But how much of that was a party thing? How much of that is that campaigns no longer buy into physical organizational infrastructure the way they did with the advent of social media and so forth? How much of it was simply that in the shadow of Trump it was difficult to grow anything?
I do think that’s one clear difference we see now versus then, is in bygone years I would hear is you start building a campaign with house parties, and then you gradually build so that your campaign can fill bigger and bigger rooms until you’re filling, let’s say middle school auditoriums with several hundred people the week before the primary.
I think a lot of that is gone now, in part because, and this is true for Democrats as well as Republicans, you have the nationalization of the nomination process where campaigns need to become very big very quickly, and to build a national ID very quickly. So like a Pete Buttigieg, for example, perhaps back in the day, he would’ve been one of those who built slowly, slowly, slowly. But I’d say for the last 20 years, it’s more kind of go big or go home.
Coaston: What are New Hampshire voters looking for?
Scala: Well, among Republicans, probably a pretty close to a majority were never looking for anyone else but the person they knew so well, Donald Trump. To me, this whole past year makes a lot more sense if you think about Donald Trump as the Ronald Reagan of his day. Now, obviously there are limits to that parallel, Reagan stood for different things and all that’s true, but in terms of being a dominant figure. I mean, I got here to New Hampshire for the 2000 cycle so I’ve been here for several now, and I remember before Trump it always seemed to be like Ronald Reagan was always the lodestar that candidates would reference or recall.
It was always about Reaganism, but all along the way, Reaganism was becoming increasingly stale as time passed. But there wasn’t a replacement for Reagan. There was McCain and so forth, but there was never really McCainism, there was the candidate, That changed with Trump. As some of my colleagues have written, he kind of defines ideological labels now. You’re kind of defined ideologically by what you think about Trump.