New Hampshire Primary: Salem Snapshot

I’ve been here since the morning. The balmy weather has magnified an already intense interest in the contest.  

One of the polling places I hit was Salem Town Hall. Salem is a community of some 30,000 adjacent to Massachusetts. “It’s very busy,” Salem’s Town Clerk, Barbara Lessard told me. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I run out of ballots.”

The town, an outlying bedroom community for Boston, has almost 8000 independents, 4900 Democrats and 5200 Republicans. The absentee ballots, of which there were 300, broke largely Democatic, according to Lessard.

The conventional wisdom is that independents break for either Democratically or Republican. My sense, this time, is that both parties will see a major increase in the number of voters, including independents.