That public interest, of course, was not limited to the residents of New Hampshire. People from all over flocked to the Granite State for a piece of the action, Cohen said, and the winds of change were blowing fiercely. Massachusetts lawmakers saw that residents were traveling to play the New Hampshire sweepstakes, and a sentiment grew over the following years that, if residents were playing anyway, it made sense to keep those dollars in-state.
This, Cohen said, is how lotteries spread from 1963 through 1977: as a sort of contagion where proximity to another legal lottery made it more likely that a state would create one of its own.
"That's how we get this sort of domino theory, where it just feels inevitable. This is what's happening right now with sports gambling and what's happening right now with marijuana legalization," he said.
Another factor working to help lotteries spread in New England was religion. When studying the spread of lotteries during this first wave, researchers have found that there was a direct correlation between the percentage of a state's population that was Catholic and the odds that it adopted a lottery. It's very clear, Cohen said, that the larger the share of Catholic voters in a state during this time, the more likely it was to adopt a lottery.
Not everyone was on board then, or today.
"The lottery opponents in New Hampshire in 1963 look really similar to the lottery opponents in Massachusetts in 1970 to Mississippi in 2018," Cohen said.
Typically, he added, lottery opponents break down into three groups: evangelical protestants, social-justice-minded liberals, and representatives from other gambling industries who feel threatened by a new competitor. Concerns generally included a lottery's impact on low-income residents, its perceived undermining of a traditional work ethic, and that it could become a front for criminal organizations.
"In almost every case, these concerns were not enough to match up with gambling fever: the desire of people not just to have the chance to bet, but to have the chance for tax-free revenue," Cohen said.