After last week’s debacle in Iowa, where nearly a week later, we still don’t know if the results are in fact valid, the chattering classes are asking, “why Iowa?” and even, “why New Hampshire?”

The horse race to November’s presidential election has begun in earnest. And as it’s been done now since 1920, presidential wannabes, political insiders, and self-appointed front-runners are forced to trudge through the cold and chill of a New England winter writ large. Running the gauntlet of retail politics is still being done in the age of Twitter—as it should be—in a very white state that doesn’t always mirror the rest of America. But to New Hampshire they all come.

During past campaigns, both my wife and I have traveled to Maine-based events together or on our own. I’ve seen Democrats like the Clintons, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich in-person. When I was a Republican, I attended events for George Bush. There’s something about seeing candidates in live settings that surpasses merely seeing them pixelated on a television screen.

On Saturday, we decided to make the 35-minute drive from Southern Maine and cross the border into neighboring New Hampshire to hear a long-shot candidate, Tulsi Gabbard. She was hosting a town hall in Rochester, at the Elks Lodge.

Why Gabbard? Both of us have been intrigued by her commercials running on the Portland station where we consume our morning news and get our weather from. Like other candidates I’ve supported: Kucinich, Ralph Nader, and in 2016, Jill Stein, Gabbard projects something different than the typical business-as-usual politics common during DNC-influenced dog-and-pony shows passed off as debates. Continue reading →