It was a brutal week for New Hampshire Republicans, as popular GOP Governor Chris Sununu announced that he wouldn’t seek a fifth term.
The ‘Live Free or Die’ State doesn’t employ any term limits, and each term lasts just two years, so Sununu first won the office in 2016. Back then, his narrow victory (48.8% to 46.6%) likely owed a sizable debt to his family history. After all, his father was also a Governor of the state while his older brother became a Senator.
Yet over time, Chris Sununu built up his own reputation, as he withstood the 2018 Democratic wave and then put together massive majorities in 2020 and 2022. In fact, Sununu’s presence at the top of the ticket became so strong that the GOP won majorities in both houses of the state legislature in 2020 and held onto them.
Such cross-ballot strength is an anomaly, indeed of the 39 states were one party holds a full trifecta (the Governorship and both chambers of the state legislature), New Hampshire is the only state where the party with the trifecta isn’t the same party that won the state in the 2020 presidential election.
With Sununu now out of the race, the New Hampshire Governor contest is suddenly a toss-up and rivals North Carolina for the most competitive Governor’s race of the 2024 cycle. Furthermore, without the incumbent on the top of the ticket, Republican control of the State House (199 Republicans, 196 Democrats, 2 Independents and 3 vacancies) and State Senate (14 Republicans, 10 Democrats) will be in real jeopardy.
It appears that Sununu’s announcement also spurred Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig to jump into the Democratic primary, with the support of former Gov. John Lynch and neighboring Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts. She joins Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington, who was already in the race and enjoys the backing of former Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter.
Conversely, the Republican primary is now wide-open, with at least one high-profile official already jumping in to fill that void. Kelly Ayotte, a former U.S. Senator and New Hampshire Attorney General, was immediately publicly teasing her own entry into the gubernatorial race and then made it official on Monday.
Back in 2016, when Chris Sununu first narrowly won the Governorship – and Hillary Clinton kept New Hampshire blue by a razor-thin margin – Ayotte lost her Senate re-election race by just 1,017 votes to then-Governor Maggie Hassan.
Since then, she’s kept a close eye on a possible comeback, a prospect complicated by her less-than-stellar relationship with Donald Trump. After the Access Hollywood tape, Ayotte pledged not to vote for Trump that November, a stance the former President likely remembers. Therefore, another Senate bid was always going to be tough for her while Trump was still around.
A Gubernatorial campaign, however, would be a bit different. After all, Chris Sununu was (and continues to be) a vocal critic of Trump. In fact, Ayotte’s Trump-skeptical background may well help her as she seeks to beat a Democrat in this blue-leaning state.
First, though, she’d have to win a Republican primary; a feat Donald Trump is sure to make far from easy. Former State Senate President Chuck Morse is already in the race, while Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, 2022 Congressional nominee Robert Burns, 2022 Senate nominee Don Bolduc and former State Rep. Kevin Smith are all weighing campaigns of their own. Each of these potential contenders has their own unique relationship with Trump, although it’s unlikely he’d pick Ayotte over any of them.
As a result of all this, New Hampshire’s Gubernatorial contest is bound to become yet another exciting race in a 2024 election cycle already packed full of them.