Still annoyed with Biden, New Hampshire Democrats are gearing up to help him

New Hampshire Democrats were furious with President Biden when he shook up the party’s nominating calendar last year, reducing their state’s political importance by pushing its primary behind South Carolina’s.

Kicking and screaming, they defied the Democratic National Committee refused to go back their primary. This year, they warned that the unrest could come back to haunt Mr. Biden and hand him an embarrassing loss in the state’s primaries.

In turn, the national party stripped the state of its deputies. Mr. Biden declined to campaign in New Hampshire or even put his name on the ballot.

Now some of the state’s influential Democrats, including Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, are coming around to the idea that they should swallow their pride and help Biden win their primaries despite his criticism of their state.

“It is up to us in New Hampshire to solve a problem that his advisers and the DNC have created for the president,” said Kathleen Sullivan, a former New Hampshire Democratic Party chairwoman who is leading a write-in Biden -super PAC.

Ms. Sullivan’s super PAC is one of two groups of Democrats in the state organizing campaigns to promote Mr. Biden as the candidate for the Jan. 23 primary.

For Granite Staters who support Biden, the write-in efforts amount to a bit of a tail between the legs, after months of howling objections to the president’s decision. Like Ms. Sullivan, they find themselves blaming the DNC or Mr. Biden’s aides instead of a president they still support.

Their goal is a substantive victory for Biden over the two Democrats running protest campaigns against the president, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota and self-help author Marianne Williamson. Both, unlike Mr. Biden, will appear on Democratic ballots in the state.

“People here, quite frankly, don’t care about the DNC or their rules,” said Terie Norelli, a former speaker of the New Hampshire State House and leader of Granite State Write-In, a grassroots group that supports the rule. Biden. “The vast majority of Democrats and independents in New Hampshire support President Biden.”

The group hopes to use its modest budget — $50,000 to $70,000 — to educate New Hampshire Democrats and independents, who are eligible to vote in the state’s primaries, on how to vote for the president in an election in which he is not participating.

Besides the obvious details, like making sure voters know his name is spelled Biden and that they need to check a write-in box on the ballot, the group is recruiting a team of volunteers. They will take part in a small-town New Hampshire experience, standing outside voting locations and holding signs calling on voters to write in Mr. Biden’s name.

The group also plans to have its members write letters and place opinion essays in New Hampshire newspapers and appear at Democratic club meetings in the city before the primaries.

Ms. Norelli said she was not concerned that Mr. Biden would lose to Mr. Phillips or Ms. Williamson. The goal, she said, is to give his campaign — with which her group is not coordinating — momentum to defeat former President Donald J. Trump in the general election, assuming he is the Republican nominee.

“It’s not like it’s a big, contentious race,” she said.

This month, the group handed out stickers at a New Hampshire Democratic Party fundraising dinner, where Ms. Shaheen, the state’s senior senator, threw her support behind the effort in a public relations triumph.

“Let’s start 2024 by writing in Biden and making our first primary in the country the first-ever victory for the Biden-Harris reelection team,” Ms. Shaheen said at the dinner.

Representative Ro Khanna of California, who is widely believed to have presidential ambitions of his own and who has publicly lamented Democrats’ decision to put New Hampshire on the nominating calendar after South Carolina, called into one of the group’s video conferences, which Mrs. Norelli said. was held every two weeks and usually attracted about 85 people.

A Biden campaign spokesman declined to comment.

Florida’s Democratic Party has already canceled its presidential primaries. Democratic officials in other states have moved to include only Mr. Biden on their ballots, leading to complaints from Mr Phillips and Mrs Williamson.

Ms. Sullivan said that by virtually ignoring the New Hampshire primary, Mr. Biden risked making the challenges from Mr. Phillips and Ms. Williamson competitive. She pointed to 1976, 1980 and 1992, when incumbent presidents lost re-election, and 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson was ousted from the race. In all those years, the presidents in New Hampshire faced tough opponents.

“I don’t think it would be good for him if he does poorly in New Hampshire,” Ms. Sullivan said of Mr. Biden.

Ray Buckley, chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party since 2007, said Biden retained the support of a large majority of Democrats in the state but warned that a significant percentage would likely vote against him.

“About a third of New Hampshire’s Democratic primary voters are grumpy people who always want to be contrarian,” said Buckley, who added that he had not communicated with the write-in groups. “Anyone who is not the main character starts with a third of the votes.”

Mr. Buckley himself plans to remain neutral — more or less.

“Since I became state party chairman, I have consistently written Jimmy Carter,” Buckley said. “Maybe this time I’ll write to Rosalynn to honor her. That’s really the choice for me.”

Lou D’Allesandro, a New Hampshire senator who has known Mr. Biden for decades, said he would reluctantly put the president’s name on the ballot despite lingering anger over the way the Granite State had been treated.

“People felt slighted,” he said. “But what he has done for the country negates that decision.”

Mr. D’Allesandro said he saw Mr. Biden last week at a fundraiser in Boston where the musician James Taylor was playing a concert. Mr D’Allesandro said he had hugged Mr Biden and that the president had invited him to the White House.

But Mr. D’Allesandro did not express his grievances about the New Hampshire primary.

“It wasn’t the time or place to do that,” he said.