Hampshire may still be a swing state, but if it swings to Trump, it will probably be a mere accessory to a much larger sweep of the 2024 battlegrounds rather than the tipping point.