Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson and New Hampshire’s Democratic primary

So on a bright Saturday earlier this month, a few dozen Democrats did what many have done in the throes of distress: They turned to Marianne Williamson, the New Age high priestess and Democratic presidential candidate.

“I was the go-to girl when the news was bad,” Williamson said of her career in the metaphysical realm. Typically, “bad” meant something grave, such as cancer or bankruptcy or addiction. In this case, the perceived slight was “disenfranchisement” — a word that, when Williamson spoke it, elicited knowing murmurs from across Aloha Keene, a yoga studio where they’d congregated for the event.

Roughly 70 had packed into the studio’s largest room — most in rows of chairs, some on folded blankets and meditation cushions in sunny patches along the blond wood floor. It was a sea of long white hair and hammered silver jewelry; a couple of people were knitting, while several others were wearing items that looked hand-knit. They listened, heads nodding along as Williamson, 71 and lithe, lectured in her Judy Garland-esque timbre about the need to embrace a new “21st-century paradigm,” “a return to the recognition that there are objective, discernible laws of the inner life, as well as of the external plane.”

Williamson — author of such titles as “Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens,” “Enchanted Love: The Mystical Power of Intimate Relationships” and, most recently, “A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution” — had complaints of her own, saying “the political media industrial complex” has treated her candidacy as “unserious” and portrayed her as a “kooky,” “woo-woo lady” who’s into crystals. (It bears noting that she made this assertion while standing barefoot near a fist-size chunk of amethyst.)

“They want for me not to even exist,” she said. Perhaps she might find common cause with New Hampshire voters who, too, were feeling invisible to the national party — but remained very real and meaningful to her. “They can take away my significance, but they cannot take away your significance,” she said.

Williamson is one of 21 non-Biden candidates who will appear on New Hampshire’s Democratic primary ballot on Jan. 23. Another is John Vail, a New Hampshire activist whose sole intention is to offer a ballot line to voters who’d rather vote against money in politics than for any particular candidate. Another is Vermin Supreme, a performance artist and perpetual presidential prospect known for wearing a rubber boot on his head.

Another is Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), a primary latecomer nudged into the race by Biden’s old age and bleak approval ratings. Phillips turned up in New Hampshire that same week with affirmations of Granite State grievance similar to Williamson’s. “They are working against all of us,” he told voters at a candidate forum at New England College. “They are suppressing the voters of New Hampshire by saying your vote does not matter.”

Does any of this matter? Biden is an incumbent president running for reelection. Barring an emergency, he is going to be the Democratic Party’s nominee — with or without New Hampshire’s blessing. And he may, in fact, still win there: Local Democrats are working on a write-in campaign, which might well succeed in proving that a plurality of New Hampshirites prefer Biden, even if they have to personally add his name on their ballot.

But what if, under the glare of the national media on Jan. 23, Williamson, Phillips or anyone else manage to make off with New Hampshire’s tiny blue log tote of primary delegates?

“If Dean Phillips does really, really well in New Hampshire, it’ll be a wake-up call for Joe,” says Billy Shaheen, a local Democratic kingmaker who said he’d been trying to talk Democrats like Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) into joining the race in a Phillips-like role. “It may not change the outcome of the election or anything, but it’ll be a wake-up call.”

“It would be a bad story if, on the night of the primary, Joe Biden loses,” says Kathy Sullivan, a former state party chair who’s working on the Biden write-in effort.

A wake-up call. A bad story. A referendum on the discernible laws of the inner life, as well as of the external plane.

There’s something else going on here that has little to do with Joe Biden, or Marianne Williamson or Dean Phillips or Vermin Supreme. The true meaning of the wacky primary season here is not so much about the present as it is about the past and the future.

It’s about relevance, entitlement and the civic truisms people take for Granite.

“Iowa picks corn, New Hampshire picks presidents,” former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu, father of current governor Chris Sununu and former senator John E. Sununu, all Republicans, said in 1988. The only non-incumbent New Hampshire primary victor to go on to win the presidency since ’88 was Donald Trump in 2016, but, still: “What New Hampshire does — it doesn’t select who the president should be, but it winnows down the field,” clarified Billy Shaheen, who is married to New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D).

New Hampshire remains first on the Republican side, where the race is on for distant-second place to Donald Trump. But the Democratic National Committee upended its primary schedule last December by slotting South Carolina as the Democrats’ first presidential contest, booting both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary from their respective early slots. The changes came at the urging of President Biden, who argued no Democratic presidential candidate can expect to win “unless you have overwhelming support from voters of color.” (Subtext: New Hampshire is too White and too rural to be a good proxy for the party anymore.)

In 2020, Biden finished fifth in New Hampshire with a measly 8 percent of the vote. Some might suspect sour grapes. Others might say the fact that he ended up running away with the nomination is proof that New Hampshire’s preferences are out of step with the party’s. Its first-in-the-nation status, however, is enshrined in state law, meaning it will hold its primary a full week before South Carolina. To hell with the DNC, a toothless party organ with no authority to tell a state — let alone one with a Republican-controlled legislature — what to do! This is a sales and income tax-less refuge where its denizens demand, as the official state motto says, to “Live Free or Die.” (So free, in fact, that a group of lawmakers routinely introduce bills for New Hampshire to secede from the United States.)

“New Hampshire is a place that cares really deeply about its freedoms and democracy,” says David Watters, a Democratic state senator who’s also working on the Biden write-in effort.

The New Hampshire primary is also about a bunch of ticked-off New Englanders mourning the loss of a family heirloom — one bestowed on them generations ago.

Sharp. Witty. Thoughtful. Sign up for the Style Memo newsletter.

Like the collapse of the Old Man in the Mountain, the end of New Hampshire’s prized status in the (large-d) Democratic president-picking process was swift, sudden and shocking. They’d received quiet assurances that Iowa, not New Hampshire, would get the bump. Then Ray Buckley, the state’s Democratic chairman, received a call from Sen. Shaheen a year ago.

“She goes, ‘Raymond? I just got off the phone with Jen,’” Buckley recounted recently, referring to Jen O’Malley Dillon, the White House deputy chief of staff. “She didn’t have to say anything more. I just knew, from the tone of her voice, what had happened.”

What had happened put an end to a 103-year-old tradition, one that has spawned a whole mythology around a local truth: that New Hampshire residents have (small-d) democratic instincts that you just won’t find in other states. Ask a New Hampshire Democrat what makes their state so special, and they might emphasize their penchant for civic duty. New Hampshire has 424 state legislators — a mammoth quantity for a state with fewer citizens than the city of San Antonio. “We do democracy really well,” says Watters, the state senator, who is a retired English professor (and, as it happens, an uncle to Fox News personality Jesse Watters).

“I don’t mean that to brag,” he adds. “But there is a kind of infrastructure and tradition here.”

As for the idea that New Hampshire’s privilege is out of sync with the values of such a diverse party, local Democrats will insist their state demographics are changing — even if the latest census data indicates it is the fourth-Whitest state in the nation. And even if they aren’t changing fast enough, well, at least New Hampshire — unlike South Carolina, Granite Staters might remind you — elects a lot of Democrats in general. “Do you want to start somewhere that embraces the party’s values or not?” Buckley says.

To campaign in the New Hampshire primary is to submit oneself to some highly specific rites: spending an inordinate amount of time in the living rooms of saltbox colonials and Cape Cod-style homes; enduring winding mountain roads and spotty cell service; listening to people defend, in an accent defined by its confusing relationship to the letter “r,” the superiority of Dunkin’ iced coffee to pretty much any other beverage, any time of the oft-frigid year. (There are 22 Dunkin’ locations in Manchestah, to give you an idear of why this might come up.) The smallness of New Hampshire makes for a relatively low voter-to-candidate ratio, and Granite Staters have grown accustomed to inspecting politicians as thoroughly as a Westminster Dog Show judge might inspect a poodle.

Those voters won’t get to poke and prod at Biden this time, but on a November morning, Dean Phillips reported for inspection at the Poor Boy’s Diner in Londonderry. It’s a classic campaign-trail stop adorned with nostalgic bric-a-brac — vintage Coca-Cola advertisements, movie posters from Hollywood’s golden age — where diner regulars subject their breakfast or lunches to interruptions from those eager to serve as their commander in chief.

Most candidates opt to simply mosey around the tables; the Democratic challenger from Minnesota had opted to work a shift, throwing on a Poor Boy staff T-shirt with his jeans and a needlepoint American flag belt. He hustled around to refill coffees and bus ramekins of salad dressing as he asked wary diners, “If you could wave a magic wand, what’s one thing you’d change about the country right now?”

“Well, there’s so much,” a middle-aged woman named Beverly sighed.

“Probably Congress,” a burly man in a New England Patriots sweatshirt replied.

“Replacing the president,” said Chris Richards, a former Ron Paul booster who’d walked in for lunch with his daughter. Phillips beamed. “Well, you may have met your man!” the congressman replied. (Richards, a libertarian, told me afterward that he would never vote for a Democrat in the general election, though he could imagine voting for Phillips in the Democratic primary — which is open to all voters — to ding Biden.)

Conveniently, Phillips’s takeaway from his shift-work glad-handing was that he was definitely right to be challenging Biden — and nowhere more so than in New Hampshire. “The rest of our country could learn from the civic culture of New Hampshire,” he said, calling it an “extraordinary” bastion of “participation and responsibility.” Later that day, he asserted that the Granite State — where he’d visited as a kid, having gone to summer camp in Maine — was “where I learned to love my country.” (“I thought you would have learned to love America in Minnesota, but sure,” said Sullivan, the former state party chair who’s working on the Biden write-in effort, who’d heard Phillips say that line before.)

She and others think Biden is still popular enough to defeat Phillips, Williamson and the rest in absentia. Neither the DNC nor the Biden campaign has tried to dissuade the effort, according to Watters — not that it would have mattered. “I kind of think we would have ignored them,” Watters says. “This is our primary — nobody tells us what to do.”

So, they’ll fundraise, employ a modest staff, and do some old-fashioned grass-roots get-out-the-vote for the dark-horse candidate also known as the president of the United States.

“We’re still mad at the DNC,” Sullivan says. “We want to be able to say to them, ‘You may not have wanted us to vote, but we voted and we organized. We did this on our own.’”

Whatever happens on Jan. 23 will surely color people’s early views on the extent to which the Dems are, once again, in disarray. It also may provide a wintry mix of indicators for the general election forecast. New Hampshire hasn’t gone red since 2000, but its small clutch of delegates certainly mattered that time: If Al Gore had won in the Granite State, no one would have given a hanging chad about Florida. “It would be a colossal mistake to take New Hampshire for granted and put it in the column of the Democrats in 2024,” Shaheen warns. “A colossal mistake.”

Buckley, the state party chair, won’t worry about party decisions beyond his control. He’s focused instead on what’s under his jurisdiction — a governor’s race, two congressional elections — arriving at a kind of begrudging acceptance of the DNC’s snub. It’s easy to accept anything, of course, if you don’t believe it’s permanent. He expects New Hampshire’s rightful place in the primary order, first, will be restored following a family discussion Biden promised Democrats after 2024. “Those who felt like Joe Biden needed to thank South Carolina for saving him got repaid,” Buckley says. “Now, we can go back to having that conversation.”

It’s hard to know if he’s right, without a crystal ball. Just don’t ask Marianne Williamson for one of those.