An Unvarnished Chris Sununu
New Hampshire's GOP Governor candidly assesses the 2022 Midterm Election with Salena Zito
New Hampshire’s midterm elections were among the more interesting this year. GOP Gov. Chris Sununu, son and brother of famous Granite State name sakes (his father was a former Governor and White House Chief of Staff; his brother a one-term US Senator).
Heavily favored to win a fourth two-year term, he won by about 25 points. The rest of the state’s GOP ticket didn’t fare so well. US Senate nominee Don Bolduc - whom Democrats spent millions promoting in the GOP primary - and the state’s two GOP congressional candidates were defeated handily. All three federal races were believed to be competitive. Oops.
So, why did one of five Sununu voters vote Democratic for US Senate and almost as much for the US House?
My first thought was that Sununu was a poor party leader. After all, in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis lead a Republican ticket that swept the state at every level, even school board races. Then again, Sununu, the lone incumbent on the ticket, ran a very different campaign from his Trumpian counterparts, running on very local issues that cut across partisan lines - electricity prices.
He explains why, with other choice advice, in this excellent interview with journalist Salena Zito. My favorite quote, and an important one for other states to seriously consider:
“This early voting stuff, I think it's a disaster," added Sununu. "We have absentee voting in New Hampshire if you're sick or something, but we do not have early voting. We don't have vote-by-mail. Those systems are terrible. And the (Pennsylvania US Senator-elect John) Fetterman issue is a great example of that. I mean, you should never be voting before you've even really seen your candidates in a legitimate way."
NH Gov. Chris Sununu says Trump's announcement 'fell flat' and shares why he will never run for Senate
by Salena Zito, National Political Reporter |
November 23, 2022 01:37
Two weeks after comfortably winning his fourth two-year term as governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu opened up about the current state of the Republican Party, its current leadership, and whether he’d ever run for the U.S. Senate or even seek his party’s nomination for president.
But first, he wanted to talk about his success, a success he attributes to focusing on the issues, the people, and staying drama-free. “I tried to keep it as uneventful as possible," he said, "but I guess the Senate race was pretty eventful.” Sununu handily defeated Democratic challenger state Sen. Tom Sherman to return to manage the state of under 2 million.
The governor is the son of former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu and brother of seven siblings, including former Sen. John E. Sununu. An MIT graduate, he is an engineer by trade, a married father of three, and an avid outdoorsman and sportsman who completed a five-month through-hike of the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia 24 years ago.
Despite all of the money poured into the Senate race in the Granite State, and despite late polling showing the race tightening between Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan and retired general and Trump-endorsee Don Bolduc, that race wasn't very close either. Hassan won easily in a race in which Bolduc attempted to distance himself from his earlier contention that the presidential race was stolen from Donald Trump in 2020.
(Photo courtesy of Sununu campaign)
“New Hampshire got their polls wrong, consistently wrong, worse than almost anywhere else,” Sununu said in frustration. “While inflation still was the No. 1 issue, no poll ever asked what the voters' frustration was with partisanship in government, and that turned out to be one of the most important things out there."
Sununu said he ran his reelection campaign on addressing and recognizing his constituents' deepest concerns. “The No. 1 issue you always heard about was inflation," he said. "In New England, it's really about electricity, electricity prices, lack of natural gas because all across New England, we're in real trouble when it comes to energy. The really dumb policies of many of the states around me have shut down power plants that we really need, and if we hit a cold snap, we're going to be in trouble. You combine that with Biden not producing enough fossil fuels and natural gas, and all the things we need to stay warm in the winter. That's a scare, especially if you're a lower-income family or fixed-income. That's very, very scary stuff, so that was the No. 1 issue.”
The office of governor is held for two-year terms in only two states — the other is Vermont. There are no term limits for the office; former Democratic Gov. John Lynch is the only other governor in the state’s history to win four terms in office.
As for why his party was far less successful than anyone had anticipated, Sununu was candid. “People just didn't have any faith that the Republicans running for the federal seats were going to be the ones to fix the policies like inflation concerns that were important to them because of some extremism and some partisanship,” he said. “To the Democrats' credit, they did a good job pre-defining our candidates very early on while they were still in primaries as crazy or extreme. And when you get pre-defined like that, before you even get a chance to truly introduce yourself to the more mainstream independent voters, you're now coming from a defensive position as opposed to, ‘Here I am, and this is what I'm about.’”
Sununu, in typical fashion, spent part of his election night at a bowling and ax-throwing venue in Portsmouth rather than the traditional hotel ballroom.
Sununu said he believes it is time for new leadership in the party, beginning at the Republican National Committee. “Did they achieve on the level of results that we all thought we were going to get?" he asked. "No. So, why would we stick with the same team assuming we're going to get a better result?”
Which led to Sununu’s blunt assessment of his party and issues he said that need to be addressed, including Trump’s decision to start teasing that he was going to run for president just before Election Day, when many voters were trying to assess whether to take a gamble on some of the people he hand-picked to run.
“The first question I have is, what moronic political consultants said, ‘Yeah, we're only a few days away from the general election, let's bring Trump in’?" he said. "Well, what are you possibly going to gain by that? There's nothing to be had; you're going after independent undecided voters. Those people have nothing to do with Trump, unless there was some bizarre poll that told me that there's a lot of Trump voters sitting on the sidelines, but that was not the case."
Also, according to the exit polling, Trump's negative ratings were even worse than Joe Biden's among those who voted.
Sununu pointed to the Pennsylvania races as an example of two candidates beholden to Trump — Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the U.S. Senate candidate. Both were flawed for different reasons, but they were ultimately done in by Trump’s decision to make it all about himself, leaving voters to wonder how beholden Oz would have to be to Trump.
“Pennsylvania was funky because you had that moronic Republican gubernatorial race — Mastriano — which was just a disaster from the beginning, and Oz, whose lack of residency really hurt him with rural voters who looked at him and said, 'We want one of us. You can't move here in 2020.' Maybe you can do that in New York, but you can't do it in Pennsylvania.”
He said that the candidates' poor quality was a direct result of Trump meddling in so many primary contests.
“I thought Fetterman's debate performance was just going to do him in," said Sununu. "I thought everybody did. But the Democrats did a masterful job of making that more of a sympathetic issue,” adding that banking hundreds of thousands of votes in early voting before the debate also helped the senator-elect.