Longshots Make Their Last Stands

Manchester, N.H.— Deval Patrick was in the midst of an answer about job creation when a middle-aged woman clutching a blue leather bible walked in the door of the bookstore where he was making a last appeal to voters.

“My name is Licarda,” the woman with the bible began, interrupting another questioner in line. ​“I have mental illness issue, and the system is broken in our nation.”

Patrick took the question — and recalled wrestling with his wife’s own mental health crisis while he served as governor Massachusetts.

As Michael Bennet and Andrew Yang had done earlier in the day, Patrick was about to draw on his personal experience to deliver a distinctive message aimed at somehow propelling him to a survival rankin in Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary.

Monday was the last chance for longshots like Bennet and Patrick and Yang to try to have their voices heard before voters cast ballots — and winnow the field of prospective Democratic candidates.

Their appearances showed that, whatever the numerical results, the longshots had something to say.

Patrick was at the Bookery in downtown Manchester. People streamed by on the sidewalk outside with red ​“Make America Great Again” hats, making their way through the darkening afternoon to a Trump rally nearby.

On the bookshelf behind Patrick sat the covers of presidential-hopeful memoirs. Some of the faces that stared from those glossy jackets, like those of Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, belonged to frontrunners who were nearby riding a wave of optimism after strong finishes in last week’s Iowa caucus. Other books, like the ones with Kamala Harris and Cory Booker on the cover, sat like crisp snapshots of last year’s soccer team smiling just before losing the state championship.

Patrick did not have a book of his own on the shelf to tell the audience: ​“I’m not dead yet.” He was there to say it himself.

Patrick did not win a single precinct in Iowa, and he hovers close to zero in most polls. He joined the race in November, and with his late entry, he has not been able to inspire a wave of support like other candidates.

On Monday, he told voters that he thinks the conversations he has had all around the state could give him a surprise boost on Tuesday, giving him the momentum he needs to win in states with large African American populations.

About 50 people packed into a corner of the Manchester bookstore to hear him Monday, less than 24 hours before many would cast their ballots in Tuesday’s primary. One woman in the back asked about the service component of Patrick’s ​“Democracy Agenda.” She had participated in Project 351, a 12-month ​“service learning, leadership development, and civic engagement” program for eighth graders that Patrick started as governor. Patrick explained how as president, he would make a similar initiative that would aim to give paid opportunities to any high school graduate who wants to work for a year in some kind of service.

He had a list of eight people whose questions he said he would answer, and once he had finished talking about his ​“universal national service” plan, he was about to call on number three. The woman with the bible stopped him.

“I’m sorry, can I,” Licarda began. She had a question she needed to ask, she told him.

“Let me ask number three if you would yield?” Patrick said, turning to another woman in the back who was ahead in line. ​“Sure,” she replied.

Licarda told Patrick that she was once homeless in Massachusetts until she got a Section 8 federal housing susbsidy in New Hampshire.

“What are you going to do with our mental health system that is broken? What are you going to do with the stigma?” she asked.

“When we talk about healthcare, we’re almost always talking about physical health care and not mental health,” Patrick replied. ​“And whole-person care has to include whole-person health… My wife has managed anxiety and depressive disorder…”

Licarda began to lose her composure. ​“It’s hard, but I need to…” she said.

“No, that’s OK,” replied Patrick. ​“Her whole life and her whole adult life,” he continued about his wife. Shortly after he became governor, he said, she was hospitalized for her mental health.

“To the stigma point, I was being slipped in at night through basements and stuff like that. And she said look, I’m not ashamed of being here, I just don’t feel well,” he recalled. So, they sent out a statement, against the doctors’ recommendations, saying that she was dealing with depression.

“She got thousands of cards and letters and notes from people saying thank you for saying what was the matter,” he continued.

The story led to the first part of his answer. Changing the mental health system would require leadership that could end the stigma, he said.

The other part is assuring that the country’s healthcare system is a complete healthcare system. He touted bills he had passed in Massachusetts that made sure insurance covered mental health and substance abuse disorders.

Patrick’s healthcare plan would create ​“a robust and accessible public option to compete with private plans modeled on Medicare.” (Though Mitt Romney got the ball rolling on Massachusetts’ progressive healthcare plan that became a model for Obama in crafting the Affordable Care Act, Patrick made it clear that he was the one who actually implemented it.) On his website, one of the key features of the plan would involve improving mental health care.

Some in the room said such interactions have impressed them.

Anthony Jackson had come from Maine to see him. He said he had convinced all but one of his family members to vote for him. He said he had liked Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden, but that once he saw how Patrick interacts with people, he decided to switch his support to the longshot governor from Massachusetts.

And that connection inspired Bill and Julie Hague to drive up to New Hampshire from Windsor, Connecticut, to see the candidate they found so warm in a Feb. 7 CNN town hall. ​“We just saw him in that town hall a few days ago and said, ​‘Hey, we have Monday off, why not drive to New Hampshire?’” said Julie Hague.

“I Know It Will Be Temporary”

Earlier that morning, Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet trudged from a large silver SUV through the snow into the Blue Loon Bakery in New London. There, a crowd of about 50 people waited for him to arrive at his first event of the day: a 9 a.m. meeting over cheddar-bacon puffs and maple scones.

Bennet grabbed one of the cheddar-bacon pastries on the way in.

“It’s one of the most delicious things I’ve ever had,” he declared as he walked to the fireplace where he would stand to talk. ​“They’re in the back and they’re warm,” he said.

It was his 90th appearance in New Hampshire, he told the crowd. Like Patrick, he remains at the bottom of the polls.

“I love every single person in this room because I know you know where I am in the polls and yet you’re still here,” he joked at the beginning of the event.

Bennet came to national politics from a local post, he told the crowd. He was superintendent of Denver Public Schools until he was appointed U.S. senator in 2009 when Ken Salazar left the job.

Denver a district of 95,000 kids, most of them students of color, and a budget of $1 billion. ​“Which for reference is about three times the size of South Bend, Indiana,” he added to chuckles from the crowd, in a reference to top-tier presidential candidate and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Throughout the 45-minute session, Bennet continued to harken back to his time as superintendent. As he did, it revealed how he learned a piece of his character that is central to his pitch: that he can talk to anyone, and does not balk at attacks.

Some of the teachers he worked with in Denver, he said, are much better at dealing with conflict than many of those he works with in the U.S. Senate. He once asked a principal in one of his schools how he dealt with conflict with parents. The principal replied that he visualizes it ahead of time, and knows it will have a beginning, a middle, and an end. ​“And because I know it will be temporary,” he recalled the principal telling him, ​“I can withstand it.”

Bennet hinted at his fair share of tense moments as superintendent. As the morning progressed, the steel and determination to collaborate with opposition he had learned in the schools resurfaced.

A woman sitting on the floor told him she liked the way he uses language.

A phone rang in the audience. ​“It’s probably Mayor Pete,” Bennet joked. ​“I’ll take it … no, just joking.” The crowd laughed.

“Melanie said she appreciates the way I speak,” he continued. The country’s founders, he said, ​“did not found this country on the idea that we were all going to agree with each other… The worst decisions I make are by myself at home, not contending with someone else’s point of view.”

Bennet, like other moderate candidates in the field, has branded himself as a someone who can work with Republicans. He pointed out that he has won two statewide elections in a purple state. At one point, he listed Republicans he has worked with: U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, to name just two.

“I spent 20 years as a Republican,” but left the party because of Donald Trump, said a voter in the corner of the room. ​“Your message is one that resonates with Republicans who are looking for a place to go,” to the right of candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. 

“I’m afraid we’re out of time,” Bennet joked as he looked at the corner where the former Republican stood. ​“I’ll have to take you on the road with me.”

“You’re In The Wrong Town”

For most of his time running, people have called Andrew Yang a longshot candidate. Looking around the packed, pitched-seating movie theater in Concord where he spoke at noon on Monday, you wouldn’t know that.

A few minutes before noon, people had to start spilling over into Theater 2 of Red River Theatres to watch Yang’s talk on a screen. A group of 45 students from a high school in Mamaroneck, N.Y., sat in the lower part of the audience with navy blue ​“MATH” sweaters and ​“Yang 2020” flyers poking out of cup holders. (“MATH” is the Yang team’s acronym for ​“Make America Think Harder,” a response to the Trump MAGA/Make America Great Again slogan.)

Yang has managed to create enough momentum that finish sixth in Iowa and draw a devoted band of believers with a call to tackle the job-loss challenges of automation and to distribute $1,000 a month to all American adults. Though he still came out of the caucus without any pledged delegates, he did the best of all the bottom-of-the-pack delegate-less candidates.

New Hampshire’s towns and cities, like many in New England, sit along rivers with brick mill buildings lying in varying states of disrepair or, in some cases, rebirth. The former tech and test-prep entrepreneur began there.

“After the mill or plant closed, the shopping district closed, people left, the school shrank, and the town has never recovered,” he said. What happened in New Hampshire has happened in Missouri, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, he told the crowd, all swing states that Trump took in 2016.

“How many of you notice stores closing around where you live?” he asked the crowd. ​“And why are those stores closing?”

“Amazon,” replied someone in the audience.

“Amazon’s like a spaceship hovering over the economy sucking up $20 billion a year in business, closing 30 percent of our jobs and malls. The most common job in the economy is retail clerk. The average retail clerk is a 39-year-old woman making between 8 and 12 dollars an hour. What is her next job after the store closes? We’re not sure. How much did Amazon pay in taxes last year?”

“Zero,” replied the audience.

“Zero,” Yang confirmed.

“We’re in the midst of the greatest economic and technical transformation in the history of our country, what experts are calling the fourth industrial revolution,” he said. He told the crowd that after Trump won in 2016, he thought: ​“I get it now, I’ve been staring at this stuff for seven years. We’re blasting away at the most common jobs in the economy.”

When he went to Washington, D.C., he asked politicians what they were going to do, Yang said, and he said he got three responses. First, was ​“we can’t talk about this.” Then there was ​“we should study this.” Finally, he heard: ​“We must educate and retrain all Americans for the jobs of the future.”

Job training programs for former manufacturing workers failed in the past, he claimed.

He recalled a friend telling him, “‘Andrew, you’re in the wrong town. No one here in D.C. will do anything about this because fundamentally, this is a town of followers, not leaders. And the only way we’ll be able to do something about it is if you were to create a wave in other parts of the country, and bring that wave crashing down on our heads.’ And I said, ​‘Challenge accepted. I’ll be back with the wave in two years’. And that’s how I came to be running for president.”

As he sat waiting for the event to begin, Rick Broussard (pictured above, with Jemi Broussard) had anticipated that point from Yang,. You ​“have to start looking at it as this speed of light” phenomenon, he said of the new economy Yang was about to warn him of. Broussard said he is an independent, and ​“probably a libertarian.” But that didn’t stop him from giving Yang a visit, to hear what he called something ​“sort of subversive.”