NH-SEN 2022 Megathread: General Dysfunction

[TML]

https://twitter.com/NewHampJournal/status/1435631869962358784

Uhhhhh, not sure "send me to Washington so I don't have to work as hard" is a winning message to come out of the gate with.

This may sound worse than Bullock's 2020 campaign - at least Bullock specified a tangible purpose in his campaign (i.e. making Washington work more like his home state) once he changed his mind after previously refusing to run. Here, I suspect it may be easier to paint Sununu as lacking the desire to become a Senator than Bullock.

[TML]

It’s not that difficult, honestly. Any Republican candidate needs to keep losses among NH women to low double digits while winning over nearly all the persuadable male voters in order to just barely get over the top statewide — that, combined with record R base turnout, only gets you a narrow win in the NH of today. The type of male Republican most likely to accomplish this (especially against a D female incumbent) is reserved, "knows his place," doesn’t make any conspicuously gender-based appeals/categorically refuses to engage in identity politics tailored to a predominantly male audience, keeps his head down, and basically brands himself as a non-ideological, compassionate citizen who only reaches his most important decisions after listening to the counsel of his wive (and daughter). By contrast, people like Scott Brown, Donald Trump, Don Bolduc, Corky Messner, Paul Hodes, and other assertive, confrontational, male 'machismo' candidates who literally or metaphorically step into the female comfort zone/safe space and think they can set the tone inevitably end up getting rejected in a humiliating fashion by said D female candidates and the kind of female voter base that endorses/celebrates/actively contributes to this resounding rejection. We’ve seen this movie before and know how this story ends, and there’s not much reason to believe it will be any different with Bolduc (or Lewandowski, LOL). If the Republican goal in NH is "supercharged gender polarization", i.e., aiming for R margins among NH men that exceed the D margins among NH women, then good luck — there’s a good 43%-44% of NH men, many of them oppressed in a very one-sided relationship, many of them socially liberal, many of them single, who will gladly join the female-driven humiliation of the type of man they are not/cannot be (think of them as the Chris Pappases of NH). This really just boils down to simple psychology, and it has been observable in just about every NH race since 2006 — the Shaheen campaign knows how to exploit these anxieties better than anyone else, and Ayotte was one of the very few Republicans to benefit from them in 2010. Also, every time we think Republicans have finally 'bottomed out' among NH women, they keep sinking to new lows with this demographic. There was a poll last year which showed Shaheen leading Messner 70-26 among NH women even as Messner was (very narrowly) leading her among NH men, and that’s probably the future we’re headed for (not in 2022, but sooner than we’d like). The bottom line is that betting on NH men to somehow outvote NH women in a federal race involving candidates like Hassan or Bolduc is... bold.

My guess as to the realistic range of outcomes in this race, with the GOP best-case scenario on the left and the DEM best-case scenario on the right:

NH women (52-53%): 59-41 Hassan / 65-35 Hassan
NH men (47-48%): 56-44 Bolduc / 52-48 Bolduc

Olawakandi is right: Sununu was able to win in 2018 because he had a fairly large cushion in his race against Molly Kelly, which allowed him to withstand the inevitable losses among NH women in the final weeks/months of the campaign and the predictable consolidation of "undecided" NH women around Molly Kelly. I don’t think we’ll ever even be entertaining any "cushions" in the case of Bolduc, Messner, Lewandowski, etc.

Then how did Trump get so close to winning in 2016?

Exit polls from 2016 indicated that Trump won men in NH (48% of the NH electorate) 53-40, while Clinton won women in NH (52% of the electorate) 54-41 - essentially an even split. On the other hand, in 2020 Trump's margin among men (47% of the NH electorate) shrank to 52-47, while Biden increased the Democratic margin among women (53% of the NH electorate) to 58-40. Remember that Clinton was very unpopular in 2016 (which allowed Trump to do as well as he did) but Biden didn't suffer from the same degree of unpopularity that Clinton did.

[TML]

The Sununu name and his brother's coattails would carry him through the finish line.

Tell that to incumbent Senator Evan Bayh.