Vice President Kamala Harris’ trip to New Hampshire this week may be the one and only time the Democratic presidential nominee stops in the Granite State during the closing stretch of her 2024 election showdown against former President Donald Trump.

On the other side of the ticket, Trump has not visited New Hampshire since winning the GOP presidential primary on Jan. 23. In a radio interview this week, Trump said he’ll return before Election Day, which is less than two months away.

“Oh yeah, I’ll be there – that’s a very important place for me,” he insisted.

Whether she will be back or not, the Harris campaign made sure the vice president multi-tasked during her visit this week as she checked a trio of political boxes.

The number one mission of her trip – spell out more of her economic vision for the nation.

The vice president used an event at Throwback Brewery, a popular brewery and eatery in North Hampton, to propose a tenfold expansion of a new small business tax deduction and announce that she aims for 25 million applications for small businesses during the first term of a Harris presidency.

The plan Harris proposed would expand the current $5,000 startup-expense deduction for small businesses (costs for such things as market surveys, ads, and training costs for workers that small businesses shell out before they even open) to $50,000.

“As president, one of my highest priorities will be to strengthen America’s small businesses,” Harris said to a crowd of over 3,0000 outside of the brewery, which benefited from President Joe Biden’s pandemic-era relief bill and other policies aimed at helping small businesses. “And here I am in New Hampshire to announce a few elements of my plan to do that.”

Veteran Democratic consultant, Concord lobbyist, and Harris surrogate Jim Demers noted that the vice president’s “message fit well for New Hampshire” because “small businesses really are the economic backbone of New Hampshire”

Besides the policy rollout, the Harris trip also aimed to accomplish a couple of political missions.

The Harris stop in New Hampshire was her first since 2021, and it was a break from her visits since replacing Biden seven weeks ago at the top of the Democrats’ national ticket to the seven key battleground states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada) that decided the 2020 presidential election and will likely determine the winner of the 2024 contest.

While New Hampshire remains a very competitive general election state, it’s been 24 years since a Republican won the state’s four electoral votes, when then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush carried the state in his 2000 White House election.

Still, the Harris campaign “is not taking this state for granted,” Demers told the Monitor.

Longtime state Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley echoed the same sentiment.

“By coming here to New Hampshire, she wants to make sure that everybody should hear her message and cast their vote for her,” Buckley said.

The Trump campaign, said Harris visited here because she’s worried about losing.

“President Trump’s campaign maintains an on-the-ground presence in New Hampshire, including staff and offices, while Kamala Harris is parachuting in because she knows that the Granite State is in play,” the campaign said.

But in reality, the Harris campaign and the Democrats have 17 campaign offices and over 100 staffers across the state and enjoy a healthy ground game advantage over the Trump campaign and Republicans.

The vice president’s trip appeared to have a third mission – to ease any remaining hard feelings from the Democratic National Committee’s move to upend New Hampshire from its traditional role of holding the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

Trump took to social media on the eve of the Harris trip to charge that the vice president “sees there are problems for her campaign in New Hampshire because of the fact that they disrespected it in their primary and never showed up.”

The former president’s claim that Harris “disrespected” New Hampshire points back to the move in late 2022 and early last year by the Democratic National Committee – following Biden’s lead – to move New Hampshire lower in its nominating calendar.

New Hampshire – adhering to a state law that mandates its presidential primary goes first, did just that – which meant the state’s Jan. 23 nominating contest was unsanctioned on the Democratic side.

Biden kept his name off the ballot and both he and Harris steered clear of the state, but thanks to a well-organized write-in effort by New Hampshire’s Democratic establishment leaders, the president easily won the primary over his long-shot challengers.

The president returned to New Hampshire in March after locking up the Democratic nomination, for a visit that was seen in the political world as an olive branch to Granite Staters.

The Republicans did not alter New Hampshire’s lead-off position in their presidential nominating calendar.

“I protected New Hampshire’s First-In-The-Nation Primary and ALWAYS will!” Trump posted on social media.

Buckley dismissed any tensions over the primary as old news and that “nobody, absolutely nobody, is thinking about anything but the great blue wave building in the Granite State.”

Demers added that “nobody I know is thinking about the New Hampshire primary.”