Tag: new hampshire

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R, New Hampshire) hires Ben Sparks as campaign manager.

Looks like a good hire.  Ben Sparks was campaign manager for now-Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska and communications manager for the Wisconsin GOP during Scott Walker’s 2012 recall election. Admittedly, he was also the comms guy for Wisconsin in Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid, but it’s always about what you’ve done lately.  Flipping a Senate seat always looks good on the resume; and Sen. Ayotte’s a good fit here. She’s an incumbent, not really vulnerable but also not yet a lock; and the Democrats are going to spend resources on toppling her no matter what happens. Nice to see that she’s not taking any chances.

Via

Elizabeth Warren getting ‘help’ from the PCCC in New Hampshire.

Help in scare quotes because… well, because it’s the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Those guys* are as about as ‘helpful’ as is a sudden outbreak of cholera.

A progressive activist group that is strongly supportive of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is reaching out to Democratic leaders and activists in New Hampshire this weekend.

Progressive Change Campaign Committee organizer Don Weigel emailed New Hampshire Democrats inviting them to coffee in Portsmouth on Saturday and in Manchester on Sunday. State Democrats received two emails from Weigel – – one Saturday and one Sunday.

Continue reading Elizabeth Warren getting ‘help’ from the PCCC in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire, Vermont: look, all those states look alike to Elizabeth Warren.

You really don’t expect Elizabeth Warren to care about New Hampshire, can you? The Senator can barely muster up enough energy to care about Massachusetts.  So it’s not really surprising to hear that the woman apparently can’t be bothered to remember which state Jeanne Shaheen pretends to be from: Continue reading New Hampshire, Vermont: look, all those states look alike to Elizabeth Warren.

So why isn’t the NRSC doing more in, say, New Hampshire’s Senate race? Or, indeed, anything?

I’m not exactly sure what the reasoning is, here.

  • It’s not because the race isn’t competitive.  It is – or, more accurately, it could be. Jeanne Sheehan is ahead of Scott Brown by 6.5 points in the current RCP average, sure.  But she’s also under 50% in the aggregate polling, which is the usual rule of thumb for an incumbent in trouble.  This is the sort of situation where throwing some advertisting cash into the mix could really come in handy.
  • Of course, it’s a little late for that now – back in May the Democrats blocked out about $1 million in ad buys for New Hampshire. I have been told that Senate Majority PAC has likewise put in $1.2 million.  The NRSC… has decided not to spend any money for the last month.
  • The problem here may simply be that there’s bad blood.  Now, this may be over something like Brown’s early (perhaps premature, in some people’s eyes) hard line on illegal immigration issues; or it may simply be that Scott Brown had some moderately harsh words to say about the NRSC’s operation back in 2011, and nobody ever forgets a slight in This Town*.
  • Either way, there doesn’t seem to be any last-minute money coming down the pipe. Which is… odd.

OK, let’s do cards-on-the-table.  On November 5th, the NRSC is going to go out and give itself a giant big pat on the back because, hey, they won the Senate! And they’re going to be exceedingly smug about it, because they’ll have in the process re-elected Mitch McConnell, and Thad Cochran, and – in my personal opinion, which I have not been shy about expressing – Pat Roberts.  And that’s fine; or, rather, that’s what will happen, so you might as well be prepared for it.

Continue reading So why isn’t the NRSC doing more in, say, New Hampshire’s Senate race? Or, indeed, anything?

Rep. Annie Kuster (D, New Hampshire-02) can’t find an actual Republican supporter?

Meet Robin Partello. And who is she?  Well, she was someone who was featured as a Republican offering praise for Annie Kuster in a recent campaign ad for New Hampshire’s Second District. Just one, small, teeny-tiny problem:

That sounded a bit odd, so I called myself to confirm that.  And it’s true: Ms. Partello is not actually currently a Republican*. Despite the fact that the camera zoomed in for a closeup so that they could dramatically show Ms. Partello saying “I’m a Republican.” Seriously, you have to ask yourself: why didn’t the Kuster campaign do this oppo first? …Because of course the VRWC is going to do this oppo. There is absolutely no reason why we wouldn’t do this oppo. It’s Oppo 101. You check the people who are telling a story, just in case there’s a problem with their story. Continue reading Rep. Annie Kuster (D, New Hampshire-02) can’t find an actual Republican supporter?

Potential scrum in New Hampshire-GOV race over possibly illegal campaign contributions.

Not the best news in the world for incumbent New Hampshire governor Democrat Maggie Hassan:

The state Attorney General’s Office says it will review a complaint received from the New Hampshire Republican Party Wednesday charging that a union strongly favoring the Northern Pass project made an illegal campaign contribution to Gov. Maggie Hassan’s campaign committee – and that the Hassan campaign illegally accepted it.

The NHGOP says the $25,000 contribution on June 12 from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers political action committee “dramatically exceeded” the state contribution limit. The Republicans also say the IBEW campaign spending report of June 18 is questionable because although it lists total receipts of $143,667, it does not list any itemized receipts.

The Northern Pass project is, for those wondering, a project to bring in Canadian electrical power via a big, honking set of power lines. The unions like the idea: environmentalists (and Maggie Hassan) do not. I have no opinion about the project itself (I never even heard of it until now), but it does look at least a little problematic that the unions are throwing so much money into Gov. Hassan’s campaign coffers. That’s one traditional way to buy influence, and everybody involved knows it.

Moe Lane

PS: Was it illegal? Honestly, based on the article: nobody actually knows, given that the legality hinges on any number of arcane and byzantine conditions happening in a certain time and order. You can tell, by the way, that nobody’s really sure by the way that Democrats avoided being rude about the GOP in their quotes; Democrats only do that when they’re not sure that the branch limb really will hold their weight.  Welcome to the wonderful world of campaign finance ‘reform:’ here’s your accordion.

Reuters can’t quite bear to say that Obamacare is a bear for New Hampshire Democrats.

This Reuters article is fascinating reading, not least because it’s a hoot. Executive summary: Barack Obama and the Democrats’ call to run on Obamacare will be tested in New Hampshire… where people hate it, and both the Senator and two Representatives up for re-election this year are currently in deep trouble over the law and things aren’t improving for any of them*.

Let me drill down on this, with ‘this’ being the reaction of local voter Derek Gagnon:

Gagnon’s distaste for the individual mandate dovetails with a principal line of conservative attacks nationally on the law.

Continue reading Reuters can’t quite bear to say that Obamacare is a bear for New Hampshire Democrats.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D, New Hampshire) is afraid that she’ll lose.

Ah, my droogies: let me show you the wickedness of the world.  Or at least the wickedness of Jeanne Shaheen’s reelection campaign.

  • It all started when this rather bizarre post went up on the Jeanne Shaheen website (don’t worry, safe link).  You look at that, and you think to yourself: That looks a lot like the framework of an ad – complete with stock photos! – that the Shaheen campaign would very much like a third-party group to grab and turn into an actual campaign commercial, only the campaign can’t actually say that.
  • And the reason why you would think that is because that’s what it is.  You see, candidates cannot coordinate with third party political Super-PACs, thanks to the amazingly bizarre and remarkably pointless regulatory regime that we like to call ‘campaign finance reform.’ But as that link shows, there’s nothing stopping campaigns from putting up public ‘Important Messages,’ and then looking surprised when a third-party group turns that message into a campaign ad. Continue reading Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D, New Hampshire) is afraid that she’ll lose.