A1 4 FRIDAY, AUGUST 23, 2019 S LATIMES.COM
■ ■■ ELECTION 2020 ■■■
city of Portsmouth on a Friday
night this spring, an hour’s drive
from home, in a bar whose brick
walls were plastered with cam-
paign signs that said “MATH.” The
Schmitts and more than 100 others
had shown up to hear a tech entre-
preneur named Andrew Yang ex-
plain why he should be the most
powerful person in the world.
Every candidate means every
candidate.
“We’ll have to find out what the
‘MATH’ signs are for,” Cheri told
Karl, as some older voters milled
around with beers and several
younger ones looked at their
phones.
While waiting, Cheri and Karl
chatted with Steven Borne, 55,
about their quest to see the candi-
dates. “My 15-year-old is doing the
same thing,” said Borne, who then
called out across the bar. “Sam!
They’re doing the same thing
also!” Sam and Steven were plan-
ning to see Democratic candidate
and former Maryland Rep. John
Delaney the next morning, at “the
pancake thing.”
‘Much funnier’
This is life in New Hampshire in
this wide-open Democratic presi-
dential contest: There’s always a
breakfast thing, a brewery thing, a
community center thing, another
senator or governor who’s showed
up in somebody’s backyard down
the street with a small entourage
and something to say.
When Yang arrived, he was
wearing a “MATH” hat and an
American flag scarf, and he made
his pitch with the self-deprecating
deadpan of a stand-up comedian:
“The opposite of Donald Trump is
what we need, and the opposite of
Donald Trump is an Asian man
who likes math!” As she often does
with candidates, Cheri positioned
herself up front and started shoot-
ing video with her cellphone, which
she’d share with friends later.
Yang revealed what “MATH”
stood for: “Make America think
harder!”
The crowd laughed. “Definitely
much funnier than I anticipated,”
Cheri said afterward. But had
Yang won Cheri and Karl’s votes
that night? “Absolutely not,” she
said later.
Yang was the first of six candi-
dates they would go see over four
days. More than two dozen Demo-
crats had entered the race since
the Schmitts made their see-every-
one pact.
But Yang’s platform, which cen-
ters on fears of automation taking
workers’ jobs, stuck with Cheri. As
Karl pulled their SUV out of the ga-
rage, Cheri noticed a ticket-taking
machine at the exit — doing a job
humans used to do. “Automation,
right there,” Cheri said. The out-
sider candidate’s message had
sunk in.
People vs. cameras
The next stop was a house party
for Beto O’Rourke in Cheri’s bu-
colic hometown of Bedford the
next morning. It’s polite to bring re-
freshments to help lighten the load
for the host family, so Cheri
Schmitt brought Arizona Sweet
Tea to the Georgian-Colonial-style
house where she would see the for-
mer Texas congressmanin person
for the third time.
Cheri piled into a stuffy, high-
ceilinged living room with more
than 60 other Democrats. Some-
one had opened the patio doors to
let in some cool air. Sign-ups for the
event had reached capacity after
two hours, which Cheri attributed
to enthusiasm among Democrats
this cycle.
She likes arriving early so she
can chat up the other attendees.
(“What the other people are think-
ing is just as interesting,” she said.)
Karl, a little less intrigued by the
candidates but more interested in
watching the crowd, often hangs
back at the events; today he was in
the kitchen.
Then O’Rourke materialized in
the doorway to the kitchen: tall,
tan, his recently graying hair a little
shaggy, in a white collared shirt
with sleeves rolled to the elbows.
But there was a problem. C-
SPAN had come to cover the house
party, and the cameraman was
standing at O’Rourke’s back, in the
kitchen. Someone in the crowd
suggested O’Rourke move to the
opposite side of the living room to
face the camera.
Groans spread through the
crowd. Everyone had already set-
tled into a comfortable position.
O’Rourke froze, uncertainty cross-
ing his face as he grasped a micro-
phone: “We’ve got our backs to the
cameras — yeah — well —”
And in that moment, who was
more powerful a force? The more
than 60 New Hampshire voters in
front of O’Rourke, or the national
audience of C-SPAN at his back?
Ashorter woman in the audi-
ence — who had taken off her shoes
to stand on a white alligator-skin
chair in order to see O’Rourke bet-
ter — said to herself, irritation in
her voice, “Are you here for the peo-
ple, or the cameras?”
O’Rourke stayed put. New
Hampshire it was.
Cheri, standing in front of
O’Rourke, recorded his stump
speech, which she later posted to
Facebook, then switched to taking
notes about O’Rourke’s answers to
voters’ questions, which she also
shared. “I’m like my own little rov-
ing reporter,” she said.
“We don’t normally go to six
events in a weekend,” Cheri said in
the car afterward; two might be
more normal. Karl was driving
them past a series of hamlets to
their next event that Sunday after-
noon in the small town of Warner.‘Go girl power!’
Cheri sees the presence of the
candidates in New Hampshire as a
luxury — a privilege she knows
other voters don’t have. She’s al-
ready seen several of the candi-
dates multiple times — even meet-
ing some of their family members
—making her an expert on the nu-
ances of their candidacies.
For instance, O’Rourke tailored
some of his stump speech to shout
out area Democrats and local is-
sues plaguing New Hampshire,
while Yang had kept his stump ge-
neric. “That’s the difference be-
tween someone working in the sys-
tem” and outside it, Cheri said.
Yang also didn’t do a Q-and-A,
which she thought was a missed
opportunity.
In Warner, more than 60 people
were already crammed into the
back room of a bookstore to see
Kirsten Gillibrand. Staffers strate-
gically placed campaign signs to
obscure art depicting nude women
on the wall behind where the New
York senator would stand.
Cheri left with a good impres-
sion of Gillibrand and a lament for
the rest of the field. “She was the
only female candidate in the state
this weekend,” Cheri said. “Go girl
power!”
For Cheri, the political is the
personal. Her son Connor was 5
when he was diagnosed with Type 1
diabetes. She and Karl bought his
insulin, managed his injections,
bought syringes, took him to get
tested, and footed steep bills not
fully covered by insurance. The day
that Congress passed the Afford-
able Care Act — with its provision
covering preexisting conditions —
Cheri sobbed.“If he doesn’t get insulin, he
dies,” she said.
On Sunday evening, she and
Karl drove to another neighbor-
hood across Bedford to catch a
house party for Sen. Michael Ben-
net of Colorado.
Bennet, who has thick eyebrows
and a curtain of light-brown hair
sloping across his forehead, stood
at a slight stoop as he gave a discur-
sive talk to the crowd in the living
room, in long, roaming sentences,
about the need to preserve the na-
tion’s institutions.
“I’d like to hear your thoughts
on healthcare,” Cheri said to Ben-
net, telling him about Connor, who
is now 24. “In the most wonderful
and most powerful country in the
world, we have people right here
who are using GoFundMe to help
pay for their healthcare expenses.
What are you going to do about it?”
Cheri’s question brought Ben-
net’s longest answer of the night —
he said America needs “universal
healthcare coverage,” but he
warned against independent Ver-
mont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ plans
to effectively replace private em-
ployer-provided health insurance
with a “Medicare for all” plan.
“It did not seem like a canned
stump speech,” Cheri said to Karl
afterward. Bennet had talked so
fast and so extensively that she had
given up on trying to take notes.The ‘wow’ effect
The next morning, at a gym in
Concord, Cheri and Karl sat in the
bleachers behind Sen. Cory Book-
er of New Jersey after a campaign
staffer invited them. The gym’s
overhead lights gleamed on the 6-
foot-3 senator’s shaved head.
Booker told personal stories about
violence in his home city of Newark
and about the need for gun control.
Afterward, Karl, typically the
more reserved of the two Schmitts,
was clearly impressed. “This is the
‘wow’ effect,” he said.
“I want to meet his mom,” Cheri
said, maneuvering toward an older
woman sitting near Booker as he
took selfies with voters. Cheri came
back and said, “I thanked her for
sharing her son with us.”
A woman who had been sittingin the bleachers in front of Cheri
said that before Booker’s event,
she thought that Barack Obama
was a once-in-a-lifetime candidate
and that the nation would never
elect another black man as presi-
dent. “Well, I’ve changed my mind,”
she told Cheri.
And this is why candidates
grind out event after event after
event in New Hampshire. To
change the stories about them-
selves, voter by voter.
That night, Cheri and Karl
joined a river of people entering
Manchester Community College to
catch the race’s headliner, former
Vice President Joe Biden. It was
the most professionally choreo-
graphed and staged event of the
weekend. Risers for the television
cameras had been erected in the
back of the school’s gym; more
than 100 attendees were tightly cor-
doned close to the stage, with a
smaller group diverted to a bal-
cony behind the podium, to make
the room — and Biden’s support —
look and feel fuller. A singer came
out and sang the nation anthem.
Then Biden started talking. He
was soft-spoken, and sometimes
hard to hear; his voice would disap-
pear as he turned away from the
microphone and glanced across
the crowd. He was the first candi-
date all weekend to use Tele-
PrompTers, and his head some-
times mechanically pivoted 90 de-
grees to the left, 90 degrees to the
right, 90 degrees to the left, as he
warned about the “existential cri-
sis” President Trump had brought
to the nation.
Biden left without taking ques-
tions.
Standing in the school’s lobby
afterward, the Schmitts were
mixed on the former vice presi-
dent. “Joe Biden is the comfortable
candidate,” Cheri said. “That cozy
old sweatshirt you like to hang out
with at the end of the day.” She
liked that he has a lot of foreign pol-
icy experience.
Karl was worried Biden would
turn off younger voters. Biden
seemed “low-energy” — and to
Karl, he looked, well, old.
“I wouldn’t say he has lower en-
ergy,” Cheri responded briskly. “Idisagree with that.” She doesn’t
see age as a barrier.
“I’d love to be able to meld all the
candidates into one big super-
candidate. That would be lovely,”
she said later. “Unfortunately, I
don’t think it’s going to work out
that way.”‘It’s about people’s lives’
Last week, Cheri Schmitt, get-
ting close to fulfilling her mission to
see every candidate running for
president, decided to go to a
Trump rally in Manchester. (He
was not her first Republican candi-
date; she had previously attended
a house party for the president’s lit-
tle-known primary challenger, for-
mer Massachusetts Gov. William
Weld.)
Cheri wore a blue hat that said
“Life is good,” which stuck out in
the sea of red “Make America great
again” hats around her, and she
warily eyed the conspiracy theo-
rists in “QAnon” T-shirts. To her,
the inside of the arena felt like
a professional wrestling event
where the president was the star
performer, delighting in the
crowd’s reactions. Cheri didn’t en-
joy the show and its open contempt
for liberals.
“Politics is not theater to me,”
Cheri wrote in a text message later.
“It’s about people’s lives, and it was
disturbing to see it play out so
cavalierly.”
After a while, she couldn’t stom-
ach any more and left early, hoping
to avoid the rush to the exits at the
end. She was looking forward to
reading a fact-check from CNN at
home afterward. Schmitt was still
undecided on candidates, but it’s
safe to say she won’t be voting for
the president.
But there was a bonus on the
way out: She spotted a strange,
bedraggled man in a gray beard
wearing a boot on his head. It was
performance artist and perennial
nonserious presidential candidate
Vermin Supreme, whom Cheri
knew as a New Hampshire staple.
Schmitt decided to get a grin-
ning selfie with him, and she added
his name to the list on her fridge
when she got home. A candidate is
a candidate.New Hampshire voter with a mission
BEDFORD, N.H.,voter Cheri Schmitt with Democratic presidential hopefuls Andrew Yang and Elizabeth Warren, top; Kirsten
Gillibrand and Pete Buttigieg, middle; and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, bottom. The elementary school teacher, who is especially
concerned about healthcare, takes notes, videos and photos at each candidate event. “I’m like my own little roving reporter,” she says.[V oter,from A1]