Every dark cloud has a silver lining, and every Election Night drubbing — even the terrible one New Hampshire Democrats just suffered — leaves someone with a smile. Below is New Hampshire Journal’s winners and losers list.
Please feel free to send your nominees to [email protected], or post them on Twitter tagged @NewHampJournal.
2024 GENERAL ELECTION WINNERS
Gov.-Elect Kelly Ayotte:
Sometimes, the obvious choice is also the right one. No one else in New Hampshire politics had an Election Night as impressive as the former U.S. senator turned first GOP woman governor of the Granite State.
Ayotte began her candidacy with two problems–Donald Trump and the abortion issue. Either one could have derailed her candidacy: an “Aaron-Day”-style brush fire rebellion among the far-right base, a major misstep during an interview about the abortion issue, or her name coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth at any point in 2024. Instead, she played to her strengths: making herself the “603” candidate, campaigning with Gov. Chris Sununu, and raising mounds of money.
Most political observers, even some who were dubious about her “Don’t MASS Up New Hampshire” strategy early on, say she ran a nearly perfect campaign. It didn’t hurt that she got to run against Joyce Craig, the Walter Mondale of the 2024 cycle. The result: Polls showed Ayotte up by about four. She beat Craig by nine.
Ayotte’s win isn’t just huge for the NHGOP. As a Republican woman in deep-blue New England, she’ll have a national profile if she wants one, too. It could be argued that the only person in U.S. politics who had a better night than Ayotte is a certain resident of Mar-a-Lago.
GOP State House Leadership:
“We kicked their asses.” That was an off-the-record comment from one of the House GOP leadership team after the results began rolling in Tuesday night. The current net pick-up appears to be 22, but it could still go higher. Winning seats in Nashua wasn’t on the “to do” list of even the most optimistic House Republicans. They had help from Ayotte and Trump, but they also faced a wave of national money as D.C. Democrats put Concord on their short list of state houses to flip.
And if the House performance wasn’t impressive enough, the four words nobody in New Hampshire politics expected to be saying on Wednesday: state Sen. Victoria Sullivan. The defeat of Senate Minority Leader Donna Soucy in Manchester is just plain embarrassing. But coming at the hands of Sullivan, an unapologetic conservative dismissed by Democrats as a gadfly, makes it even worse. Add in the defeat of Sen. Shannon Chandley by Rep. Tim McGough (R-Merrimack) and it was a night nobody in New Hampshire politics expected.
The #FITN Primary:
After the “Red Whimper” 2022 midterms and his sloppy entrance into the GOP presidential primary two years ago, many political professionals thought Donald Trump’s moment might have passed.
Around the same time, polls showed most Americans — and quite a few Democrats — didn’t believe President Joe Biden had the mental or physical acuity to run for another term. They were telling pollsters they wanted a different candidate.
Ahead of them both loomed New Hampshire’s First in the Nation primary.
Trump faced a strong field of serious candidates including Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. What did he do? He came to New Hampshire and beat them all, the first of many presidential primary campaigns that made him a better, stronger candidate before November.
And what did Biden do? He tried to kill the primary. Claiming the problematically pigment-deprived people of the Granite State lacked the diversity to host the party’s first primary, he muscled through a calendar change at the DNC and refused to appear in New Hampshire until after he had officially won the nomination.
The result? One is a soon-to-be-forgotten footnote roaming the halls of the White House yelling randomly at the furniture. The other just won the most politically-significant presidential election since at least 2008, if not 1980.
The importance of the First in the Nation primary has never been more evident than it was Tuesday night.
Honorable Mention
Gov. Chris Sununu:
His endorsements haven’t always carried a great deal of weight, but Ayotte says she couldn’t have won the victory did without him, and many Granite State political insiders agree.
Lily Tang Williams:
She defeated a far more well-funded GOP primary field to become the nominee, then created a viral moment by attacking wealthy D.C. insider Maggie Goodlander’s hypocrisy on “feeling the pain” of the working class during her WMUR debate. Williams has no future in major elected office, but as an internet influencer? Cha-Ching!
2024 GENERAL ELECTION LOSERS
NH Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley:
Once again, the obvious choice. Buckley began the election cycle by losing the First in the Nation presidential primary, and ended it by losing every state race that wasn’t nailed down.
In three of the last four cycles, Democrats under Buckley have lost races they should have one — including being the only state during Biden’s 2020 victory to lose both the state House and Senate to the GOP.
Now smart Granite State Democrats are asking: When was the last time Buckley found a way to win a race he was supposed to lose?
Yes, the state has an all-Democrat federal delegation, but that has nothing to do with Buckley. New Hampshire doesn’t vote Republican at the federal level any more than South Carolina votes Democratic.
In the wake of Tuesday’s fiasco, Buckley — who’s all but disappeared from social media — released a statement saying, “Over the days, weeks, and months to follow, we will get right back to work for the people of New Hampshire.”
Republicans agree. The way Buckley is running the Democratic Party is absolutely “working for the people of New Hampshire.” And they hope he keeps it up.
WMUR:
There is plenty to complain about when it comes to the state of the political media, both nationally and in New Hampshire. And NHJournal is the first to admit that no news outlet is perfect. But many longtime Granite State political news consumers have been shocked by the performance of a media institution they once respected and relied on. The coverage, once so carefully nonpartisan, has skewed to the left. The most glaring example came during the general election gubernatorial debate, when the station made the decision to hold an hour-long debate dominated by the issues of abortion and Donald Trump — but not a single question about taxes or the economy.
The fact that openly liberal NHPR did the same thing days earlier, and was called out for it — and WMUR still went ahead with its Democrat-centric debate — shows the station has made a decision to embrace partisanship. At a time when trust in the media is already collapsing, it’s a risky bet for WMUR at best.
The “Abortion” Card:
New Hampshire Democrats had a very simple strategy to win on Tuesday: Trump + Abortion = Victory. It’s obvious the first part of their equation was off, but some political observers are just beginning to realize the second one is, too.
It’s not that abortion isn’t an issue, or that Republicans can’t lose elections due to it. (As they did in 2022.) But its power as a stand-alone solution in competitive races is clearly limited. One data point from the exit polls:
In 2022, Democrats won voters who said abortion should be “legal in most cases” by 22 points, 60-38. On Tuesday, those voters split 49-49 percent.
Democrats carpet bombed Ayotte and the entire GOP field on the abortion issue with millions of dollars of ads on TV and in the mail. Many of the ads were lies, claiming Ayotte and others supported a total abortion ban, or a federal abortion ban. But the abortion nuke turned out to be a dud. And there’s no reason to think it’s going to get more powerful two years from now, as more Granite Staters figure out that abortion isn’t banned in New Hampshire and it’s not going to be.
Honorable Mention
Russell Prescott:
The failure of Prescott’s self-righteous faux-candidacy was proof positive that the 1980s called and they DON’T want their candidate back. The era of Bob Dole politics is long over, and Prescott wasted an opportunity to help his party by getting in this race and refusing to actually run. “I’m too good a person to criticize my opponent!” is the same as saying, “I’m just here to lose politely.”
Supporters of Boys in Girls Sports:
This was the issue New Hampshire voters talked about without being prompted. Democrats unanimously opposed legislation protecting girls sports and private spaces from biological males. They also just got their heads handed to them. The next vote on this issue will be bipartisan — guaranteed.
Most Memorably Bad Quote of the Campaign Season:
“Suck it up, buttercup.” — Former NHDem chair Kathy Sullivan warning her fellow Democrats to shut up and support President Joe Biden after his disastrous debate performance. Just days later, Biden dropped out.
