There is a certain kind of dedicated American political journalist who spends primary season traveling from state to state, reporting for the likes of CNN or Politico. They congregate in the media section at the back of every state-college auditorium rally, sometimes taking small pains to disguise their boredom. They often end up watching variations of the same stump speech many times over. Understandably, they spend a lot of time gossiping with one another, or scrolling through news on their phones, grazing tidbits from other parts of the country. They know that their editors are going to expect them to fit their reporting into the larger narrative that’s being crowdsourced, in real time, on social media and cable news.

As a Canadian journalist, my own approach this election season has been, by necessity, completely different, as no one pays me to fly around from the United States. Over the years, I’ve done most of my U.S. political reporting in that postage stamp of America that exists within a half day’s drive of Toronto, mostly consisting of New York and New England—including, of course, New Hampshire, where Bernie Sanders won a narrow victory over Pete Buttigieg in the first 2020 Democratic primaries two weeks ago.

New Hampshire’s tininess is one of the reasons I try to visit every primary season, since almost every New Hampshire voter lives within a two-hour drive of one another. The campaign style gives you the slight feeling of traveling back in time to an era when politicians made their reputation on foot and horseback. (Unfortunately, New Hampshire’s racial demography adds to this anachronistic impression, as the state remains just seven percent non-white, a quarter the rate for America as a whole.) A voter (or journalist) looking to meet the presidential candidates in person can simply hop in a car and follow them around from one speaking event to the next. And it’s surprising how many New Hampsherites I met this year who did just that. (In one of the rare funny lines that I heard Buttigieg deliver, he described how one voter had told him, “I was really impressed with your speech, and you’re now in my top seven.”)