The year’s final primaries will be decided in Rhode Island, Delaware and here in the Granite State, where the stakes for November’s battles for control of the House and Senate are highest. For Republicans, the primary season finale is in line with how it has played out in many other states: with divisive infighting and a flurry of last-minute campaign spending from both parties designed to tilt the outcome. One missing factor: former President Donald Trump, who until Sunday had not endorsed in any of the three most-watched contests. His absence had left the candidates to make their own sales pitches to his supporters, blurring some of the ideological battle lines. While President Biden won New Hampshire by seven points, the competitive primary was influenced by the right, with Republicans calling out congressional leaders, restrictions imposed during the pandemic and vote counting in the 2020 election. The Republican primary for the US Senate is seen as a major factor in the larger battle for control of the upper house next year. The race features retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who said he “agreed with Trump’s assessment” of the election, referring to his false claims that he was the winner, and co-signed a letter raising questions about the vote. Bolduc has also advocated shutting down the Department of Education and questioned whether America should “get rid of” the FBI in the wake of last month’s Mar-a-Lago investigation. “I’ve taken the arrows from my fellow Republican candidates and I’m standing strong,” Bolduc told supporters at a town hall Saturday afternoon here. “When God made the Bolducs, he made oaks, not willows!” New Hampshire Senate President Chuck Morse (R) opposes Boldus. Morse is supported by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who called Boldus a “conspiracy theorist.” At a campaign stop in Rochester, Morse defended the integrity of the state’s 2020 election but did not oppose an effort by most House Republicans and some Senate Republicans to challenge Biden’s electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. “In these other states where we’ve been hearing things – that’s because people are going in and looking at it and doing things,” Morse said. “I’m not against the legislature doing that.” A University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll conducted late last month showed Bolduc leading Morse 43 percent to 22 percent in the Republican primary, with the other candidates in single digits. National Republicans tried and failed last year to get Sununu to run against Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan. after he refused, he urged the 61-year-old Morse to run, according to the two men. Last week, when Trump called Sununu about the race, the governor said he was making a pitch for Morse, and Morse met with Trump to discuss a possible endorsement. “I answered his questions and he told me what he thought,” Morse said in an interview after touring local businesses in Rochester. “He certainly has some strong opinions.” An outside group whose treasurer has past ties to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and the National Republican Senate Committee put $4.6 million behind ads to help Morse. That’s three times what Morse himself has been able to raise for his campaign, alarming Republicans, who have watched Hasan raise more than $30 million and hit the airwaves with early TV ads. The National Democrats, apparently betting on Bolduc that it would be easier for Hassan to win in November, have spent millions to boost Bolduc. Senate Majority PAC, a group aligned with Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (DN.Y.), has spent $3.2 million on ads calling Morse “another stingy politician” backed by the “establishment of Mitch McConnell in Washington.” “What a sign of weakness,” Sununu said of the Democratic meddling after greeting voters at a seafood festival over the weekend. “I think it’s unethical, frankly. I think it should be banned, somehow, from the political system.” Three weeks ago, according to the candidates’ final pre-primary campaign finance reports, Hassan had $7.4 million to spend. Morse had less than $600,000. The Senate Leadership Fund, the outside spending group aligned with McConnell’s leadership, has reserved $23 million in advertising spending for the general election. Public opinion polling, which had found Hassan running in a possible race against Sununu, found her ahead of either Morse or Bolduc, but below the 50 percent mark — often a danger sign for incumbents. On Saturday, after speaking to Democratic volunteers in Dover, Hasan declined to take a position on Democratic spending on Boldus. “I can’t control what outside groups do,” Hassan said before criticizing Morse as a threat to abortion rights if sent to Washington. Morse helped enact a more restrictive abortion law in New Hampshire, although the procedure remains legal, with restrictions, in the state. While Morse has vowed to finish building Trump’s “wall” on the US-Mexico border and has repeated Trump’s evidence-free claim that the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago property was a political attack, both his opponents and Democratic insiders have accused him of being a party loyalist who would undermine Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda by siding with Republicans like McConnell. “You’re a rubber stamp,” cryptocurrency investor Bruce Fenton told Morse in a summer discussion hosted by the NHJournal. “You would come down [to Washington] and vote as you are told to vote.” In the debates, other Republicans spent less time attacking Bolduc, who never stopped running after his 2020 Senate loss, than criticizing Morse on issues like the state’s 2020 Covid-19 restrictions. Sununu, who said he waited to endorse Morse until voters finally tuned in, called him the Republican with the best shot to defeat Hassan. But if Bolduc prevails on Tuesday, he is ready to support him. “Look, qualifiers are qualifiers,” Sununu said. “Go back to 2016 and everything that was said about Donald Trump. At the end of the day, it’s about what’s best for the country.” The September primary in New Hampshire has often caused headaches for the party out of power. While incumbents build their re-election campaigns, challengers have seven weeks to refill their war chests and reunite their voters. That was a source of Republican headaches in 2020, when Bolduc narrowly lost the party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate and refused to endorse the winner, accusing national Republicans, including the Trump campaign, “rigging” the race against him. It’s a crucial element of Democrats’ strategy this year, as Hassan and Reps. Chris Pappas and Annie Kuster face voters who have often punished the incumbent’s party in midterm elections. In the 1st Congressional District, which is represented by Pappas and includes the Atlantic Coast and conservative Boston ridings, Matt Mowers, 33, has been endorsed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as a “tough and a proven conservative.” A GOP operative and former aide to the Trump campaign that narrowly lost to Pappas in 2020, Mowers is backed by the main outside group aligned with the House GOP leadership, the Congressional Leadership Fund. That didn’t stop Mowers’ opponents from bashing him for his ties to Washington and for voting in the 2016 New Jersey state primary after voting in the 2016 New Hampshire primary. (Mowers had moved to New Hampshire as an operative for then-governor Chris Christie’s presidential campaign.) Karoline Leavitt, a 25-year-old former staffer for Rep. Elise Stefanik (RN.Y.) and the Trump White House press shop, has spent nearly $1.5 million and campaigned with conservative stars such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R- Tex. ), portraying Mowers as a DC “swamp” creature. “The establishment is so afraid that I’m going to hit their handpicked puppet,” Leavitt told voters at a Thursday rally with Cruz in Londonderry. Leavitt has run as a New Hampshire native who, despite her own endorsement from Stefanik, is not a D.C. Republican. He has repeated Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged for Biden. Mowers said there were “irregularities” in the count. In an interview, Mowers dismissed the criticism he has received. “They’re just using talking points,” he said. He added: “It’s a few days before the election – people who are down in the polls are going to say a lot of crazy things.” While Trump has not weighed in on the race, Mowers sent mailers to voters stressing that the former president has endorsed his 2020 run against Pappas. Polls have found Mowers leading, with Leavitt close behind, and other Republicans are hoping to capitalize on the turmoil. Another candidate, Gail Huff Brown, a former television news anchor and wife of Scott Brown, a former Massachusetts senator, has run ads pledging to support New Hampshire’s abortion law “and the choice it guarantees.” Democrats point out that the law added restrictions the state never had before, and they plan to target any Republican as a potential vote on the abortion ban. On Saturday, Pappas predicted that qualifying bruises would affect his eventual opponent. “Whoever the candidate is, they’re definitely going to be hit by this process,” Pappas said. In the 2nd District, which Kuster represents, a tight Republican primary is also being decided. Sununu has endorsed Keene Mayor George Hansel. As a Republican mayor of a city.
