Trump’s Sunday rally setting: A New Hampshire city that’s picked the GOP winner for 70 years

ROCHESTER, N.H. — Burning questions about who could win Tuesday’s presidential primary weren’t the top priority here Saturday evening. Instead, it was burning marshmallows.

Around 50 residents of Rochester braved the 17-degree weather common for the winter festival in this city, huddling around a few fires, making s’mores and drinking hot chocolate while children skated on a makeshift ice rink. But 24 hours later, politics is taking over Rochester, with former President Donald Trump holding one of his last major events before the New Hampshire primary at the city’s opera house Sunday.

The small city of roughly 33,000 in southeastern New Hampshire is one of a handful of cities and towns that has mirrored the GOP statewide primary results going back to 1952.

And “the campaigns know that Rochester is a bellwether,” said Mayor Paul Callaghan, a Republican.

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley has also campaigned in Rochester in the final days of the race. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stopped here on his first swing through the state last year. And in many ways, the city illustrates how the GOP has changed in the last decade: Voters here twice supported former President Barack Obama before they flipped to support Trump in the 2016 and 2020 general elections.

“It’s a good mix of the makeup of the modern New Hampshire Republican Party,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist who worked for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and for Republican former Sen. John Sununu.

“You’ve got very conservative activists and some longtime party stalwarts,” Williams said. “So that attracts quite a bit of attention in primaries.”

Callaghan, the mayor, expects a contested primary race in Rochester this year.

“You have the real