New Hampshire primary to set up key battleground state governor's race
New Hampshire voters will head to the polls Tuesday for a primary that will set up the matchup for one of just two governor’s races in presidential battleground states this year.
On the Republican side, former Sen. Kelly Ayotte has a substantial polling lead against former state Senate President Chuck Morse in the race to replace outgoing GOP Gov. Chris Sununu. As for the Democrats, former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig will face off against Cinde Warmington, a former health care lobbyist and a member of the state’s Executive Council, in what polls show is a relatively close race.
In addition to North Carolina, New Hampshire is the only other swing state to hold a race for governor this election cycle. Reproductive rights, housing costs and the opioid crisis have already emerged as the most prominent themes for the November general election, which the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter has rated as a “toss-up.”
Meanwhile, Cook has rated New Hampshire, a traditional presidential battleground, as “likely Democratic” in the race for the White House, cementing the decadeslong tendency of its voters to split their tickets. That is in part because nearly 40% of the state’s voters are registered independents.
As a result, national political trends — most prominently the ascendance of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and the prominence of reproductive rights as a turnout issue — may not hold the sway in the governor’s race that they do in other statewide races.
Ayotte prepares for November
Ayotte, who has largely stayed out of electoral politics since she lost her Senate re-election campaign in 2016 by just over 1,000 votes, has consistently led Morse by upward of 20 points in most polls of the GOP primary, allowing her to train her sights, in debates and in ads, on the general election.
Morse’s main attack line during throughout his campaign has been that Ayotte hasn’t been sufficiently loyal to former President Donald Trump. Ayotte pulled her endorsement of Trump after the “Access Hollywood” tape fiasco during the 2016 race. During the current cycle, she didn’t initially formally endorse him, saying instead that she would vote for the party’s nominee. After Trump became the presumptive nominee, she offered her endorsement.
But New Hampshire Republicans and Ayotte allies have painted her distance from Trump as a strength in a state that hasn’t voted Republican at the presidential level since 2000.
“The lasting impact of Chuck Morse’s campaign is that he’s made Kelly look like a mainstream, traditional, conventional Republican — sort of a lot like Chris Sununu,” said Dover City Council member Fergus Cullen, a former state GOP chairman.
“Which is to say the kind of Republican who wins elections in New Hampshire,” added Cullen, who is supporting Ayotte and has for years identified as a “Never Trumper.”
New Hampshire voters have shown a penchant for splitting their tickets in ways that favor Republican candidates for governor. For example, in 2016 and 2020, voters elected Sununu while also supporting Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. They also re-elected Sununu in 2018 and 2022, which were strong years for Democrats nationally. Sununu opted not to run for a fifth two-year term.
Republican strategists said keeping the GOP presidential nominee at an arm's length would help her carry the state’s large swath of Trump-averse independent voters.
“She’s being attacked in the primary right now for not being sufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. People are hearing that, and it’s true,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist who has worked on New Hampshire campaigns. “He is the leader of the Republican Party right now, but she’s shown that she’s willing to stand up to him.
“I think that helps people in New Hampshire realize that Kelly Ayotte is a New Hampshire Republican, not a straight party loyalist,” Williams said.
A person close to the Ayotte campaign said, “Kelly has been winning this primary since Day One and is putting in the work on the ground.”
“With such a short general election, she’s taking the fight to the Democrats on TV early,” the person added.
Meanwhile, Morse campaign manager Maya Harvey predicted that Morse would overperform Tuesday, saying, “None of the public polls that were conducted occurred when we started to really spend and inform voters of Kelly’s horrible record on Donald Trump.
“We are confident that the informed voters that turn out on Tuesday will break to Chuck and our campaign,” Harvey said.
A bruising primary for Democrats
Meanwhile, Warmington and Craig are locked in a nasty Democratic primary fight, with restaurant owner Jon Kiper also in the mix.
Craig and her allies have attacked Warmington over her past as a lobbyist for Purdue Pharma and the broader notion that the company pushed the highly addictive OxyContin — a particularly poignant message in New Hampshire, where the opioid crisis has ravaged several rural communities.
Warmington and her allies have attacked Craig over the problems Manchester experienced on her watch, most prominently crime and homelessness.
Each campaign has sought to paint its opponent as unelectable against Ayotte.
“The big issue for a lot of voters is who is going to beat Kelly Ayotte. Republicans have been saying for months how excited they are to run against Joyce Craig’s record in Manchester because they already used that playbook in last year’s Manchester mayoral election,” Warmington campaign manager Philip Stein said. “If Cinde is our nominee, the general election will be about Kelly Ayotte’s failed record, not Joyce Craig's.”
Craig campaign manager Craig Brown said Craig “is the only candidate building a sustainable campaign that is ready to flip the governor’s office,” adding, “We need a Democratic nominee that can beat Kelly Ayotte, and by every metric, that candidate is Joyce Craig.”
Many Republicans in the state say the primary has weakened both Democratic candidates, putting Ayotte in the driver’s seat heading into a rapid eight-week general election campaign.
“It’s been a pretty nasty race that’s going to leave a trail of critiques for the Republican nominee to pick up when it’s over,” said Williams, the Republican strategist.
Democrats turn focus to reproductive rights
New Hampshire Democrats have signaled that they plan to paint Ayotte as opposing abortion rights, an issue with widespread support in the state, according to polls.
In New Hampshire, abortion is banned after fetal viability, or around the 24th week of pregnancy. But reproductive rights advocates note that there is no explicit law on the books that makes it clear that abortion is legal until then — making it the only state in New England without statutory protections for abortion rights in state law or in the state constitution.
Ayotte has repeatedly said she supports the current reproductive rights laws. But Democrats and reproductive rights groups have attacked her for having voted in the Senate to defund Planned Parenthood and to ban abortion nationwide after 20 weeks.
They’ve also repeatedly nodded to Ayotte’s role as the “sherpa” — a term used to describe seasoned politicos who help usher Supreme Court nominees through the arduous confirmation process — for Neil Gorsuch after Trump nominated him to the court in 2017, saying it is evidence that she opposes abortion rights. Gorsuch was one of three Trump appointees who contributed to the court’s overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“The main thrust of the general election back-and-forth is going to be us saying you can’t trust Kelly Ayotte on abortion rights — and a whole litany of other issues, but abortion rights being front and center,” said a Democratic strategist familiar with the race, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
“There’s a lot of meat on the bone to the abortion attack on Ayotte,” the strategist added.
Democratic Governors Association spokesperson Izzi Levy said abortion is going to be the "key issue” in the general election.
“We’ve seen in the last few years that governors and state leadership sort of make or break it when it comes to protecting abortion rights,” Levy said.
Republicans, however, predict that the eventual Democratic nominee will have a tough time portraying the current law supported by Ayotte as a radical position that would make her especially vulnerable.
“New Hampshire achieved this compromise position that we adopted prior to the Dobbs decision, and since the Dobbs decision, we’ve made no move to change it,” said Jason Osborne, the Republican state House majority leader. “I think by now, the voters have figured that out, and they realize that Republicans have staked out a very reasonable position.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
