ach weekday, about 70,000 Granite Staters stream south, clogging highways on their way to work in Massachusetts. For the next few days, a reverse migration unfolds as flocks of Bay Staters head north to help presidential campaigns.
Massachusetts is the world's leading exporter of corner boys and field operatives. In every New Hampshire primary, they swarm north, particularly during the campaign's final days.
From now through Tuesday's primary, more than 1,000 Bay Staters will be on the ground in New Hampshire, staffing phone banks, dropping leaflets, holding signs.
More than most years, the volunteer armies could play a crucial role. In both party primaries, the races are close enough that get-out-the-vote operations could be decisive.
Most of the Bay Staters are helping the Democrats - Vice President Al Gore and former senator Bill Bradley. No surprise there. Gore's camp says it will have no less than 1,600 troops out for Tuesday's effort, and hundreds will be from Massachusetts. Bradley's team says it is mobilizing at least 1,400, perhaps a fifth from the Bay State.
But there's an unusually large Republican presence from south of the border this year, primarily because of Governor Paul Cellucci's marriage to the campaign of Texas Governor George W. Bush. For weeks, Cellucci's team has been sending up workers, 200 at a time, and at least that many down the stretch. Senator John McCain of Arizona has imported a smaller Massachusetts contingent, led by former state party chairwoman Jean Inman.
Once upon a time, there was plenty of friction between these states, which share little in the way of political traditions besides Daniel Webster, who represented both in Congress and is memorialized in statues outside each state's capitol.
Live-free-or-die Granite Staters once sneered at their southerly neighbors, viewing them as pointy-headed fools who sent suitcases full of tax dollars to their slothful, crooked bureaucrats. We, in turn, viewed our northern cousins as pickup-driving gun nuts who were too cheap to pay for kindergarten.
That's changing fast now. The high-tech boom, surging affluence, and a torrent of Bay State refugees have remade New Hampshire's populous southern tier.
''You don't hear as many negatives about `Taxachusetts,''' said William M. Gardner, a Democrat and New Hampshire's secretary of state since 1976. His traditionally Republican state has a popular Democratic governor, Jeanne Shaheen, while heavily Democratic Massachusetts is beginning its 10th consecutive year with a Republican governor, Gardner notes.
''Since the recession of the early '90s, I think there's a lot more economic interdependence between the states,'' said Concord attorney Tom Rath, a prominent Republican who is backing Bush. ''I think we view each other with a lot less suspicion.''
Some of the political foot soldiers feel it.
''You try not to do your Boston accent because they'll think you're interfering, but people were thrilled to hear from us, out knocking on doors when it's two degrees,'' said Bobby Haynes, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, who canvassed for Gore in Manchester last week. He and 150 other Bay State labor activists will be up there again today for the veep.
So will Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, among a horde of pols blowing in from the south for Gore. He's more useful, though - 160 of his experienced ground troops are along for the ride.
The value of the support of these political figures, entertainers and professional athletes, is somewhat nebulous.
Some, like Rath, say it goes into the mix of information for voters, particularly in the Boston media market to the south.
Others aren't so sure.
''Half of them, the public never heard of them and couldn't care less,'' said Hugh Gregg, a former governor from Nashua.
Yet they pour in by the hour. For Gore alone from the Bay State, they include Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry; US Representatives Joseph Moakley of South Boston, Edward Markey of Malden, James McGovern of Worcester, and Richard Neal of Springfield; state Treasurer Shannon O'Brien, and a gang of state legislators. Cellucci is bringing in about 30 Republican state lawmakers for Bush. Bradley too has drawn in state legislators from the south, with former attorney general James M. Shannon as well as Nicola Tsongas and Thaleia Schlesinger, the widow and sister of the late senator Paul E. Tsongas, who won the New Hampshire Democratic primary in 1992.
Can they move votes? Some. Maybe. Menino is sure he can count on a Gore vote from a brother-in-law in Somersworth. Beyond that and his volunteers, he said he's merely providing ''part of the ambience of the campaign.''
