Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Court Attention at All Cost

Scott Brown entered first and courted the base for over a year. John E. Sununu called Trump a loser in print and got the endorsement. Six days from the primary, Greene’s sixth law meets the state that audits attention for a living.

In June of last year, Scott Brown got into the New Hampshire Senate race early, when the seat was still an open question. He courted the Republican base for more than a year. He had served as Donald Trump’s ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. He presented himself, plainly and repeatedly, as the Trump-aligned candidate in the field.

On February 1, Trump endorsed the other guy.

The other guy is John E. Sununu, who opposed Trump across his presidential runs and called him a loser in print in a 2024 Union Leader op-ed backing Nikki Haley. Trump’s Truth Social post called him an “America First Patriot” and gave him a complete and total endorsement. The Senate Leadership Fund said the endorsement had “put an end to the primary.” Brown did not quit, and said Granite Staters deserve a choice. In January, a University of New Hampshire poll had the race 48 to 25. By late August, polling reported by Newsweek put it at 60 to 20.

Robert Greene’s sixth law of power says court attention at all cost. Be seen. Stir things up. The one unforgivable outcome is to be ignored. New Hampshire has spent a century running that experiment on live subjects, and six days from now it runs it again.

The state’s verdict is split. Greene is right that being ignored is close to fatal. He is wrong that attention is one substance you can accumulate by trying harder. New Hampshire’s whole civic function is to sort attention you generated from attention someone handed you, and the two behave nothing alike.

The floor is real

Start with the part Greene gets right, because the state supplies a clean example.

In 1952 Harry Truman was the sitting president. He treated the New Hampshire primary as beneath the office, in the spirit of a president who does not run in silly little primaries, and did not work the state. Estes Kefauver beat him. Truman left the presidential race within weeks. As Saint Anselm College politics professor Christopher Galdieri has noted, it remains the only time a sitting president has lost a New Hampshire primary.

Being ignored, or choosing to be unseen, carries a price here. That is Law 6’s floor and it holds.

Courted attention, at close range, works

The best evidence for Greene in New Hampshire is John McCain, twice.

In 2000, McCain built his campaign around the Straight Talk Express and held more than 114 town hall meetings in the state, against George W. Bush’s 36 days of campaigning in it. In 1999 he was often speaking to fewer than a dozen people in a room. He trounced Bush.

In 2008, McCain was out of money and trailing. He went back to the town halls, did more of them than anyone in the field, won New Hampshire again, and took the nomination from there. Mitt Romney had led the state’s polls until a few weeks before the vote.

That is Law 6 executed properly, and it is worth naming precisely what McCain was doing. He was not accumulating exposure. He was submitting to examination, hundreds of times, in rooms small enough that nobody could hide in them.

Conferred attention beats courted attention

Now the part Greene misses.

In 1964 two young Republicans from Boston set up a write-in operation for Henry Cabot Lodge, then the ambassador to South Vietnam. Lodge won the New Hampshire primary without ever setting foot in the state. He courted nothing. His name and his office did the work.

Sixty-two years later the same asymmetry is running in real time. Brown did everything Greene prescribes: entered first, stayed visible, pressed the alignment argument, refused to leave. Sununu did close to the opposite on the base-courting question and holds a lead that a February endorsement widened and never gave back.

The distinction that matters is not how much attention a candidate has. It is who generated it. Courted attention is what you produce yourself. Conferred attention is what an institution, a family name or a president hands you, and it arrives pre-loaded with a credential that courting cannot manufacture. Sununu is a former United States senator and the son of a governor who ran the Reagan-era political establishment in this state. Add a presidential endorsement and the ceiling on Brown’s effort was set by someone else’s decision.

Greene’s advice contains no way to tell those apart, which is why it fails as a strategy for anyone who is not already a name.

And attention can evaporate at the end

The third finding is the one that should keep every campaign in this state honest, and it comes from 2008.

Barack Obama went into the New Hampshire Democratic primary after winning Iowa, drawing enormous crowds and leading essentially every final poll. CNN/WMUR had him up six. American Research Group had him up thirteen. Hillary Clinton won, 39.0 percent to 36.4 percent.

The post-mortems pointed at undecided voters, who ran as high as ten to fifteen percent in late surveys and broke for Clinton in the last days, after a January 7 exchange in which she was visibly moved answering a voter’s question. Much of the polling had finished its fieldwork before it happened.

Read that carefully. The largest attention advantage in the race did not survive the final seventy-two hours, and what changed it was not a bigger event. It was a smaller one.

The case for courting anyway

The strongest version of Greene’s side is worth stating, because Brown’s strategy was not stupid.

Attention is a precondition. Nobody has ever won anything in this state by being unknown on purpose, and for a candidate without a famous surname there is no alternative route. Galdieri’s summary of the New Hampshire mythology is the case for the sixth law in a sentence: here, he has said, “you don’t have to have the most money” to break through, because the state is small enough to cross in a day and voters expect to meet you. That promise is the entire reason unknown candidates come here.

Brown was also solving a real problem. He entered a race where the likeliest Republican alternative carried a family name and an establishment network he could never match. Early entry, constant visibility and an alignment argument aimed at the base is close to the only playbook available to a challenger in that position. The fact that it failed against a presidential endorsement does not mean a quieter campaign would have done better. It would almost certainly have done worse.

And the courting has a residual value the polling does not capture. A candidate who spends a year in the state builds a list, a volunteer network and a set of relationships that outlast a single primary. Brown has run statewide here before. Whatever happens Tuesday, he will not have to introduce himself again.

The honest conclusion is narrower than a refutation. Courting attention is necessary, it is often the only move available, and it still does not determine the outcome when someone else can confer more of it with a single post.

The cost Greene leaves out

There is also a price on the courted kind, and it shows up in exactly the place New Hampshire specializes in.

Attention you generate is attention you invited someone to evaluate. Brown spent a year arguing he was the more Trump-aligned candidate, which set up a comparison that a single Truth Social post then resolved against him in public. The claim was testable, he made it central, and it got tested.

That is the structural risk in the sixth law. Every attention-seeking move plants a standard you can later be measured against, and in a state built around follow-up questions, the measuring is not optional.

What the sixth law is worth

Set the three findings side by side and Law 6 turns out to be a floor without a ceiling.

The floor is solid. Refuse to be seen in New Hampshire and you will lose to someone who was, whoever you are. Truman is the proof and no one has repeated the experiment.

The ceiling is imaginary. Attention does not accumulate into victory, because voters here treat it as a claim to be checked rather than a quantity to be impressed by. That is what the town hall format is for. A candidate who says the same thing to four hundred rooms is not building a reputation. He is being audited four hundred times, and McCain passed.

The comparison to draw is with Part Five of this series. Reputation in New Hampshire turned out to be a ledger somebody else keeps. Attention turns out the same way. In both cases Greene assumes the individual holds an asset that, on inspection, is held and priced by other people: an employer, an attorney general, a party, a president, a voter with a follow-up question.

What separates Law 6 from Laws 3 and 4 is that here the auditing is scheduled. The Right-to-Know fights in the earlier installments failed for lack of a referee. This one has a referee, a date and a ballot. That is the whole reason it scores in the middle instead of the bottom.

What to watch next Tuesday

Margin, not the winner. The Republican primary result is not in serious doubt. What is worth reading is whether Brown’s share lands near his polling or above it. Late movement toward the candidate who did the retail work would be the most interesting number on the board.

Where the undeclared voters went. They can take either ballot. Which primary they choose is itself a measurement of which race the state finds live.

Turnout against the polling. New Hampshire has embarrassed final surveys before, in both directions and within living memory. Treat every pre-election number, including the ones in this piece, as a claim awaiting an audit that happens on September 8.

Next: Law 7, on getting others to do the work while you take the credit, tested against a 424-member Legislature that runs on volunteer hours and a handful of staff.

Fact check

Editor’s note: Commentary and analysis. Every poll cited here is a snapshot, and this piece publishes six days before voting; nothing in it should be read as a prediction of the result. Poll figures reported by outlets without an identified pollster are marked ATTRIBUTED in the fact-check table. This piece quotes no part of Robert Greene’s book beyond the subject of Law 6. The GSR Power Index is an editorial rating, not data.