Will Joe Biden's New Hampshire Gamble Backfire?

President Joe Biden's unusual absence from the primary ballot in New Hampshire is drawing attention to a fight among Democrats that officials would rather ignore as voting gets underway and as the party prepares for a likely rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Trump will sweep into New Hampshire on the heels of a landslide victory in the Iowa caucuses last week, with a chance to effectively end the Republican primaries if he wins New Hampshire on Tuesday.

But Biden won't campaign in the state at all ahead of the primary, and his name even won't be on the ballot — the result of a standoff between the Democratic National Committee and New Hampshire's state party over its decision to go ahead with the Jan. 23 primary.

The situation has forced Biden allies in the state to launch a campaign for voters to write in the president's name on the ballot. Despite the unusual circumstances, Democratic insiders in New Hampshire said Biden should easily beat his two main primary challengers, Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, and the author Marianne Williamson.

"It's an odd" primary, said David Watters, a Democratic state senator in New Hampshire and leader of the Biden write-in campaign, but "I think Democrats are going to come home to Biden."

A small group of Democratic officials and operatives are running the write-in campaign on a budget of roughly $70,000, according to Watters and others involved in the effort. The group, which only has two paid staffers, has held weekly organizing calls with grassroots activists since last fall, when it became clear there was a strong likelihood Biden's name would be left off the ballot.

A separate write-in campaign by a super PAC has sent out mailers and paid for print and digital ads urging registered Democrats and independents to vote for Biden by writing his name at the bottom of the primary ballot.

The write-in campaign is not unprecedented in New Hampshire.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson won the state's Democratic primary as a write-in candidate. But the surprisingly close second-place finish by Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota, was widely seen as a rebuke by Democratic voters to Johnson and his support for the Vietnam War.

Johnson later announced he would not seek reelection. McCarthy, a liberal anti-war candidate, went on to capture the party's presidential nomination.

"There's no McCarthy on the ballot" this time to give the president a serious challenge, Jim Lynch, a former Democratic governor of New Hampshire, told Newsweek.

Still, the New Hampshire primary has become an early test of Biden's popularity and ability to generate enthusiasm with the Democratic Party's base. Biden has low job approval numbers and most national polls show him narrowly trailing Trump in a head-to-head general election matchup, though a recent poll of New Hampshire voters found Biden leading Trump by roughly seven percentage points.

And while Democrats and veteran political observers in New Hampshire said there was little reason to think Biden won't win by a comfortable margin on Tuesday, several conceded the write-in campaign added an element of uncertainty about the final outcome.

"No one expects Phillips to win," said Christopher Galdieri, a politics professor at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. "But in the back of a lot of Democrats' minds is the [worry] that Biden has enough headaches. He doesn't need the headline 'Biden underperforms' in New Hampshire."

Without his name on the ballot, it's an open question whether Biden can match the showing by Barack Obama in 2012 or Bill Clinton in 1996, the last two times that an incumbent Democratic president ran for reelection. Both Obama and Clinton won more than 80 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary when they ran for reelection.

New Hampshire has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in seven of the past eight general elections. But most of the contests have been fairly close, and New Hampshire is still regarded as a swing state.

Independent voters, a key voting bloc in 2020, will be closely watched in New Hampshire next week for signs of which way they'll swing in the general election.

Voters in New Hampshire who do not declare a party affiliation can vote in either the Democratic or Republican primaries, which take place the same day. A plurality of voters in the state are not registered with either major party.

"That's a big unknown with this New Hampshire primary," Lynch said of independent voters.

Biden would head into the primary with far more certainty if the New Hampshire state party wasn't at loggerheads with the Democratic National Committee.

The tension started in 2022, when Biden asked the DNC to move South Carolina ahead of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire on the party's primary calendar.

Biden's South Carolina primary victory in 2020 helped resurrect his campaign and propel him to the nomination. The proposal was backed by Democrats who wanted the DNC to overhaul the primary lineup to prioritize states with more diverse electorates than Iowa and New Hampshire, which have majority white populations that play an outsized role in winnowing the primary field.

The DNC approved Biden's recommendation last year. But New Hampshire's state Democratic party rebuffed the plan -- which would have required a change in state law -- and decided to go ahead with its 2024 primary as planned.

The national party responded by stripping New Hampshire of its delegates to the Democratic convention this summer, and called the Jan. 23 primary "non-binding" and "meaningless" in a letter to Buckley earlier this month.

"It's obviously a situation that we didn't ask for," Ray Buckley, the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, told Newsweek.

Lynch said many Democrats in New Hampshire found Biden's push to end New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation status "frustrating and maddening."

But Democrats "are scared to death that Trump could get another term in office," Lynch added. Writing Biden's name on the ballot on Tuesday "is a way to stand up to Trump."