Next year, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s independence and our Revolution to end monarchy rule. Since then, Americans have viewed political dynasties with great skepticism. In recent years, the Kennedys, Clintons, Bidens, and even Shaheens have experienced electoral setbacks. On the GOP side, Donald Trump ended the Bush dynasty a decade ago and hasn’t looked back.
Against that backdrop, the GOP establishment in Washington appears to be anointing a member of the Sununu family as the chosen standard-bearer for the 2026 open Senate race. No, it’s not former Gov. Chris Sununu, but his older brother, former U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu.
Having been out of public office since his 2008 defeat at the hands of U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the Sununu news has left people scratching their heads — and for good reason. After all, John has spent recent years not on the campaign trail here in New Hampshire, but in corporate boardrooms, earning a cushy living peddling influence for clients like Lloyd’s of London.
Along the way, John missed the transformation of the Republican Party from one that favored unfettered trade, open borders, and foreign intervention. Today, we are the party of the working man and woman, fairness on the international stage, and America First.
To put it in perspective, when John went to Washington, D.C., in 1997, Tom Brady was a backup quarterback at the University of Michigan. John’s last successful campaign came in 2002, five years before the first iPhone hit shelves.
John Sununu is a Windows 95 candidate in a digital world. His time on the national stage came and went a long time ago.
There is a litany of reasons John cannot carry the GOP banner in this era of Trump.
Here are three.
First, in 2008, John voted for the $700 billion bailout of the big banks. The bank bailout and the lack of accountability led to the change of direction in the Republican Party. It fueled the anger and frustration among the grassroots. John doesn’t understand this because, since that time, he has been fighting for the interests of corporate clients from his perch as a “policy adviser” to Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP in Washington, D.C.
Second, John is an unreliable ally of Israel. He supported direct aid to the Palestinian Authority, whose anti-Israel policies have provoked renewed bloodshed and terrorism and forced Israel to expand its counterterrorism operations in the West Bank. Israel is our only ally in the region, and the Palestinian Authority is not our friend.
They fund terrorism. John has a different view. Just last week, he refused to take a position on the ongoing conflict.
Finally, John is a founding member of the Never Trump movement. In 2015, he became one of former Gov. John Kasich’s top surrogates in the Granite State (Kasich ended up losing the state by 20 points). Even after Trump became the GOP nominee against Hillary Clinton, John refused to endorse him. In 2024, John’s animosity toward Trump only grew. In the days before the New Hampshire primary, he wrote an op-ed in the Union Leader headlined, “Donald Trump is a loser.”
And that is John Sununu’s Achilles’ heel. New Hampshire political history is littered with the carcasses of candidates that D.C. powerbrokers deemed next in line. The same experts who in 2016 predicted Donald Trump could never become the nominee (let alone president) are the same ones trying to convince the public that John is the second coming.
Fortunately, Granite Staters are smart enough to see through the spin. They can cut through the phoniness and smell the D.C. stench a mile away. They know that this race is earned through hard work, not handed down from Washington. Support is gained through parades, town halls, cookouts, Old Home Days, and the retail politics that our state is famed for. The kind of up-close, personal retail politics that John couldn’t handle in his political prime, let alone a decade and a half later.
John Sununu can have the D.C. swamp rats. The independent-minded people of New Hampshire are the ones who will decide this race.
