Of all the American political traditions we’ve lost in Trump times, one of them never got its moment of silence: “As New Hampshire goes, so goes the nation.”
That chestnut rested on New Hampshire’s status as host of the first presidential primary election. When I was growing up there, we earnestly believed our parents were a solid-gold prediction market. Whoever they picked would land on the national ticket. New Hampshire was the belle of the primary season ball then, and many rural kids got their first taste of politics when they spotted George W. Bush or Barack Obama campaigning in a local Grange hall.
But in 2024, the Democratic National Committee jilted New Hampshire and chose South Carolina to vote first in the presidential primary. Last month, the state was snubbed again. South Carolina will once again kick off the Democratic primaries in 2028.
But New Hampshire will be damned if Americans take it, so to speak, for granite. Fortunately this year’s Senate race is a nail-biter, and Republicans view the race as one of their pickup opportunities. Sure, the contest doesn’t have the earthquake vibes of Talarico-Paxton in Texas or El Sayed-Rogers in Michigan. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with a thick plot, suspense, and some good twists.
First off, the candidates. Odds are on Republican John E. Sununu and Democratic Representative Chris Pappas to win their respective primaries on September 8. They’ll then vie for the seat of three-term Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who announced her retirement in March. According to Polymarket, Sununu’s and Pappas’s chances of winning their primaries (against MAGA Scott Brown and DSA Karishma Manzur) are over 90 percent, though one recent poll showed Manzur, a biochemist and peace activist, gaining on Pappas.
If Sununu and Pappas indeed prevail, the race will make New Hampshire seem as though it’s decorously dodging the MAGA–Democratic Socialists of America blood feud and banishing ideologues right and left. But on the stump, the candidates mostly seem to be in denial about the Trump catastrophe and the global polycrisis. They’re less politically moderate than politically vague.
Sununu, a congressman in the late 1990s and early 2000s and a U.S. senator from 2003 to 2009, once poison-penned an op-ed called “Donald Trump Is a Loser.” But he also won Trump’s endorsement in this race. During a town hall, he boasted that his campaign is “important to President Trump’s agenda.”
Pappas, who since 2019 has held one of only two congressional seats in the small state, is a married gay man and true blue on standard Democratic issues, though he rarely mentions foreign policy. Maybe this is because he has taken a whopping sum—some $823,000—from pro-Israel groups. (Sununu, who has Palestinian heritage, has received only $19,500.)
And then there are the men’s odd personas.
Sununu comes off as dangerously low on luster. If you for a second miss the Republican deacons of the pre-MAGA days, Sununu will nip that in the bud. As he drones on about “Ron Paul” and “the Clinton impeachment,” you can almost see why MAGA thinks RINOs are such stiffs.
No wonder state Republicans, and Trump, were disappointed when Sununu’s brother Chris, a popular former New Hampshire governor, refused their invitation to run. (“He’s been very nice to me over the last year or so,” Trump said, wistfully, of Chris.) But they got hyped when a March survey by Emerson College showed this other Sununu, John E., statistically tied with Pappas. And it’s still extremely close. While Pappas has been up in most polls, a startling University of New Hampshire poll published Wednesday gave it to Sununu, 45 percent to 43 percent. (As of this writing, Polymarket still puts the Democrat’s chances of winning the seat at 86 percent.)
The Sununu name is well known, but, like “Cuomo” in New York, it also groans under baggage. The John E. Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, which was named for candidate Sununu’s famous governor father, has been embroiled for years in one of U.S. history’s largest juvenile-detention abuse scandals. A watchdog group claims that detained children at the Sununu facility were held for weeks in restrictive lockdown, where they were deprived of education and fresh air. In an incident caught on video, staff members broke a child’s bone while administering an illegal restraint.
Sununu also refuses to debate his primary opponent, Brown. Perhaps this is wise because Brown, as they say, mogs. He once posed nude for Cosmopolitan as “America’s Sexiest Man.” (Yes, this is the same Scott Brown who, 16 years ago, unexpectedly snatched a Massachusetts Senate seat out of the Democrats’ seemingly safe grasp—Ted Kennedy’s seat, no less!—depriving Barack Obama and the Democrats of their Senate supermajority.) Instead of confronting Brown, Sununu insists on attacking Graham Platner, the disgraced former Senate candidate in Maine, against whom no one is running.
Moreover, even as Canadian wildfires jaundiced the New Hampshire skies for much of July, Sununu announced on a podcast that he was running to promote more drilling, pipelines, and nuclear power in the state. He now regularly praises “Big Tech” and “innovation” as though New Hampshirites were clamoring for data centers on their village greens. (They aren’t.) When he complains about the mass surveillance of freedom-loving New Hampshirites, he doesn’t mention Palantir or Flock cameras. He waxes Abe Simpson, and snoozily lectures on the Patriot Act. Wasn’t that a quarter-century ago?
Finally, in Sununu’s 2024 masterwork, “Donald Trump Is a Loser,” the candidate called Trump’s political endorsements the kiss of death. He wrote, “His record is littered with losses all across America.” Now Sununu has been kissed. He’s not dead, but he does look a little woozy.
As a millennial, Pappas, who is 44 to Sununu’s 61, does not come off like a brain-fogged hotmail user. Pappas is committed to labor, women’s rights, and anti-corporate legislation. His Senate bid is endorsed by labor unions, Planned Parenthood, and Shaheen. If he wins, he’ll be the first openly gay man in the Senate.
He says the right things about affordability, as well as “confronting entrenched power and the status quo” and subjecting Trump to “checks and balances in Washington.” Early on, Pete Buttigieg joined Pappas on the campaign trail.
But Pappas is an oddball too. Though his patron Shaheen was outspoken on Israel—voting to ban weapons sales to Israel and denouncing Trump for backing out of the Iran deal—Pappas has, after years of taking pro-Israel money, gone quiet on the subject. This year, in a minor course correction, he voted “present” rather than take a position on the ban on aid to Israel. He has also condemned the “extreme policies of the Netanyahu government.”
This hemming and hawing has given Manzur, Pappas’s primary rival, an opening to stake out a robust pro-Palestine position, which is part of her allure to younger voters. “New Hampshire Democrats, you don’t have to go for AIPAC-funded, corporate shill [Chris] Pappas, who is now losing to the Republican candidate,” Wajahat Ali, the progressive journalist, posted to X, as he hosted Manzur on his news show.
In December, pro-Palestine protesters surrounded the Puritan Backroom, a beloved Manchester restaurant founded by the Pappas family as an ice cream shop in 1919. “Wake up or lose again!” read one sign. The demonstrators wanted Pappas to reject pro-Israel money. He has not. Pappas’s campaign literature now says tepidly that “Chris supports a two-state solution that provides full security for Israel and safety and self-determination for the Palestinian people.”
Foreign policy is not always top of mind for New Hampshirites, who tilt libertarian but not always isolationist. And in the age of ICE detention centers (which Pappas helped keep out of Merrimack in February), some libertarians are inclined to vote against MAGA.
That impulse might point to Pappas, who defends trans rights, for example, because “I’m from a state that cherishes liberty and freedom, [and I] want to make sure that the government is not interfering with how you live your life.” Those words, more than any other, are music to the ears of the Granite State. New Hampshire may give up its first primary but never, ever its awesomely incendiary slogan, “Live free or die.”
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