Democrats get opponent they wanted in New Hampshire Senate race
Quote:
Democrats appear to have gotten the Republican challengers they wanted on Tuesday in two competitive New Hampshire races, while the Republican winner of a third race was opposed by GOP super PACs.
Retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who falsely claims that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, is the apparent winner of a close Republican primary to face Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan. The Associated Press called the race shortly after noon on Wednesday, when Bolduc led chief rival Chuck Morse by less than 2 percentage points. Morse, the state Senate president who was endorsed last week by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, had said in a tweet thanking supporters earlier Wednesday that “we’ve come up short.”
Rhode Island Democrats also chose Seth Magaziner as their nominee for an open House seat on Tuesday.
In New Hampshire, 25-year-old former White House aide Karoline Leavitt won the Republican nomination in the 1st District to face Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas, and county treasurer Robert Burns won in the 2nd District to take on Democratic Rep. Ann McLane Kuster in November.
Democratic groups spent money in the campaign indirectly to boost Bolduc in the Senate race and Burns in the 2nd District. And in Leavitt’s case, a super PAC aligned with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy spent millions to boost one of her opponents, 2020 nominee Matt Mowers.
National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Rick Scott of Florida said in a statement shortly after 8 a.m. that the NRSC was “proud to stand with Don Bolduc.”
“Don ran a great race and earned the right to take on one of the most vulnerable members of the U.S. Senate, Maggie Hassan,” Scott said. “Inflation, a border crisis, rising crime and a sputtering economy is the direct result of Hassan and [President Joe] Biden’s failed leadership.”
Bolduc’s campaign was low on cash in the campaign’s final days, when Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, ran ads calling Morse a “sleazy politician” and tying his campaign to lobbyists. Likewise, a group called Democrats Serve spent $562,000 airing attacks on Burns. Both efforts had the effect of boosting the candidates’ conservative credentials to Republican primary voters.
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Donald C. Bolduc - WikipediaQuote:
In November 2021, Chris Sununu announced that he would seek reelection as governor and would not run for U.S. Senate; the announcement was viewed as a setback for the Republicans' hopes of winning Hassan's seat. After Sununu's announcement, Bolduc gave a conspiracy-filled interview on conservative talk radio in which he denounced Sununu, a fellow Republican, as a "Chinese Communist sympathizer" and claimed that Sununu's business "supports terrorism."
Bolduc has falsely claimed that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips.
NewsweekQuote:
While New Hampshire's senate race is considered competitive, Hassan is favored. An aggregate of recent polling from FiveThirtyEight showed Hassan with a 6.6-point lead over Bolduc. The most recent independent polling from Data for Progress from June 22 to July 8 shows Hassan with 49 percent support to Bolduc's 45 percent.
Remember in recent years Republicans often do better than polling suggests because conspiracy theory-minded voters tend not to answer stranger's questions. What I do is add 4 or 5 points to the Republican candidate polling result and subtract that from the Democrat. That would make this race a toss-up. That is not a sure-fire rule by any means but still frightening. As a Senator Bolduc is pretty much guaranteed to vote not to certify any electoral college vote the Democratic candidate wins, same with Burns if he is elected to the House of Representatives.
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