New Hampshire's 'live free' spirit turns less prickly

New Hampshire state representatives are paid $100 a year and, the joke goes, many residents think that's too generous.

Traditionally, nothing brought out the "live free or die" spirit here like government meddling in private property. Some years back, after a set of buildings were declared part of a historic district in Durham, the owner protested various restrictions by painting the buildings purple, orange, and chartreuse.

That old Yankee resistance, however, may be waning. Towns have been passing ordinances regulating everything from commercial signs to light bulbs that emit too much "light pollution."

And most dramatically, this longtime Republican bastion of bare-bones government shocked political observers – and maybe itself – last month by tossing out its two Republican congressmen and giving Democrats control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1874.

The switch to the Democrats, plus the openness to a broader role for government, stems partly from a flood of newcomers from out of state since the 1960s, say experts. A full two-thirds of today's residents are not natives. The newcomers, who tend to be wealthier and more highly educated, have been gradually turning this red state's political landscape blue – and are increasingly bumping up against natives in their push for more muscular local regulation.

The big surprise may be that "refugees" from Massachusetts, New Hampshire's notoriously liberal neighbor to the south, are not responsible for the transformation.

"Those towns in which you had the highest percentage of people moving in from out of state, particularly moving in from states other than Massachusetts, are the towns that vote most Democratically," says Andrew Smith, director of the Survey Center at the University of New Hampshire. He excepts the Massachusetts migrants because they are less likely than transplants from outside New England to have high levels of education and white-collar jobs.

"The economy now in New Hampshire is no longer an old manufacturing-type economy. It's service, it's high-tech, it's insurance," Dr. Smith says. "If you're going to come for those kinds of jobs, you have to have a college degree and often more.... Those are the kind of people who are voting most Democratic."

Smith and others cite other reasons, too, for the surprise election results. Democratic candidates had a popular governor behind them, while the Republicans were saddled with the Iraq war and a national party that has tilted toward the South – all factors likely to play out in the first-in-the-nation presidential primary in 2008.

This dramatic shift in the political landscape comes after years of gradual cultural changes in the state. Outsiders coming over the past four decades have helped boost the education level from middle-of-the-pack to No. 8 nationally.

"[New Hampshire] rocketed in the last 25 years from just ordinary to the absolute pinnacle" in terms of median household income, says Peter Francese, director of demographic forecasts for the New England Economic Partnership, who lives in New Hampshire. "And that's all driven by education [and] by the people moving here."

Stratham is one town that turned from reliably "red" to solid "blue," says Smith, noting the correlation here between newcomers, their higher education levels, and a rise in voting Democratic.

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