Long before there were the conservative talk show pundits and MAGA followers, there was Stephen Stepanek, a New Hampshire guy who followed his wife’s advice to say hi to Donald Trump at a golf course a decade ago. He is now the guy Trump has confidently chosen to be his strategist in what still remains the most important state for a presidential candidate to win a primary in.
The night before the DNC Feb. 4 voted to nix New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation status, Stepanek vehemently emphasized his belief that the “new primary calendar” is playing zero influence on what he believes is the real ulterior motive behind the move and that is to bump Trump from being the lead candidate, as he was both in 2016 as well as 2020 when Trump clinched all 22 pledged delegates to the national convention and captured a historic 129,734 votes—outdoing Bill Clinton’s 1976 record of 76,797.
Finding any lack of confidence that Trump will be the Republican nominee let alone the president-elect from Stepanek, the now former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, would pretty much be like looking for a needle in the haystack.
Despite such recently coined phrases as “Trump fatigue” and charges that “Trumpism has taken a shellacking,” not just by Democrats, but by party leaders within—at the end of day says Stepanek, it’s not them, but the voters who yearn for the days when their lives were so much better under the Trump administration, who are going to put him back in office.
“I’m talking about the average joe who’s a good hard-working American. He doesn’t even know who the chairman of the Hillsborough County Committee is, but he knows what Donald Trump is,” said Stepanek.
Stepanek is referring to the many former Trump loyalists in New Hampshire like Hillsborough County GOP Chairman Christ Maidment who recently told Reuters in a Jan. 27 article that New Hampshire Republican members were suffering from Trump fatigue and that they were ready for other candidates.
While there is a speculative lineup with Trump the only one officially declaring, most of the former Trump supporters have heavily hinted at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as being their favored nominee.
DeSantis, a staunchly conservative Republican and good speech-giver in his own right who has tactfully led popular crusades against leftist ideologies, has been ascribed as the “likable version” of Trump. Nikki Haley, Kristi Noem, Ted, Cruz, and Mike Pence, just to name a few more, have also gotten their share of nudges from Trump defectors.
There have also been trace hints from New Hampshire’s own Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, of making a run for the presidential nomination, a possibility that could arguably upset a Trump victory in a grassroots-based primary race like the one Stepanek envisions.
But Stepanek says DeSantis, Sununu and the rest will never “risk the wrath” of standing up to the “secret government” like Trump has or continue where he left off in “draining the swamp.” And there are literally signs everywhere that the average joes of New Hampshire know that.
“If you drive around NH, you see not 1 or 2, not 10 or 20, but hundreds if not thousands of Trump flags, Trump signs, all over the states. ”I don’t see any DeSantis signs, I don’t see any Nikki Haley signs,” he said.
Stepanek was just one in a sea of 400 New Hampshire state representatives when he became the “first politician” nationally to endorse Trump back in 2015 for his first bid for the presidency. Then came New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary and Trump comfortably led a large pack of 17 Republicans for the Granite State’s nomination. The rest is history—with lots of sordid tales along the way.
One major change as Stepanek pointed is Trump’s “more presidential” demeanor, which did shine through in his unofficial campaign kick-off speech in New Hampshire last week, which consisted of little to none of his proverbial slights of his opponents.
Stepanek’s strategies for a 2024 Trump victory in the New Hampshire primary start and end with a very localized town-to-town campaign, pointing to his already successful initiative to expand what was just a handful of town Republican committees in New Hampshire to dozens throughout the state.
The Jan. 6 storming of the capitol, new allegations of a very old sexual assault, the discovery of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and a hubris-filled social media post about changing the U.S. Constitution to accommodate his election, Stepanek believes, also won’t have much bearing on the former president’s popularity. “They’ve overplayed these issues,” he said.
As the Democrats run ads filled with hackneyed controversies, Stepanek has literal visions of campaign ads showing Trump standing next to the now rusting, massive pieces of the border wall laying on its side near where droves of illegal aliens pour over the border. When you have places like New York City asking to be rescued from their own cause, Stepanek says you know what the real issues are.
New York City, after all, was the same place that mass-produced and circulated how-to flyers warning illegal immigrants to stay hidden during Trump’s initiated 2019 ICE raids.
