NH-SEN 2022 Megathread: General Dysfunction

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

This race is over Hassan and SUNUNU wins

[wbrocks67]

https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/status/1544714217114243072

[ProgressiveModerate]

Shaheen could lose, but this isn't the seat that Dems need to worry about in 2022. Still though a loss could curse their chances in 2026, especially if it's a favourable midterm.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Shaheen is going nowhere SUNUNU was losing to Shaheen in 2020 but was leading Hassan in 22, Shaheen like Warner and Casey and Tester and Brown are gonna serve until they hang it up since they all were elected in 2006, Shaheen was leading by 3 in 2o and Shaheen defeated his Brother John that's why Chris refused to run against her


Both Shaheen and Chris were leading by 3, Shaheen over Chris and Chris over Hassan by 3

Chris doesn't want to run against Shaheen the way she defeated his brother John in 2008

[Politician]

https://www.wmur.com/article/don-bolduc-fundraising-q2-2022/40560125

Don Bloduc posts bad fundraising numbers in the 2nd quarter.

[free my dawg]

lmao Republicans may very well have dodged a bullet here. I've been saying for months that Smith is the only candidate who has a chance of beating Hassan. If the conservatives coalesce around him he wins.

[MATTROSE94]

lmao Republicans may very well have dodged a bullet here. I've been saying for months that Smith is the only candidate who has a chance of beating Hassan. If the conservatives coalesce around him he wins.

Chuck Morse I think likely wins by around 1 or 2%. He is a MAGA guy overall, but has a lot of political experience in New Hampshire and an inspiring life story.

[free my dawg]

Well, that aged like milk:

https://twitter.com/SolomonPhoenix_/status/1545468536482439168

[free my dawg]

lmao Republicans may very well have dodged a bullet here. I've been saying for months that Smith is the only candidate who has a chance of beating Hassan. If the conservatives coalesce around him he wins.

Chuck Morse I think likely wins by around 1 or 2%. He is a MAGA guy overall, but has a lot of political experience in New Hampshire and an inspiring life story.

Morse is very, very swampy and more of an older-style Republican than anything. He's a MAGA guy in the same way that Sununu is, but doesn't have anywhere near the skills to set himself apart.

Unlike Smith and Bolduc he's on the record, as Senate President, passing an abortion ban. Maybe it won't kill Sununu's campaign but I think it could be enough to shift votes to Hassan.

[MATTROSE94]

lmao Republicans may very well have dodged a bullet here. I've been saying for months that Smith is the only candidate who has a chance of beating Hassan. If the conservatives coalesce around him he wins.

Chuck Morse I think likely wins by around 1 or 2%. He is a MAGA guy overall, but has a lot of political experience in New Hampshire and an inspiring life story.

Morse is very, very swampy and more of an older-style Republican than anything. He's a MAGA guy in the same way that Sununu is, but doesn't have anywhere near the skills to set himself apart.

Unlike Smith and Bolduc he's on the record, as Senate President, passing an abortion ban. Maybe it won't kill Sununu's campaign but I think it could be enough to shift votes to Hassan.

I think the midterm environment will be enough to push Chuck Morse over the top. Mitch McConnell and Rick Scott endorsed him as well, so he will be getting a lot of campaign dollars as well.

[Brother Jonathan]

lmao Republicans may very well have dodged a bullet here. I've been saying for months that Smith is the only candidate who has a chance of beating Hassan. If the conservatives coalesce around him he wins.

Chuck Morse I think likely wins by around 1 or 2%. He is a MAGA guy overall, but has a lot of political experience in New Hampshire and an inspiring life story.

Morse is very, very swampy and more of an older-style Republican than anything. He's a MAGA guy in the same way that Sununu is, but doesn't have anywhere near the skills to set himself apart.

Unlike Smith and Bolduc he's on the record, as Senate President, passing an abortion ban. Maybe it won't kill Sununu's campaign but I think it could be enough to shift votes to Hassan.

I think the midterm environment will be enough to push Chuck Morse over the top. Mitch McConnell and Rick Scott endorsed him as well, so he will be getting a lot of campaign dollars as well.

My general thought has been that Morse's fundraising, if he is the nominee, probably improves markedly over his primary fundraising which has so far been fairly lackluster. Plus then he will get a lot of outside support that is probably hanging back a bit right now and which won't be as active if Morse isn't the nominee.

[Utah Neolib]

Nuclear take: Even without Sununu, and with Morse, this could flip before Arizona.

[Brother Jonathan]

Nuclear take: Even without Sununu, and with Morse, this could flip before Arizona.

Maybe, but if so I'd say that would be thanks more to the strength of the Democrats, and Mark Kelly in particular, in Arizona and Hassan's relative weakness than to any particular strength on Morse's part. Still think Morse is probably a bit behind Hassan, but if (and it is a big if) Morse is the nominee he makes the race completive and will be able to actually get money which Bolduc probably won't.

I'd be interested to see more polling on the GOP primary, to see if Morse has made any inroads. He seems, from everything I've seen, to be doing well with the grassroots right. Conservative former state Rep JP Marzullo is a co-chair of the campaign in Hillsborough county and he has the endorsement of Ovide Lamontagne (which he is touting on his website). So I wouldn't count Morse out, and I wouldn't pigeonhole him as the rump "establishment" candidate, at least at this point.

[Cyrusman]

Nuclear take: Even without Sununu, and with Morse, this could flip before Arizona.

Maybe, but if so I'd say that would be thanks more to the strength of the Democrats, and Mark Kelly in particular, in Arizona and Hassan's relative weakness than to any particular strength on Morse's part. Still think Morse is probably a bit behind Hassan, but if (and it is a big if) Morse is the nominee he makes the race completive and will be able to actually get money which Bolduc probably won't.

I'd be interested to see more polling on the GOP primary, to see if Morse has made any inroads. He seems, from everything I've seen, to be doing well with the grassroots right. Conservative former state Rep JP Marzullo is a co-chair of the campaign in Hillsborough county and he has the endorsement of Ovide Lamontagne (which he is touting on his website). So I wouldn't count Morse out, and I wouldn't pigeonhole him as the rump "establishment" candidate, at least at this point.

What makes Mark Kelly a strong candidate and Hassan a weak one? Kelly has been a senator for 4 fewer years and just seems like a generic liberal who votes with Biden 90% of the time.

[Politician]

Nuclear take: Even without Sununu, and with Morse, this could flip before Arizona.

Maybe, but if so I'd say that would be thanks more to the strength of the Democrats, and Mark Kelly in particular, in Arizona and Hassan's relative weakness than to any particular strength on Morse's part. Still think Morse is probably a bit behind Hassan, but if (and it is a big if) Morse is the nominee he makes the race completive and will be able to actually get money which Bolduc probably won't.

I'd be interested to see more polling on the GOP primary, to see if Morse has made any inroads. He seems, from everything I've seen, to be doing well with the grassroots right. Conservative former state Rep JP Marzullo is a co-chair of the campaign in Hillsborough county and he has the endorsement of Ovide Lamontagne (which he is touting on his website). So I wouldn't count Morse out, and I wouldn't pigeonhole him as the rump "establishment" candidate, at least at this point.

What makes Mark Kelly a strong candidate and Hassan a weak one? Kelly has been a senator for 4 fewer years and just seems like a generic liberal who votes with Biden 90% of the time.

Kelly is an astroNUT who looks like a strong, independent voice in the US Senate (is a white male Democrat).

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

Well, that aged like milk:

https://twitter.com/SolomonPhoenix_/status/1545468536482439168

I mean it's a GOP Primary electorate. Then again the anti-women voters are probably already going for Bolduc.

[free my dawg]

What makes Mark Kelly a strong candidate and Hassan a weak one? Kelly has been a senator for 4 fewer years and just seems like a generic liberal who votes with Biden 90% of the time.

Kelly has a strong background as a Navy SEAL and astronaut. He's a moderate, but enough of a team player that he hasn't alienated progressives. Plus he can lean in on his background to beat back accusations of being a Pelosi/Schumer liberal.

Even someone like Chris Pappas has a strong geographic connection to the most populous area in the city. He owned and ran a popular restaurant in the area and his last name sort of crosses partisan boundaries there. It was a massive contrast to his main primary opponent in 2018 and Matt Mowers, who both moved to New Hampshire to run for Congress.

To be fair, Hassan's campaign hasn't been bad - just a bit cookie cutter. The Sawx vote probably isn't big enough to matter. Even if we had significant numbers, her vote against minimum wage reform was a year and a half ago. The NHDP doesn't have an adversarial relationship with its left wing, and she's only facing token primary opposition. Most of the people outraged at her vote against the administration have simply moved on to Manchin and Sinema.

Her actual campaign so far has been more of "muh bipartisanship" with talks about her trying to bring down gas prices with a gas tax holiday. It's a lot better than the radio silence from the GOP side, but it's really nothing special. Just the same focus-grouped, overanalyzed playbook you see from every Democratic politician. It works well here but I don't think it's good enough to carry her in a rough environment.

[wesmoorenerd]

"Hassan is a weak candidate" is the new "Jacky Rosen is a weak candidate." She's not the strongest incumbent in the world but she's probably a better candidate than literally any of her competition.

[free my dawg]

Yeah, for all my bitching about Dem strategy it works well on the federal level here. She's not a bad candidate - just nothing special.

As I said before, people like me don't really exist here and most progressives will be in her corner.

[Brother Jonathan]

I suppose I just tend to view Hassan as pretty much as close to a "generic Democrat" as you can get in most ways, she just doesn't really stand out. She's not weak or a bad candidate in absolute terms, just doesn't seem to have the sort of profile that say Shaheen has. Her campaign has been fine in any event, and this race is at the very least lean D no matter who the Republicans nominate.

[Brother Jonathan]

On the subject of the Republican primary, it's fair to say that Bolduc is clearly leading at this point, but I'm going personally somewhat skeptical of his actual chances. We've only had one poll, where Bolduc was clearly very strong (33%, far and away the leader), but that's less impressive when you consider the context. Bolduc ran for Senate in 2020, which of course gives him an advantage over everyone else in the field when it comes to name recognition and in that race, he got 42.3% of the vote. So that Bolduc is starting out strong is not really all that surprising. But I also don't think he has really done anything to build on that early advantage. He's been unable to raise money, he has not gotten the sorts of support from other figures in the state as he did in 2020 (the Wikipedia entry is wrong and I need to edit it, but even if some of those people are in Bolduc's camp some surely have either not committed or are even backing someone else), and he seems to be running a much more bare bones campaign than either Morse of Smith. I'm still willing to agree that by name recognition alone he may be leading, but his inability to run a really meaningful campaign is likely going to hamper him. As far as I can tell he does not have the money for ads and his only campaign events have been a series of town halls. It's also a much more crowded primary than in 2020, so Bolduc has to compete with some of the other more Trumpy right-wingers for votes, whereas I think the general assumption at the outset was that he would have them (and the Trump endorsement, which could still save him but which I doubt is coming) all to himself.

In brief, I essentially still see Bolduc as a very weak frontrunner by virtue of his strong carryover from 2020, but I don't think he has run a good campaign and I think this is more open than some NH politics watchers seem to think.

[free my dawg]

That's the vibe I'm getting too. His name recog and reasonably Offline campaign probably pushes him past Fenton but I definitely wouldn't be surprised to see him in 3rd.

[Brother Jonathan]

With the obvious caveat that Vermont is of course not super indicative of trends in NH, the Senate primary results in VT, and some other recent primaries, is probably a good sign for Bolduc. Basically, in VT we saw a well-funded candidate with deep support among the grandees of the state party state loose to a much Trumpier type of Republican (also, incidentally, with a military background). Generally it seems that candidates perceived as being Trump aligned are getting a boost without really investing anything or evening getting an outright endorsement, and I assume Bolduc benefits from that pattern. Morse of course is much less alienating to the Trump and more conservative wings than a lot of the candidates who have lost recently, but there is no doubt that Bolduc is still the preferred candidate amongst those voters.

[Nyvin]

With the obvious caveat that Vermont is of course not super indicative of trends in NH, the Senate primary results in VT, and some other recent primaries, is probably a good sign for Bolduc. Basically, in VT we saw a well-funded candidate with deep support among the grandees of the state party state loose to a much Trumpier type of Republican (also, incidentally, with a military background). Generally it seems that candidates perceived as being Trump aligned are getting a boost without really investing anything or evening getting an outright endorsement, and I assume Bolduc benefits from that pattern. Morse of course is much less alienating to the Trump and more conservative wings than a lot of the candidates who have lost recently, but there is no doubt that Bolduc is still the preferred candidate amongst those voters.

I am seeing way more Bolduc signs than any other candidate's.   Which is surprising since I'm in the southeast where I'd expect to see Morse have more support.

[Brother Jonathan]

With the obvious caveat that Vermont is of course not super indicative of trends in NH, the Senate primary results in VT, and some other recent primaries, is probably a good sign for Bolduc. Basically, in VT we saw a well-funded candidate with deep support among the grandees of the state party state loose to a much Trumpier type of Republican (also, incidentally, with a military background). Generally it seems that candidates perceived as being Trump aligned are getting a boost without really investing anything or evening getting an outright endorsement, and I assume Bolduc benefits from that pattern. Morse of course is much less alienating to the Trump and more conservative wings than a lot of the candidates who have lost recently, but there is no doubt that Bolduc is still the preferred candidate amongst those voters.

I am seeing way more Bolduc signs than any other candidate's.   Which is surprising since I'm in the southeast where I'd expect to see Morse have more support.

That's true as well, seemingly a lot of Bolduc support. I still feel like Bolduc is essentially coasting through this campaign, but it seems like it may actually be enough for him to just coast on his reputation and name recognition.

In my area I'd say it's roughly even, maybe a slight edge for Morse even, but I have seen a decent number of Bolduc signs.