While waiting to hear from New Hampshire voters ...

I tend to think I know a good amount about electoral demographics, but this was news to me. An awful lot of these proverbially gritty Granite State voters are newcomers to the primary.

University of New Hampshire demographer Ken Johnson calculates that since the last election, about 195,000 of the state’s 1.1 million voters have departed — either from the state (150,000) or from this mortal existence (45,000). They’ve been replaced by about 230,000 fresh faces, including 70,000 young people who became newly eligible and 160,000 outsiders who moved in.

For one in five voters, this will be their first presidential primary in the state, according to Johnson’s latest calculations. Most of the state’s 2020 primary voters wouldn’t have been eligible to vote in 2008, when Hillary Clinton eked out a win over Barack Obama.

States where many people are newcomers present different challenges and opportunities than more stable places. These new voters usually don't know anything about the down ballot candidates -- not an issue in a presidential primary but a large one in the general election. This knowledge gap which can make some people doubt they should vote at all. We saw this in 2018 in Nevada which, as the map shows, is the most transient state of all. New people also may not know the local rules and procedures about voting, the mechanics. Canvassers can get a leg up just by helping out with information. If the canvassers themselves are not locals (and sometimes even if they are), they need to learn accurate answers to questions about voting rules.