How Trump and an Army of Volunteers Won New Hampshire for Joe Biden

The small campaign for the most powerful man on Earth.

Ashley Marcoux stands outside a polling site with a campaign sign supporting President Joe Biden as a write-in candidate.
Hoping to send a message for the general election, Democrats rallied behind President Joe Biden even though his name wasn’t on the ballot in New Hampshire. David Goldman/AP

SALEM, N.H. — President Joe Biden did not run in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. He won it anyway.

That was thanks, in large part, to an army of supporters like Dan Guild, who was up well before the sun rose to visit all five of Salem’s polling places. Fellow volunteers were in place at each one to encourage people to write in Biden’s name on a primary ballot where he was not listed and that will not be used to determine who becomes the eventual nominee.

“The question you’re most likely to get, and I believe it will come from a Republican, is why Biden isn’t on the ballot,” Guild told Norma Schuman, a volunteer who came up from Framingham, Massachusetts, and whom he spoke with during his five-minute stop at Mary A. Fisk Elementary School.