For Democratic and independent voters in New Hampshire this year, the most important issue facing the United States isn’t the economy, the sort of kitchen-table quandaries that more often than not determine presidential elections.
It’s the future of democracy.
A new USA TODAY/Boston Globe/Suffolk University Poll two weeks before the Granite State’s pivotal primary finds half of Democrats (49%) and nearly 3 in 10 independents (29%) rank that solemn and even philosophical question well above such concrete concerns as health care or crime − defying the conventional political wisdom of decades that “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The survey was taken amid a series of stress tests for the nation’s democratic institutions, including a federal appeals court hearing Tuesday to consider whether Donald Trump should be immune from criminal prosecution for actions he took while president. A few weeks later, the Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments in a case that considers whether Trump can be bumped off state ballots because of a constitutional ban on insurrectionists.
On Monday, President Joe Biden delivered his second speech in four days on concerns about democracy and freedom, speaking from the pulpit of the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, site of a deadly mass shooting by a white nationalist in 2015.
“It’s really just all morphed into saving democracy,” Christine Hayes, 50, a nurse from Rochester, New Hampshire, said in a follow-up interview after being…
