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Last June, just five months into his presidency, Donald Trump was underwater with New Hampshire voters by -10 in Morning Consult’s monthly state-by-state polling.

After a year of Mueller investigations, the Stormy Daniels sturm und drang, and Trump’s torrential tweet storms, what’s happened to the president’s approval rating in the Granite State?

They’ve gone from underwater by 10 points to…underwater by 11.  In the updated Morning Consult polling released today, Trump’s popularity (or lack thereof) is virtually unchanged–43 percent approve, 54 percent disapprove–after a year of presidential soap opera and anti-Trump media coverage.

The June number is  a recovery from where Trump was in the winter (-17 in February), but he’s still down over the course of his presidency. It’s hard to remember, but when President Trump first took office, more New Hampshire voters approved of him than disapproved,  45-44 percent.

Is his baseline permanently below 50 percent because he’s a Republican?  Or because voters are just in anti-incumbent mood? Apparently not, based Morning Consult polling of Republican Gov. Chris Sununu.

Last March, Sununu’s ratings were a solid 57 percent approve, 23 percent disapprove. In March 2018, the most recent update from Morning Consult, Sununu’s approval advantage had grown to 63-21–in a state whose entire D.C. delegation is Democratic and that Hillary carried (albeit narrowly) in 2016.

As a recent Concord Monitor story put it: “Four Months To Election Day, Sununu Has History and Poll Numbers On His Side.”

Donald Trump… not so much.

The good news for Republicans is that Trump doesn’t have to face the New Hampshire voters again for another two years. The bad news is that presidential approval ratings tend to be a significant predictor of midterm performance.

Can Trump narrow this gap between now and November? Absolutely. And if Democrats keep up the extreme rhetoric on issues like abortion, or Judge Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, they may give the GOP a boost.

But when the Trump trend is essentially flat over the previous year, it’s hard to imagine a big 1o-point breakout in the next four months.

In the wake of the shocking suicides of celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade comes word that suicide rates are rising across the US.  According to new data from the CDC, suicide rates rose in every state except Nevada.  And one of the states with the highest increase in suicide deaths is New Hampshire.

According to the CDC, New Hampshire’s suicide rate jumped 48.3 percent from 1999 to 2016–the third-highest increase in the U.S.  Suicide is the second leading cause of death for young people in New Hampshire and eighth overall.

“Suicide rates in the United States have risen nearly 30% since 1999, and mental health conditions are one of several factors contributing to suicide,” the CDC report says. “Examining state-level trends in suicide and the multiple circumstances contributing to it can inform comprehensive state suicide prevention planning.”

New Hampshire does have a State Suicide Prevention Council and a State Suicide Prevention Plan. However, it also has one of America’s worst opioid-abuse rates and this may be contributing to the spike in suicide deaths.

According to the Washington Post, “the CDC has calculated that suicides from opioid overdoses nearly doubled between 1999 and 2014, and data from a 2014 national survey showed that individuals addicted to prescription opioids had a 40 percent to 60 percent higher risk of suicidal ideation. Habitual users of opioids were twice as likely to attempt suicide as people who did not use them.”

Will suicide become the “opioid addiction” of the next political cycle? President Trump, who focused on the opioid epidemic before any other national politician during the 2016 campaign, has already begun talking about suicide–particularly among veterans. But the issue is rarely mentioned in either the the New Hampshire governor’s race or the campaigns for New Hampshire’s two  congressional seats.

That may all change soon.

The “Politics and Eggs” breakfast at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics is one of the compulsory events in Granite State politics for anyone considering a presidential run.  Conservative journalist and national leader of the #NeverTrump movement, Bill Kristol, will be making an appearance–and firing up the 2020 rumor mill–on Wednesday, May 23rd.

NHJournal’s Michael Graham caught up with Kristol at one of his Harvard Yard haunts on the eve of his speech for a quick Q&A:

MG: My first question for you is this: Is Bill Kristol coming to “Politics and Eggs” to formally announce his candidacy in the 2020 presidential race?

BK:  It’s tempting, it’s tempting. But then I’d be laughed out of New Hampshire and I’d be slipping back across the border to Massachusetts in about 12 minutes. So I think I won’t do that.

I’m just talking about my analysis of the political situation. It’s always great to be in New Hampshire because people here are so interested in national politics, and they follow it much more closely than almost any other state because they’re so conscious of their “First in the Nation” primary. And I do think the fact that independents can vote in either primary–and so many New Hampshire voters are independents–means they tend to follow both parties. In some states the Republicans follow Republican stories, and the Democrats have the Democratic stories. In New Hampshire, everyone follows everything.

MG: Which potential 2020 candidate best matches the mood of the Democratic electorate?

BK:  I think there are several moods going at once, which is why it’s complicated. There’s obviously a ‘We hate, loathe and despise Trump and we will reward the person who hates, loathes and despises him the most’ [mood].  There’s also a ‘Look, we’ve got a win’ [mood], with Democrats saying ‘We cannot afford to lose to this guy and, incidentally, we lost because we were out of touch with parts of middle America. Some of those concerns were legitimate, and some of those concerns are traditional Democratic concerns–stagnant wages and stuff like that–and so we need somebody who can speak to them.’

That leads you in two pretty different directions.

The conventional wisdom among Republicans in Washington is the Left has all the energy. Everything’s going Left. The empirical evidence so far in the primaries is a little mixed, I would say. Some moderates have won primaries. Some Lefties have won some primaries, and some have just been extremely close like the Nebraska [NE-2] primary. So I’m sort of open-minded about that debate on the Democratic side.

MG: What about Republicans?  Trump’s approval is back in the upper 80s, approaching 90 percent among Republicans. Of those Republicans who are dissatisfied–maybe they’re reluctant Trump supporters, whatever. Are they angry at Trump, or do the just want their party to go in a different direction?

BK:  I think Trump supporters–let’s just say it’s 80, 85 percent of the Republicans–are split into two categories: Half of them, some 40 percent of the Republican Party, are Trump loyalists. They believe in him. They are proud to have voted for Him. They hate his enemies and they like the fact that he’s shaking things up.  But about half of Trump supporters are reluctant Trump supporters. They voted for someone else in the primary–Bush or Cruz or Rubio.  They mostly voted for Trump in the general election because of Hillary and judges and so forth.

They support some of the things Trump has done, but they’re not Trump loyalists and I think they’re open to the following argument, one which you can’t really make now, you have to make it the day after the midterms:

It goes like this: ‘You voted for Trump. We’re not gonna criticize that. You support a lot of things he does. You think a lot of the criticisms of him are unfair. We’re not going to quarrel with that.  But–do you really want to do this for another four years?

It’s a little crazy. It’s a little chaotic. He comes with some downside risks. In foreign policy and and other things, maybe you could just like pocket the gains and get a more normal, so to speak,  Republican or Conservative.’

I think that message would have–could have– more appeal after Election Day this year. Right now it sounds like, ‘Well, you’re just anti-Trump. We’ve got to rally to Trump, we’ve got to defeat the Democrats.’  But I think November 7th [the day after the midterms], everything changes.  Because the question becomes not a retrospective question of were you right to vote for trump or his critics, or ‘what about Hillary?’ It becomes a prospective question. What do you want going forward?

MG: Last question: The Democratic ticket that you think Republicans should be the most afraid of in 2020?

BK: That’s a good question. These things are actually harder to predict.  I’m inclined to give the conventional answer, which I think is right, which is the more moderate the candidate Democrats nominate, the easier it is to win back some Republican voters and independents.  I guess I have the kind of conventional view that that’s the most dangerous thing for the Republicans.

But you know, sometimes history fools you.  Everyone thought Reagan would be easier to defeat than a more moderate Republican.  Take Elizabeth Warren. [Republicans think] That’d be great. We can demonize her. She’s scary. She’s left wing.

Well, I don’t know.  Maybe she could run a campaign that was pretty intelligent and get the best of both worlds: The Hillary Clinton appeal, first woman president; And some of the Sanders energy. Look, she’s a Harvard law professor. She’s not crazy.

It could be like Obama. [Independent voters saying] ‘She’s a little more liberal that I like, but she comes from modest origins.’ So I think [my fellow conservatives] may underrate Warren a little bit.

On June 5th, 2017, Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan joined their fellow Democrats in a unanimous vote reaffirming their commitment to the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995.  That act also passed with massive Democratic support (the only Senate Democrat to vote against it was former Klansman Robert Byrd of West Virginia) and was signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton.

But on Monday, when the Shaheen/Hassan-supported law’s mandate that “the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem” was finally put into effect,  Sen. Shaheen was silent. Sen. Hassan said nothing–despite repeated requests for comment.  The top Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York, released a subdued statement “applauding President Trump” for the embassy move. But from New Hampshire–nothing. Why?

It hasn’t always been “no comment” from the New Hampshire delegation. When President Trump announced his intentions regarding the US Embassy in December, Sen. Shaheen criticized the proposal, saying it was “harmful to both U.S. and Israeli interests” and “moves all parties further away from a peaceful solution.”

Is that still her position?  You’ll have to ask her–though you might get some insights from J Street as well. They are one of Sen. Shaheen’s top contributors, donating more than $112,000 since 2013.  And they’ve given more than $200,000 to Sen. Hassan as well.

J Street has been described as a “liberal fringe group” by some, and it certainly has a pro-Left, pro-Obama, anti-Netanyahu view of Middle East policy.  Unsurprisingly, they oppose the embassy’s move.

But what about Sens. Shaheen and Hassan?  Do they regret their support for the Jerusalem Embassy Act less than a year ago? Has something changed?

She says she’s not running.

He’s in the middle of a “pay-offs to porn stars” story that would kill any conventional politician.

And yet the (very) early tea leaves from the “First in the Nation” primary state already point to the match-up many pundits dream of:

President Donald Trump vs. Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2020.

Let’s take a moment to insert all the standard disclaimers: We haven’t even gotten to the midterms yet, two years is a political eternity, Sen. Warren could (theoretically) lose her re-election bid in November, President Trump could (less theoretically) be unable to seek re-election due to incarceration, etc.  The fact remains that the new poll from Suffolk University aligns with the emerging conventional wisdom:  Democrats want Liz Warren and the GOP is going to stick with Donald Trump.

In his analysis of the numbers. Suffolk University’s David Paleologos notes how Sen. Warren’s strength draws from virtually every other major Democratic candidate.

“When we first asked likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire who they would prefer—and we left Liz Warren’s name off the list— we got the expected results:  Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders well ahead of the pack of list seven possibilities:

Biden 30%

Sanders 25%

Booker 10%

Patrick 8%

Harris 6%

Gillibrand 3%

McAuliffe 2%

“Then we introduced Sen. Warren’s name to the mix,” Paleologos told NHJournal, “and she cleared the field:

Warren 26%

Biden 20%

Sanders 13%

Booker 8%

Harris 4%

Patrick 4%

Gillibrand 2%

McAuliffe 2%

According to Paleologos, what makes Liz Warren’s position so strong is that “looking at the cross tabs, what we see is that all of the candidates lose something to Elizabeth Warren. Most of the candidates lose about one in five core supporters between scenario one without Warren and scenario two. And [former Massachusetts governor) Deval Patrick and Bernie Sanders lose a very big share of their voters.”

If Warren were merely strong in New Hampshire because of geography, the implications would be as significant. Instead, her strength is ideological–she’s the first choice (by far) of the voters looking for a nominee on the left end of the Democrats’ spectrum.  Plus, the fact that a third of Biden voters would jump on her bandwagon shows she’s strong with more old-school Democrats as well.

“On the progressive side, it appears voters are saying ‘Sanders had his chance,'” Paleologos suggests. “Elizabeth Warren is a little bit younger, a woman who has been carrying the challenge to big business, big dollars in politics.  And you may have some Hillary Clinton supporters who, if given the choice, either gravitate to Biden or to Warren, but not to Sanders.”

And that’s how Sen. Warren wins the nomination: Progressive voters, a few establishment voters, and some Hillary voters still smarting from the Bernie vs. Hillary fallout.  What about President Trump?

Two months ago, a New Hampshire poll gave him a narrow six-point lead over Gov. John Kasich. In the new Suffolk poll, he’s crushing all comers:

Trump beats Kasich 68-23 percent;

Trump beats Sen Jeff Flake 72-15 percent;

Trump beats Sen. Marco Rubio 65-23 percent;

Trump beats Mitt Romney 63-28 percent.

Trump lost New Hampshire, though narrowly, to Hillary Clinton in 2016. It’s a state more known for it’s moderation than it’s bombast, where candidates with names like Bush, McCain and Romney tend to do well. For Trump to be dominating like this, Paleologos notes, is a sign that he’s in no real danger within his party.

Once again: It’s early, it’s politics and it’s Trump.  But if you are hoping for a Trump vs. Warren throwdown in 2020, we are well on our way.

Although Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million, she still lost the 2016 presidential election to Republican Donald Trump. A closer look into the votes cast reveals that one of the factors of Clinton’s loss could be attributed to her underperformance in rural areas. New research suggests that while she nearly matched Barack Obama’s 2012 performance in most urban areas, she failed to match the Democratic presidential nominees in the last five elections in the less populated areas of the country.

The research was released this week by the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire and was conducted by Dante Scala — associate professor of political science and a faculty fellow at the Carsey School — and Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey School and professor of sociology.

The researchers examined voting along a rural to urban continuum, rather than treating rural and urban as a polarity. They found significant variations in voting behavior among both urban and rural places that persist over the last five presidential elections.

“Yet, defining 2016 as the tale of two Americas — one urban, one rural — hinders a nuanced understanding of the country’s political geography,” the researchers stated. “Many political commentators mistakenly caricature rural America as a single entity, but our research … shows that complex variations in voting patterns persist among both urban and rural places.”

Several headlines after the election pushed the urban-rural divide that existed in the election. “How the Election Revealed the Divide Between City and Country,” read a piece by The Atlantic. The researches suggest that while the overall premise is true, it’s a lot more complicated than that because political pundits don’t often include suburban voters or towns adjacent to suburbs.

Clinton received 2.1 million fewer votes in rural America than Obama did four years earlier even though 531,000 more votes were cast there in 2016. Large urban counties are the base of the Democratic Party as well as their suburbs and the cores of smaller metropolitan areas. The outer edges of smaller urban areas and the vast rural regions tend to be Republican territory.

“Through the last five presidential elections voting patterns were consistent along a rural-urban continuum,” the researchers said. “Democrats did best at the urban end of the continuum and Republicans at the rural end. What is distinctly different in 2016 is that Hillary Clinton did far worse across the entire rural end of the continuum than any Democratic candidate in the previous four presidential elections.”

Image Credit: University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy

At one end of the continuum are the urban core counties of large metropolitan areas. This is where Democrats have received their greatest support in the last five presidential elections. Al Gore and John Kerry averaged slightly less than 60 percent of the vote in these areas in 2000 and 2004. Barack Obama boosted the Democrats’ urban vote share in 2008 and 2012, and Clinton maintained it in 2016. Also, the suburbs of these large metropolitan areas gave both Obama in 2012 and Clinton slightly less than a majority (49.6 and 47.8 percent, respectively).

Next on the continuum, the suburbs of smaller urban areas are more strongly Republican. It is at this point on the rural–urban continuum that the contrast between earlier elections and 2016 is evident. Here the gap between Democratic support in 2012 and 2016 widened, which ultimately led to Clinton’s loss.

At the rural end of the continuum, counties tend to be more Republican, but there is variation within these rural areas. Democrats consistently did worse in counties remote from urban areas, and in those without large towns of 10,000 to 50,000 people. This pattern continued in 2016, but there was a substantial decline in support for Clinton across all types of rural counties. For example, in 2012, Obama received 41.6 percent of the vote in rural counties adjacent to metropolitan areas that contained a large town and 38.9 percent in those that did not. Clinton received just 33.1 percent in these adjacent large town counties and 29.7 percent in other adjacent counties.

“Certainly, these rural vote totals are dwarfed by those in urban areas. But, from the suburban periphery of smaller urban areas to the most far-flung rural areas, Clinton’s inability to match the performance of any Democratic candidate since at least 2000 contributed to her defeat in crucial swing states such as Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” the researchers said. “Though many commentators argued that the faster population growth and growing diversity on the urban side of the rural-urban continuum would give Democrats a significant advantage in 2016, the election demonstrated that what happens at the rural end of the continuum remains important.”

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There’s a debate brewing in the mental health community — to diagnose President Donald Trump with a personality disorder or not — and it made an appearance in New Hampshire last month.

Elizabeth Lunbeck, a professor in residence at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science, who specializes in psychoanalysis, psychiatry and the psychotherapies, presented a psychological case study of  Trump as part of her speech, “Acting Human: The Psychopath and the Rest of Us,” on February 14 at the University of New Hampshire.

“There is value in trying to understand him,” Lunbeck said in her speech. “He’s not a policy guy, he’s all raw, unfiltered emotions.”

She guided the audience through a case study, using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to identify a variety of symptoms of potential personality disorders exhibited by Trump. For evidence, she used a collection of Trump’s tweets, speeches, and statements. Lunbeck said he falls into the categories of paranoid personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), which is the most common one Trump has been diagnosed with by several psychologists and psychiatrists.

“I think it is startling how much of this criteria fits our current president,” she said. “I suspect Trump mobilizes his own narcissism.”

Lunbeck, who also has training as a psychologist, isn’t alone in her thinking. Just take a look at these articles from The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, or on Twitter, where mental health experts weighed in. Yet, others have went a step further stating he doesn’t have the mental capacity to be president, sparking criticism within the health community on whether they should be making their opinions known without a proper medical diagnosis to determine if Trump has a personality disorder.

Thirty-five U.S. psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers sent a letter to the editor of The New York Times saying Trump was mentally unfit to be president.

“We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president,” they wrote.

The group of experts said they were breaking their own ethics rules to speak saying they “fear that too much is at stake to be silent any longer.”

Historically, psychiatrists stick to a self-imposed ethics standard known as the Goldwater rule, which appeared in the APA’s code of ethics in 1973. The rule actually stemmed from a political incident involving presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. In 1964, Fact magazine polled 12,356 psychiatrists on Goldwater’s mental fitness to be president, with 1,189 of the 2,417 who responded saying he was psychologically unfit for the White House. Some of the psychiatrists characterized Goldwater as “grandiose, obsessive, paranoid, or paranoid schizophrenic.” Goldwater later won a $75,000 libel lawsuit against the magazine.

Usually around the time of an election the APA has to remind psychiatrists to not make psychological diagnoses of the presidential candidates.

“The unique atmosphere of this election cycle may lead some to want to psychoanalyze the candidates,” said APA President Maria Oquendo in a letter published in August 2016. “But to do so would not only be unethical, it would be irresponsible. A patient who sees that might lose confidence in their doctor. And would likely feel stigmatized by language painting a candidate with a mental disorder (real or perceived) as ‘unfit’ or ‘unworthy’ to assume the presidency.”

It’s important to note that psychologists do not have the same ethics rule as psychiatrists, as exhibited by a Change.org petition started by psychologist John Gartner, which has nearly 30,000 signatures, and is calling for Trump to be removed from office because he is “mentally ill.”

In response to this debate, Allen Frances, a psychiatrist who helped write the DSM, wrote a separate letter to the Times denouncing the claim that Trump is mentally unfit for the presidency.

“Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder,” he said. “I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.”

John Mayer, professor of psychology with a focus on personality at UNH, said it’s time to get rid of the Goldwater rule because mental health professionals can offer diagnoses from a distance. He and his colleague researched the ethics of professional commentary on public figures. He points out that the press, without training, often makes those assessments for themselves.

“I do believe that it’s possible to diagnose from distances, with caveats, and watch them [public figures] over time even if we don’t know them personally,” he told NH Journal. “With public figures, they often intend to project an image of themselves, which can be quite different than who they really might be, so that makes it particularly challenging, though.”

Mayer said he supports free speech and health professionals have the right to discuss diagnoses and personality traits with people.

“Psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are among society’s assigned experts in human behavior and mental health,” he wrote in his journal article on the topic. “Judging others can be viewed as an obligation — involving a duty to educate and a duty to warn, in the case of dangerous figures.”

Frances supports the Goldwater rule and generally believes mental illnesses are over diagnosed, but he said he worries that when signers of the petition and others call Trump mentally ill, it stigmatizes people who actually suffer from those problems. It can also be a way to shut down a political discussion and distract from the more objective criticisms one could make about his time in office.

“Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy,” Frances wrote. “He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.”

Mayer agreed and said diagnosing Trump, or other public figures, isn’t without its biases. Even if the psychologist or psychiatrist don’t know it, their own political beliefs or ideas can cloud their professional work.

“With political public figures, we have to be careful and remember that there are many reasons we judge people that have little to do with personality and more to do with political loyalties or opinions,” he said. “With President Trump, we may overlook character flaws and if we are opposed, we may be very judgmental of what his personality is actually like.”

Mayer also defended the use of diagnosing Trump and other public figures as a case study for education, like what Lunbeck did with the UNH students in February. He even does a similar exercise in his own lab where students identify public figures and look at their “healthy” personalities.

Lunbeck stood by her depiction of Trump in an interview with NH Journal a couple weeks after her talk. She added, though, that looking at Trump’s rise isn’t going to be solved by just psychoanalyzing him.

“We need economic explanations, social explanations, legal explanations, et cetera,” she said. “I think looking at the psychology can be helpful, but I don’t think we have a full understanding yet. The question still is how this man, who displayed these narcissistic behaviors became president. It’s hard to explain that, and we need many tools to explain that.”

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It’s never too early to be thinking about the 2018 midterm elections. For the incumbent party in the White House, it usually means losing seats. However, Republicans are poised to retain control of the House and Senate, barring any major catastrophe, which would give Democrats the advantage.

In New Hampshire, it could mean tough races for Democratic incumbent Reps. Carol Shea-Porter and Annie Kuster, and their final campaign finance filings for the 2016 election cycle can provide clues on what to expect for their reelection campaigns.

Assuming they run again for their seats, Kuster and Shea-Porter enter the 2018 contests with a significant difference between them in their total cash on hand.

Shea-Porter only has approximately $3,800 in the bank as a result of a tough election against former Republican Rep. Frank Guinta and Independent candidate Shawn O’Connor. Out of the 435 representatives in the House, she has the fifth lowest cash on hand total.

Kuster, on the other hand, sits modestly with just over $1 million stashed away.

The median amount that lawmakers who won their races in 2016 have in the bank is about $367,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a nonpartisan research group tracking money and lobbying in elections. Specifically for House candidates, it’s about $361,000.

Of course, for party leaders they have the biggest war chests since they are expected to raise money to help their colleagues. House Speaker Paul Ryan had the highest cash on hand in the House with $9.1 million.

“The typical pattern is that campaigns that are in tough reelections or open seat battles will almost never have any money left,” said Caleb Burns, a partner at Wiley Rein LLP, to the CRP. “But conversely, the opposite is also true, where members of Congress have extraordinarily safe seats and don’t feel the pressure of having to raise a lot of money.”

That’s especially true for New Hampshire’s representatives. Kuster was assumed to have a relatively safe seat in the Granite State’s 2nd Congressional District, while Shea-Porter in the 1st Congressional District was always going to have a tough time ousting Guinta.

So what does this mean going into next year’s race?

Well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) included Shea-Porter and Kuster in their initial 36-member target list.

Kuster spent nearly $2.2 million against Republican challenger Jim Lawrence. He spent less than $100,000, and yet, Kuster only defeated Lawrence by 5 percent, 50-45 percent, respectively, with Libertarian John Babiarz receiving 5 percent. The NRCC figures that if they can recruit a decent candidate and put a little money into the race, they could have a chance at ousting Kuster.

For Shea-Porter, the 1st Congressional District is always a toss up, mostly because it’s been a Shea-Porter versus Guinta contest every two years since 2010. The NRCC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee usually throw a decent amount of funds toward the district’s candidates. It also helps the NRCC that Shea-Porter has been kicked out by voters before and she defeated Guinta in a crowded field. She won by a margin of 162,080 to 156,176, while independents O’Connor and Brendan Kelly and Libertarian Robert Lombardo garnered a total of 46,316 votes among them, possibly to the detriment of Guinta.

However, Republicans swept the 1st District in every other federal race. Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by about 6,000 votes, former Sen. Kelly Ayotte beat Sen. Maggie Hassan also by about 6,000 votes, and Gov. Chris Sununu defeated former Executive Councilor Colin Van Ostern by about 18,000 votes. With the right candidate, the NRCC believes they can flip the district again.

Any ideas on who’s going to run against Shea-Porter or Kuster?

As recently as Wednesday, one Republican has indicated that he’s “seriously” interested in challenging Shea-Porter in the 1st District.

John Burt, a four-term New Hampshire House member from Goffstown, told WMUR that he has spoken with conservatives throughout the state and region about running for Congress. He said he hopes to make a final decision in the coming weeks.

“I have no doubt that I can beat Carol Shea-Porter,” he said. “In 2018, it’s going to be another 2010-type sweep of Republicans heading to D.C. and also to the New Hampshire State House.”

Other Republicans being talked about as possible candidates include state Sen. Andy Sanborn from Bedford and former state commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services John Stephen, who is also a former gubernatorial and congressional candidate.

Don’t be surprised if Guinta makes another run for the seat he lost. Neither Shea-Porter nor Guinta ruled out running again in 2018 if they lost.

Earlier this month, the DCCC made Kuster the chair of its “Frontline” incumbent retention program, which gives special attention to vulnerable Democratic incumbents, so they must feel confident that she can win again in 2018.

However, former state Rep. Joe Sweeney of Salem previously told WMUR that he is “in the very early portion of exploring a run” for the 2nd District against Kuster.

“I firmly believe that Congresswoman Kuster does not adequately represent the district, and her performance and voting record presents a winnable path,” he said.

Senate President Chuck Morse could also be a potential candidate. The Salem senator is listed on the National Governors Association’s website as a former governor of New Hampshire. He served as acting governor for two days from January 3 to 5, when former Gov. Hassan resigned early to be sworn in as U.S. Senator. The New Hampshire Union Leader sees him as an option for Republican Party operatives still looking for a candidate.

Voters shouldn’t rule out seeing the two Republican frontrunners from the 2nd District GOP primary on the ballot either. Former House Majority Leader Jack Flanagan from Brookline indicated that he was hearing from supporters to run again in 2018. He lost the GOP primary to Lawrence by about 5,000 votes. Also, with Lawrence’s close finish to Kuster in the general election, he heard calls from supporters to consider yet another run. If he did, this would be his third congressional bid in six years.

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Pollsters were heavily criticized after the presidential election for completely missing the mark on their predictions. Across the country, they were scratching their heads, trying to figure out how they didn’t see Republican Donald Trump defeating Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton.

Even the University of New Hampshire Survey Center had to take a step back and figure out what went wrong for them. In their last Granite State Poll before the November election, they predicted an 11-point victory for Clinton. She actually won New Hampshire by four-tenths of a percentage point, 47.6 to 47.2 percent.

Their last survey also had Democrat Colin Van Ostern beating Republican Chris Sununu by 11 percent, 55 to 44 percent, for the governor’s office. Sununu beat Van Ostern by 2 percent.

For many political strategists in the state, these way-off predictions confirmed their suspicions that the UNH survey is a “bad poll.” Even WikiLeaks exposed that the Clinton campaign didn’t think much of them.

“As always, this poll doesn’t have a good history of accuracy so we need to take it with a grain of salt,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook wrote to Clinton about a recent UNH pre-primary poll May 5, 2015.

“The state of survey research is not static and there are a lot of technological changes and problems,” said UNH Survey Center director Andrew Smith. “We do an analysis after each election to look for biases that come into the surveys.”

Smith said he believes he found the reason why his numbers were so off during the election and he tweaked his methodology to reflect that in his most recent UNH poll released this week.

In his past polls, he would weight the sample based on age, sex, and region of the state, in addition to the number of adults and telephone lines within households.  Often pollsters will weight their samples to adjust for oversampling and undersampling of key demographics. For example, more women than men, and more older people than younger people, answer polls in the Granite State, Smith said.

Now, Smith added level of education into the mix.

“It’s a difficult variable to use and in the past it didn’t have that much political correlation when we used it, so it didn’t make a difference statistically,” he told NH Journal. “However, we saw that in this election, the percentage of people with a college education make a significant difference, and had we weighted it going into the election, we would have been dead accurate on all of the results.”

This election showed that Trump won the support of white, blue collar workers with some college education or less. He also over-performed in rural areas, while Clinton did better in more wealthy suburban areas.

Smith said he found that men with some college education, known as the Trump coalition, were not participating in the UNH surveys as much as they did when it came time to vote.

“It’s a new phenomena in New Hampshire politics,” he said. “Is it due to Trump? Probably, but it certainly made a difference in our polls. Hopefully, our methods are improved.”

The UNH Survey Center released four polls since February 10. The first one, released last Friday, was on Trump’s approval ratings in the Granite State, which found that residents are pretty divided on the president.

Forty-three percent of adults said they approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 48 percent are disapproving of his performance, and 8 percent are neutral, the poll found.

These numbers are close to the national trend. The Pew Research Center released Thursday the findings of its survey, which found 39 percent approve of his job performance, while 56 percent disapprove.

Looking at the different regions of the state, his approval rating also varies. This is where it will be interesting to keep an eye on the UNH Survey Center to see if their new weighting of education level has an impact on the data.

In the Central/Lakes, Connecticut Valley, and Manchester area, his approval ranges from 32 to 39 percent. Along the Massachusetts border, on the Seacoast, and in the North Country, his approval rating is more positive.

Credit: UNH Survey Center

“It’s not surprising anymore,” Smith said. “Democratic political strength in the central part of the state and Connecticut River Valley is still there and Republicans have been strong in Massachusetts border towns and somewhat strong in the Greater Manchester area, like in Bedford.”

Smith said he found the political dynamics of the North Country interesting because that area is becoming more Republican. For years, it used to be an area of Democratic strength due to blue collar support for Democrats with union support.

“The character and self-identification of the people in the North Country is different than the rest of the state,” he said. “They have not been doing well economically and the Democratic Party has been having difficulty holding onto these blue collar people.”

As exhibited by Trump’s win, many of these blue collar workers in New Hampshire, and in other states across the country, lent their support to the president.

“All we are seeing right now is a group of people who are quasi-Republicans, who might not have participated in politics before, or turned out greater in number, but we’ll have to see how that plays out in the next several years,” Smith said.

The other polls released this week showed that the drug crisis is still the number one issue for residents in the state, Gov. Sununu has similar approval ratings at the start of his term as his predecessors, and all of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation have positive approval ratings.

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Some local headlines of the Betsy DeVos confirmation hearing showed Sen. Maggie Hassan making her mark early in her first term.

“Hassan emerges as fierce critic of Trump’s Cabinet nominees,” reads an article from the Associated Press. Hassan’s questioning of President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education earned her 15 minutes in the national spotlight after she hammered DeVos on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and school vouchers.

But a look at Hassan’s record shows she has taken advantage of school choice, despite questioning DeVos about it.

Hassan sits on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) and voted against DeVos’s nomination on Tuesday in a committee vote. The freshman senator, whose son has cerebral palsy, is an expert on public education for students with disabilities. Her son, Ben, went to public high school.

But DeVos has received a significant amount of criticism from Senate Democrats and the media due to her lack of experience in the public school system and for being in favor of school choice and school vouchers. The National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are also against her nomination.

However, six of the 10 Senate Democrats on the HELP committee attended private or parochial schools, or have children and grandchildren attending them, according to information obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

Sens. Robert Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Michael Bennet of Colorado sit on the committee and have never attended public school, according to the investigation.

For Hassan, her husband Tom, served as the principal of the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, where their daughter, Margaret, attended, as well. Tom was censured last year for failing to disclose sexual misconduct charges against a faculty member.

Hassan received approximately $10,000 from the NEA during her Senate campaign and the union also spent $1.5 million against her opponent, incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte. AFT also spent $4,400 against Ayotte.

“It’s just bizarre to see people who have exercised those school options suggesting that it’s somehow problematic or malicious to extend those options to all families,” said Frederick Hess, executive editor of Education Next, to the Daily Caller.

Hassan’s record on school choice is also revealing. While she was a supporter of public charter schools as governor, she did veto a bill that would enable small school districts to pay tuition, at public or private schools, for students of any grade level if it is not available within their resident district.

On a recent interview with NPR, Hassan reiterated her support for charter schools, but she took issue with DeVos position of a voucher system.

“I am a proud supporter of public charter schools here in New Hampshire, as well,” she said. “But there is a real difference between public charter schools, which can be established working with local communities and educators to fill a particular need in the public school system and provide more alternatives and more choice for learning styles and families – than a voucher system, which diverts money from the public school system, generally and often doesn’t cover the full cost of the private school that the student is attending.”

During DeVos’s confirmation hearing, Hassan also questioned her on her role in her family’s foundation, the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation. While it’s being debated if DeVos was accurate with statements during the hearing about having a role or not, she is also being charged that she and her family have donated extensively to groups which promote the idea that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students must undergo “conversion therapy.”

The claim comes from Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., who cites their large donations to the Focus on the Family group as evidence. Politifact found his claim to be “Mostly False” saying they found indications that the group supports conversion therapy, but there was no evidence that they believe that LGBT students must undergo it.

A recent report by The New York Times, highlights another side of DeVos not seen in public. She has supported her gay friends and advocated for LGBT rights as far back as the 1990s. This shows her coming out in support significantly earlier than a lot of Democrats who are questioning her on these beliefs.

“At that time, two colleagues recalled, she made accommodations for a transgender woman to use the women’s restroom at a Michigan Republican Party call center,” the article states. She also used her political connections to help persuade other Michigan Republicans to sign a brief urging the Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage in 2015, though she did not sign it herself.”

“This aspect of Ms. DeVos’s personal story is not only at odds with the public image of her and her family as prominent financiers of conservative causes, but it also stands out in a nascent administration with a number of members who have a history of opposing gay rights,” the report continued.

Hassan has been a champion for LGBT rights in New Hampshire, dating back to her time in the state Legislature. In June 2016, she issued an executive order that banned discrimination in state government based on gender identity.  

However, her colleague, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, hasn’t always been supportive of LGBT rights. Shaheen has announced that she will vote “no” on DeVos’s nomination.

As governor, Shaheen initially opposed same-sex marriage. After Vermont signed into law a “civil union” bill in 2000, Shaheen said she didn’t support it.

“I believe that marital unions should exist between men and women,” she said at the time.

However, she came out in favor of marriage for same-sex couples in 2009 and became a sponsor of the Respect for Marriage Act in the U.S. Senate. She also voted in favor of the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military and supported government recognition of same-sex spouses of military members and other government personnel.

Although Hassan and Shaheen didn’t mention DeVos’s stance on LGBT student rights when they said they wouldn’t vote in favor of her nomination, it is interesting to note the differences in time of support between them of LGBT causes.

Shaheen agrees with Hassan, saying that DeVos is “unqualified” to be the next secretary of education. The full Senate is expected to vote on DeVos’s nomination on Thursday.