As we’ve often noted, in New Hampshire, an endorsement by a locally elected official – state representative or a mayor, for instance – can help a presidential candidate more than in key communities than an endorsement by a U.S. senator or U.S. House member.

These are neighbors and have nothing gain or lose politically by making an endorsement. It’s not calculated, it’s genuine.

Today, former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign is rolling out endorsements of two current and four former mayors of Granite State cities. The Biden campaign says eight current or former mayors have now endorsed Biden, "more than any other candidate."

Backing Biden are current Mayors Kendall Lane of Keene and Paul Grenier of Berlin; and former Mayors Bob Lister of Portsmouth; T.J. Jean of Rochester; and Jack Buckley and William Boc, both of Dover.

Buckley and Boc had previously endorsed Sen. Kamala Harris, who has dropped out of the presidential race.

Sure, partisans are generally enthusiastic about their party’s nominee, but in 2016, given how unpopular both candidates were, a sizable number of voters who cast ballots said they liked neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton. According to exit polling conducted that year, about 1 in 5 voters said they liked neither Trump nor Clinton, about nine times as many as said they liked both major-party candidates.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1440
That became important, given how close the 2016 election ended up being. As it turns out, while people who liked Trump and didn’t like Clinton voted heavily for Trump (as you’d expect), the current president also had an edge among people who disliked both him and Clinton. He won those voters by 17 points nationally — and by margins in the closest states that were likely enough to hand him the electoral college victory he needed.*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1440
....The split between those who like or don’t like the candidates is remarkably similar to 2016. Trump is the only candidate liked by 36 percent of respondents, same as the percentage of voters three years ago. Biden is the only one liked by 41 percent — the same percentage of exit poll respondents who said the same of Clinton. The group of like-neithers is slightly smaller, at 12 percent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1440
How do they vote? According to Quinnipiac, they prefer Biden by a wide margin. This is a relatively small group of people, so the margin of error is fairly large, but Biden’s margin is large enough that it doesn’t matter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1440
Note that only 10 percent say they’d vote third party, half the percentage of the same group that said that in 2016. Another 9 percent say they wouldn’t vote at all.

What we see when we compare those numbers to 2016 is a flip in sentiment among the cynical voters. That year, Trump’s support among the like-neithers was about the same as his overall percentage; it was Clinton whose numbers plunged. In Quinnipiac’s poll, Biden holds strong with that group, while Trump’s numbers drop off a cliff.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1440

It was eight years ago this week that Donald Trump was outraged that then-President Barack Obama hosted a Hanukkah celebration at the White House two weeks before the start of the holiday. Nevertheless, Trump hosted a Hanukkah celebration at the White House yesterday, two weeks before the start of the holiday.

But as HuffPost noted, the event itself became notable for entirely different reasons.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at tackling anti-Semitism on college campuses on Wednesday – but one of the speakers at the event has said that Jews are going to hell.
Trump signed the order at a White House Hanukkah reception, with several prominent Jewish Americans in attendance, including New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.

But the president also called upon evangelical Christian leader Robert Jeffress to speak, claiming he’s a “tremendous faith leader.”
....A controversy soon followed, and much of the country learned of Jeffress’ record of over-the-top extremism on issues throughout the so-called “culture war,” with the Texan having lashed out at everyone from gays to Mormons to Muslims to Catholics (he’s described Roman Catholicism as a “cult-like pagan religion,” which represents “the genius of Satan.”)
Of particular relevance today, he’s also said “you can’t be saved by being a Jew.” As recently as four years ago, Jeffress even insisted that Christians in the United States are persecuted in ways comparable to Germany’s treatment of Jews before the Holocaust.