For the record, the first phone message arrived at 7:15 a.m., followed by similar messages at 8:13 and 8:30. I was in my office for the next call – from an “appalled” occasional letter writer – who informed me she was canceling her subscription and promised to encourage her friends to do the same.

By the end of the following day, I had spoken to or received voice mail messages from two dozen more “former” subscribers, using words and phrases like “blows my mind,” “disgusted,” “disappointed,” shocked,” “absolutely floored” and “totally bowled over,” to name a few.

And that doesn’t include the roughly 30 emails we received as letters to the editor or personal notes to our editorial board, all expressing similar sentiments.

No, we didn’t run a corpse photo on the front page.

Worse. We endorsed Mitt Romney for president.

That our Oct. 31 endorsement triggered a flurry of cancellations didn’t come as a total surprise. Four years earlier, when we endorsed a young senator from Illinois to be our next president, we received about a dozen cancellations, too.

But I’d be lying if I said I was prepared for the reader response that greeted our Romney endorsement, which we had explained resulted from roughly three hours of debate before our five-member editorial board reached a consensus.

On Thursday night, as I did when I wrote about the endorsement cancellations of four years ago, I reached out to my colleagues in the Association of Opinion Journalists and asked if their newspapers had experienced anything similar.

One editorial page editor based in the Midwest told me his newspaper’s endorsement of Romney had resulted in about 45 cancellations, roughly half as many as it received four years earlier when the paper backed Republican John McCain; a paper in the Southeast lost about 50 subscribers when it endorsed Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson; and a few editors at papers that endorsed Obama said they had gotten just a handful of cancellations.

Now that I’ve had a chance to digest all of this, a few observations:

As we stated in our pre-endorsement editorial (“Oct. 28: Bipartisanship key to our endorsements”), we don’t endorse candidates to tell you how to vote. Rather, our editorial board endorses candidates to share our collective insight and participate in the civic life of the community, just like we do the other 364 days of the year.

But it’s also clear that some readers – especially longtime readers – are looking for something more: a reaffirmation of the philosophical or ideological bond they have developed over time with our newspaper.

As a paper that has tended to endorse more Democrats than Republicans over the years – and one that backed Obama in 2008 – there was an expectation among many readers that we would do the same this year.

Had we endorsed the president, those who felt otherwise might not have liked it, but they certainly wouldn’t have been surprised by it.

But when we endorsed Romney, the Obama supporters I heard from took it much more personally than endorsing the wrong candidate: For them, it was a betrayal.

As someone who has been in this business for 35 years now, this is hardly the first time – nor do I suspect the last – that readers will drop their subscription over something they didn’t like in the paper, be it the next political endorsement or the cancellation of their favorite comic strip.

Still, for me, it hurts to lose readers who have been loyal subscribers of this newspaper for 20, 30 and even 40 years because we disagreed over our preference for the next president.

Then again, if they change their minds, apparently they know how to reach me.

Nick Pappas is editorial page editor at The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-6505 or npappas@nashuatelegraph.com. You can also follow the Opinion page on Twitter at @TelegraphEdit and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TheTelegraph.

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