CONCORD, N.H. — The other day, Lauren Chooljian received a text from her father, a lifelong New Hampshire resident, that said: “You’re losing friends in nh.”
She knows, Dad.
Ms. Chooljian, 32, has become a divisive figure in her home state because of her job: co-host of “Stranglehold,” a podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio that, as its name suggests, takes a not always flattering look at the Granite State’s treasured first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
So far, “Stranglehold” has had 16 episodes of varying lengths. An 11-minute episode included a discussion of how the botched Iowa caucuses may affect the New Hampshire primary, which takes place Tuesday. A deeply reported 55-minute episode revealed how the election sausage is made in Dixville Notch, the White Mountains community celebrated by national news outlets for its tradition of midnight voting.
The primary is “protected and upheld by powerful people who stand to benefit from its survival,” Ms. Chooljian said in one episode. “And so reporting that doesn’t interrogate that institution, well, it seems to apply a different standard to the primary than to other important political forces.”
Fans of the show appreciate its rigorous examination of the state’s role in picking presidents. But the podcast has a prominent detractor in Joseph W. McQuaid, until recently the publisher of the state’s biggest newspaper, The New Hampshire Union Leader.
In an editorial published in August, Mr. McQuaid wrote that he saw evidence of bias in the podcast’s tagline: “One small state got its hands around our presidential elections. Now it won’t let go.” He called the show “a bit of a head-scratcher, given how much NHPR itself gains from its association with the first-in-the-nation primary.”
In a phone interview, Mr. McQuaid, now editor at large at The Union Leader, said he had listened to some “Stranglehold” episodes and found them wanting.
“It confirmed my suspicion that this was, as we said in the bad old days of newspapering, a hatchet job, with a desire, for some reason, to trash the New Hampshire presidential primary,” he said.
James Pindell, a Boston Globe reporter who is covering his fifth New Hampshire primary, disagreed, describing “Stranglehold” as a novel journalistic development.
“You would occasionally have long-form pieces that looked at the institution, but never with a critical eye,” Mr. Pindell said. “It would be a soft, featurey thing, with a lot of war stories. Never something like this.”
Mr. Pindell, who appeared as a guest on the show, has noticed that not everyone is a fan. When he bumped into a New Hampshire political insider in the course of his reporting, he got an earful.
“There was no small talk,” Mr. Pindell said. “He started right into ‘Stranglehold’ and how much he hates it.”
Ms. Chooljian, the journalist stirring the pot, grew up in Hampstead, a town of about 8,000 in the state’s southeastern crook. Her father, Barry Chooljian, is an accomplished high school wrestling coach. Her mother, Carrie, is a social worker.
She decided to attend St. Anselm College in Manchester partly out of interest in the primary. She said she attended the 2008 debate where Barack Obama told Hillary Clinton, “You’re likable enough.”
“I found my career through the primary,” Ms. Chooljian said.
After St. Anselm, she earned a master’s degree at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and went to work at the Chicago public radio station WBEZ. She covered Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the 2016 Democratic and Republican conventions for the station. In 2017, she returned to New Hampshire — which, thanks to her years away, came into sharper focus.
“I understand the ecosystem of this thing,” Ms. Chooljian said, “but I couldn’t really see it until I had taken a step back and then come back.”
Within two years, she was working on the podcast, which would examine a tradition as essential to the state’s identity as Lincoln to Illinois or the orange to Florida.
NHPR newsroom leaders were hoping to follow up on their breakout podcast hit, the true-crime series “Bear Brook,” with a show focused on the primary. But it would have to steer clear of the usual fare. Maureen McMurray, the station’s director of content, said she wanted to avoid “primary kitsch,” and Dan Barrick, the news director, did not want to add to the election-season din.
“We were not going to spend that much being the 51st reporter at a Joe Biden press conference in Manchester,” Mr. Barrick said.
Accordingly, the first five “Stranglehold” episodes, which took months to report and produce, were divorced from the news cycle. Ms. Chooljian and her co-host, Jack Rodolico, 37, got help from colleagues like the reporter Casey McDermott and the “Bear Brook” host Jason Moon, who helped write the “Stranglehold” theme music.
In an interview at the NHPR office in Concord, the state capital, Ms. Chooljian and Mr. Rodolico bristled at descriptions of “Stranglehold” as slanted or even “critical,” arguing that the show’s irreverent title was meant to establish a tone that would set it apart from other political podcasts.
“It could just never be something that felt like broccoli,” Mr. Rodolico said.
He added that the show’s through line was its focus on “people who have outsize influence over one of the most consequential decisions in American democracy.”
When “Stranglehold” made its debut a few months ago, the Democratic Party was struggling with the premium it placed on New Hampshire and the caucuses in Iowa, another largely white state. After the debacle over Iowa’s vote counts last week, skepticism of the two bellwethers has only increased, as evidenced last week by a Boston Globe editorial whose headline said it all: “Kill the tradition: N.H. and Iowa should not vote first.”
“This is the first time people are openly considering us not being first,” Ms. Chooljian said after a day spent reporting a “Stranglehold” episode.
Mr. Rodolico and Ms. Chooljian alternate as hosts. He is direct and self-effacing; she is more willing to make herself something of a character, the crescendo of her sentences often ending on an incredulous question mark.
There has been very little horse-race content on “Stranglehold.” This is not a podcast that makes a fetish of passing along the latest poll results. What it does provide is an almost novelistic portrait of the relationship between the state’s residents and the primary that turns them into cable-news quarry every four years.
“I don’t know if it will be forever,” William Shaheen, a former United States attorney for the state, said in a “Stranglehold” episode that chronicled Jimmy Carter’s upset victory in the 1976 primary. “But there was a time — big time — when it was Camelot.”
The first episode told the story of Bill Gardner, the longtime New Hampshire secretary of state, whose clout overseeing the state’s elections has made him a powerful gatekeeper. More recently, the podcast team turned the microphones on itself, exploring how the primary had been a boon to New Hampshire news outlets.
Scott Spradling, a former political director of WMUR, the only TV station in the state with its own news division, said on the episode: “When it came to protecting the presidential primary, I was a biased reporter. I will own that proudly.” The podcast went deeper into meta-journalism when it noted that Mr. McQuaid, of The Union Leader, had renewed his criticism of “Stranglehold” in a C-SPAN interview last month.
Ms. Chooljian spoke up for “Stranglehold” in the closing minutes. “Now, I would argue what we are doing is not negative, but I understand why my colleagues would be mad, or at least baffled,” she said. “The primary has made New Hampshire’s local media important — all local media. Us, too.”
Away from the microphone, she was more specific.
“I occupy a really odd spot, where my face is on the marketing at St. Anselm College for interviewing presidential candidates,” Ms. Chooljian said. “It’s just evidence for how much we all benefit from this thing.”
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