Republican Kelly Ayotte and Democrat Joyce Craig will face off this November in the race to succeed Gov. Chris Sununu. The Associated Press made the call in the Republican race moments after polls closed, as returns showed Ayotte with a close to 2-to-1 margin over her main opponent, former state Senate President Chuck Morse.
"New Hampshire is the best state to live, the best state to work, the best state to raise a family,” Ayotte told supporters Tuesday night. “And this election is about making sure New Hampshire remains that way, and we become even stronger as a state."
The Democratic primary was tighter, as Craig — the former mayor of Manchester — edged out Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington, with nearly 80% of the votes counted as of 10:52 p.m.
“This is a great moment, but it is only the start,” Craig told supporters inside of the Rex Theatre in Manchester Tuesday evening. “So tonight, we are going to celebrate and have fun, but tomorrow we are back at work, working hard to win in November.”
With Sununu deciding against seeking a fifth term in the corner office, this year has seen a rare open race for New Hampshire governor. And both primaries featured tense campaigns between the top candidates.
Morse’s turn toward Trump not enough to overcome Ayotte’s advantage
On the Republican side, both candidates came to the race with long political resumes: Morse as a longtime state senator, and Ayotte as a former U.S. senator and state attorney general. Both also brought deep roots in the party’s establishment wing. But the pair took very different paths on their route to Primary Day.
Morse’s rise through the ranks of Republican politics was founded on his local connections: as the owner of a garden center in Atkinson, a selectman in his hometown of Salem, and a member of the Legislature for two decades. Over that time, he built a reputation as a Granite State Republican of the old school, with a focus on fiscal conservatism and small government, and little attention to culture war issues. But in this primary campaign, Morse retooled himself as a full-throated advocate for former President Donald Trump, with a promise to take a hard line on border enforcement and against transgender rights, among other issues.
But it was clear from the start that Morse would face headwinds in the primary. For one, while he was a longtime powerbroker in the Senate, he lost in every previous campaign for higher office, including runs for Executive Council and, more recently, for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2022.
And in Ayotte, Morse faced a candidate who enjoyed broad name recognition, had a proven ability to raise significant sums of money from national donors, and seemed determined to ride the coattails of Sununu, the popular incumbent who endorsed her earlier this summer.
While Ayotte avoided many unscripted public events on the campaign trail, she worked to leverage appearances on conservative talk radio, where she hammered a boilerplate message.
“You know what one of my campaign themes is? It’s 'Don’t Mass it up,' " she said on The Howie Carr Show earlier this year.
Anti-Massachusetts sentiment is nothing new in New Hampshire Republican politics. But traditionally, the critiques focus on taxes and government overreach. Ayotte’s, however, has largely been on crime and immigration.
Ayotte also sought to neutralize what Morse hoped would be a major political liability for her: Her fraught personal history with Trump.
While Ayotte says she now supports Trump, she rescinded her endorsement of Trump in 2016 after a recording surfaced of him bragging about grabbing women without their consent. At the time, Ayotte said rejecting Trump for those comments was more important to her than winning any election. She soon narrowly lost her Senate seat to Maggie Hassan.
But Morse’s repeated efforts to tie himself to Trump and highlight Ayotte’s more mixed record of Trump support did not resonate with the vast majority of Republican primary voters.
In the largely Republican town of Weare, Ann Domainge said she voted for Ayotte based on her familiarity with her in her previous offices. She said she also likes that Ayotte is promising continuity with Sununu's policies.
"I've known Kelly Ayotte a little bit from the past so I feel that I’d like to give her a try," said Domainge, who works as an artist.
Ayotte had largely avoided the political spotlight since her 2016 Senate loss – aside from a stint assisting in the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. In the meantime, she made millions of dollars serving on corporate boards, including at News Corp, BAE Systems, and Blackstone, which owns hundreds of thousands of units of rental housing and is the nation’s largest landlord.
At Morse’s election night party, the event started off optimistic but took a somber turn right after 8 p.m., when the Associated Press declared Ayotte the victor. A tearful Morse soon addressed a roomful of supporters.
“I’ve never met a group of people so dedicated,” he said. “And I’ve been in a lot of races.”
“Chuck, we love you!” shouted a supporter as Morse struggled to get his words out.
Morse said he will attend the state Republican Party’s unity breakfast on Thursday and endorse Ayotte. He also said that this would be his final run for elected office.
Speaking at Ayotte’s election night party in Manchester Tuesday, state Rep. Ross Berry predicted unity behind Ayotte in the coming weeks.
“You’re going to see one cohesive unit coming out of this from Republicans,” Berry said.
Democratic race turns on opioid records, Manchester’s trends
The Democratic primary featured two candidates well-known to party regulars. Craig and Warmington both entered the race as proven fundraisers who are very much within their party’s ideological mainstream. But they brought very different resumes to a race Democrats hope they can win for the first time in a decade.
Warmington pointed to her two terms on the state’s Executive Council as evidence of her fight against what she’s called “Republican extremism” on issues ranging from COVID-19 policy and education, to abortion rights and contraception.
"I stood up for women to be free to make their own healthcare decisions,” Warmington said in her campaign announcement video.
Craig served three terms as the mayor of Manchester before running for governor, and pointed to what she described as the city’s economic growth on her watch as her key campaign argument.
Warmington and Craig both announced their candidacies more than a year ago – before Sununu announced his intent to retire. But it was in the race’s closing weeks that the tone took a decidedly bitter turn.
Craig attacked Warmington, a lawyer at a large Concord law firm, for her earlier lobbying work on behalf of Purdue Pharma, the makers of Oxycontin. The drug maker hired Warmington in 2002 to fight a proposal to make it harder for doctors to prescribe Oxycontin, which Warmington touted in a legislative hearing as a "miracle drug with few side effects."
Warmington dismissed the criticism as unfair, given that the work stretched back two decades. She, in turn, attacked Craig for holding a financial interest in her husband’s law firm, which had advertised its services defending drug traffickers, and said Manchester had been plagued by overdoses, a homelessness crisis and other woes under Craig’s leadership.
But many Democratic voters seemed unpersuaded by that line of critique. James Fiest cast his ballot for Craig at Manchester's Beech Street School, in the heart of the city. He said Craig took a different approach from the Republican-controlled Board of Aldermen, especially in her response to homelessness.
“When people were trying to shove homeless people somewhere else — anywhere else but here — she was there trying to find a humane and decent solution,” Fiest said.
A quiet watch party hosted by Warmington’s campaign at Phenix Hall in Concord grew almost silent as those gathered trained their attention on the presidential debate and waited for results. Minutes after the race was called for Craig, Warmington took the stage to thank her supporters and endorse her former opponent.
“While Joyce and I had our disagreements during this campaign, we both love this state,” Warmington said. “And we both know we have to stop Kelly Ayotte from becoming our governor.”
