TAMWORTH, N.H. — The circus has left town. No more walks down Main Street, no more visits to veterans’ halls, no more fables about lessons candidates learned while talking to people in community centers in small towns. But for all the divisiveness and all the invective, New Hampshire’s primary gave clarity to two things that will shape the campaign in the year ahead.

One is the likely identity of the two presidential nominees. The other is the notion that Americans of all stripes believe that, in the 2024 election that New Hampshire helped set up, the greatest issue may be the survival of democracy.

The voters tell people that they are concerned about the economy, the climate, abortion rights, parental control in the schools, and a mess of other issues that the candidates only stoked and rendered toxic. But what’s evident after months of campaigning here is that for all the nastiness and name-calling, Americans — in New Hampshire and probably everywhere — prize the democratic system. 

They like to talk politics and, in places like this, talk with and to politicians. They line up in the cold to see politicians. They like having a voice and a vote. They like debates. They like the clash of ideas. They like elections. 

New Hampshire isn’t a proxy for the nation, which is why its role as the first primary is so often assailed; it’s too white, too educated, too small. But it’s a proxy for the rest of the country in an elemental way: It’s rock-solid pro-democracy. 

The other day, Gov. Chris Sununu was talking to a clutch of reporters and students and explaining the New Hampshire way: No sales tax, no income tax, but big-time local property taxes. That put the focus on the smallest possible unit of government, and thus prompted the public to make its decisions and to focus its attention on local issues, which in turn increased peoples’ stake and involvement in government. 

“This is how things really work in small towns,” the Hancock, N.H. writer Howard Mansfield explained in a 2019 essay in Yankee magazine. “People get together, figure things out, and walk the crooked path to a solution.”

There won’t be as much open public discussion of issues once the campaign moves to Nevada (one of the next stops) or to the big states (Democratic strategist Bob Shrum once told me that a rally in California consisted of four people sitting around a television). But no one wants to close off political debate. 

Indeed, the question of opening political debate is on everyone’s agenda. 

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, for example, campaigned here saying he wanted to assure that conservative ideas got a fair airing on campus. His many detractors have been arguing that DeSantis himself is one of those most willing to shut down debate and restrict library access.

DeSantis got nowhere here, but his example is telling. The left thinks the right is a nutty vanguard of zealots who want to repress free expression. The right thinks the left is using college courses to indoctrinate the next generation of students and is doing so by shutting off dissent from the right. In one of her last campaign appearances here before the primary, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina said her son told her he was tired of writing papers he didn’t believe in so he could get an A.

It also was Haley who, in the few times she directed sharp fire at former President Donald Trump, accused him of being “obsessed” with dictators.

There was a lot of talk, both on the campaign trail and in coffee shops here, about the future of democracy, and in truth there is no bigger issue. Everybody feels it, a lot of people express it, and it follows us, kind of like the way there is no escaping the smoke from a campfire; it has an uncanny, and irritating, way of getting in our faces.

Three in five American adults believe that democracy is at risk depending on the result of the fall election, according to a poll conducted for The Associated Press by the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. About three-quarters of Democrats and a little more than half of Republicans share that view.

Conservatives are dead serious about their concern with the choking off of debate on campus, about the way college campuses seem to have swung so dramatically leftward. 

Liberals are dead serious about their concerns around Trump, who tried to overturn an election he lost, who has an unsavory congeniality with people like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and who — in the spirit of the old chestnut that many a truth is said in jest — said that he might like to be a dictator on his first day of office. 

“If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy,” Sununu, part of a New Hampshire Republican political dynasty, said in Manchester last week, “don’t sit on your couch during a moment of democracy.” 

In the air here was the notion that if Trump prevails in November, he might seek a third term in contravention of the 22nd Amendment, which restricts presidents to two full terms, or might simply refuse to leave the White House, in contravention of the fundamental notion of rotation in office. 

Sounds far-fetched, but what might you have thought a year before the siege of the Capitol about the prospects that the doors of the House and Senate would be breached by an angry mob using a battering ram and that someone in red, white, and blue face paint and wearing a horned headdress would maraud around the country’s citadel of democracy?

Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota spent the past several weeks here running for president but really trying to edge Biden into retirement. The whole thing was a pointless sideshow, but he warned a crowd in Nashua that it wasn’t inconceivable that there might not be an election in 2028.  

All this may be the reverse of Ulysses S. Grant’s premature estimate of the military ability of the South and North: “Each side underestimates the other and overestimates itself.” But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.