New Hampshire governor and possible 2024 Republican presidential candidate Chris Sununu doubled down on Donald Trump’s electoral track record after the former president’s televised CNN town hall at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.
Sununu told CNN’s Anderson Cooper hours after the event, “He is a loser…and as a four-time winning Republican, I’m tired of losing.” Evoking Republican losses at the federal level in New Hampshire in 2020 and 2022, Sununu continued, “He’s a three-time loser going on to be a four-time loser, and it’s not just him I’m worried about. I’m worried about the U.S. Senate races. I’m worried about the governorships. I’m worried about the ballot that he affects up and down the ticket.”
It wasn’t the first time Sununu criticized Trump’s electoral liability, calling him a “loser” on several occasions. Sununu also expressed concern about Trump’s ability to grow his coalition beyond his base if he continues talking about the “rigged” 2020 election.
Sununu told Cooper, “I want winners. I want independents back on the team. I want young people to be reinvigorated by what I think is a great Republican conservative product that doesn’t get the headlines it deserves because the former President just tries to keep defending himself over the flaws of 2020.”
The CNN town hall focused heavily on the 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol riot. Never Back Down PAC, a super PAC working to draft Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis into the 2024 Republican primary, also criticized Trump for his focus on and comments about events surrounding the 2020 presidential election. The group tweeted,
“On CNN tonight, Trump spent an hour talking about:
– What he did or didn’t do on January 6
– Whether he will pardon people who harmed police officers
– How the 2020 election was rigged
– Whether he supports terminating parts of the U.S. Constitution or the whole thing because the 2020 election was rigged…
How does this Make America Great Again?”
It marked a continuing theme among most declared and prospective candidates eyeing the 2024 Republican nomination to avoid discussing 2020 and January 6, as the former president doubled down on those two talking points himself.
But Trump isn’t the only presidential candidate happy to discuss those events. President Joe Biden has repeatedly mentioned both since releasing his 2024 announcement video two weeks ago.
In a tweet Wednesday night, Biden highlighted Trump’s town hall comments about the January 6 protesters while including footage of the riot. The president tweeted, “There were not fine people on both sides of Charlottesville. The January 6th rioters were not good people. End of story.”
So far, much of the 2024 presidential campaign has been a relitigation of events from more than two years ago, as Wednesday night showed. While both parties’ frontrunners are busy rehashing the 2020 election and January 6, it will be interesting to see how the other candidates try to avoid that conversation, if they want to, and attempt to reshape the narrative of the 2024 presidential campaign.
