Republicans might have inflicted an even greater defeat on Democrats by seizing a US Senate seat in New Hampshire if their candidate had been someone other than Scott Brown, according to exit polling and experts on the state’s politics.
The re-election of Senator Jeanne Shaheen was one of the very few bright spots for President Barack Obama’s party on Tuesday as it lost control of the upper chamber of Congress, suffered further setbacks in the House of Representatives and was badly beaten in a series of gubernatorial contests.
Shaheen, already the first American woman to be elected a state governor and US senator, became the first Democrat to be re-elected to the Senate from New Hampshire since 1972 – a remarkable feat in a wave year for Republicans, and one from which Democrats elsewhere were desperately seeking lessons on Wednesday.
But her victory appears attributable as much to the flaws of Brown, a former US senator for neighbouring Massachusetts who moved to New Hampshire last year after being voted out in 2012, as to the winning campaign run by the wily 67-year-old incumbent.
Disgruntlement with Obama in the state is severe. His approval rating stood at just 37% in a University of New Hampshire poll this week. Voters taking part in the Senate race reported a series of complaints about the administration to NBC exit pollsters. The number of voters identifying themselves as conservatives exceeded liberals by five percentage points.
Like other Republicans around the US who did so to better effect, Brown, 55, relentlessly nationalised the contest by tying his opponent to the president, telling voters at every rally that she had “voted with Obama 99% of the time” and attacking the White House’s handling of the Ebola outbreak, Islamic State militants and the crisis at the southern border. Signs declaring “Stand With Obama, Vote For Shaheen” – which were planted by the Brown campaign – dotted lawns on Tuesday.
Yet after a campaign in which Shaheen painted him as an out-of-state opportunist who was “not for New Hampshire”, a majority of voters – 53% – told exit pollsters that they did not think Brown had “lived in New Hampshire long enough to represent the state effectively”. This is a disastrous characteristic for someone asking voters to entrust him with a prestigious six-year term.
“I feel like a lucky man to live in this great state and call it home,” Brown said in his concession speech. But when asked by a reporter earlier in the day whether he would be moving back to Massachusetts if he lost, he would only dismiss the question as “silly”. Shaheen opened her own speech with a barb. “Tonight the people chose to put New Hampshire first,” she said.
“The carpetbagger narrative hurt Brown,” said Andrew Smith, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire and the director of its survey centre. An alternative Republican candidate with identical politics to Brown who had lived in the Granite State for 10 years or more “could very well have won”, said Smith.
This problem, along with a distinct lack of a substantive policy agenda, fed an absence of the sort of rightwing enthusiasm that sent Kelly Ayotte, a Republican former state attorney general, to the Senate from New Hampshire with 60% of the vote four years ago. “Republicans did not come out in the way they did in 2010, and that really helped Shaheen,” said Smith.
By selecting someone who had already served in the Republican congressional class of 2010, the New Hampshire party also virtually ensured that their candidate would come with a record of opposing legislation guaranteeing equal pay for women and allowing employers to opt out on moral grounds of providing contraception in employees’ health insurance.
Shaheen hammered Brown, a truck-driving jockish type, for being part of the so-called war on women, to great effect. She beat him among women voters by 15 percentage points, according to NBC’s exit poll. While Brown enjoyed a similar advantage among men, women – as usual in the US – made up a greater share of the electorate.
At the same time Shaheen, a veteran political strategist, ran a far better campaign than many of her Democratic colleagues elsewhere. She struck a careful balance between not trumpeting her link to Obama’s record while not making embarrassing headlines by running away from it ridiculously like Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, for instance, who refused even to say whether she had voted for him.
“Jeanne Shaheen is not particularly charismatic and is not someone who generates passions,” said Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican party who wrote a master’s thesis on Shaheen’s rise to power. “But she is very cautious, makes very few mistakes and gives her opponents very few opportunities.”
Shaheen appeared on Wednesday to have finished with 51.6% of the vote, the same as her total in 2008 when she unseated the first-term Republican senator John Sununu, and a narrow advantage befitting a patient and risk-averse candidate.
While Brown struggled to energise the Republican base, which in New Hampshire often means blue-collar refugees from liberal Massachusetts more difficult to turn out than mansion-dwelling professional suburbanites, Shaheen worked hard on ensuring that solid Democrats made it to the polls.
As well as a formidable state party ground operation that she helped build, Shaheen had the benefit of New Hampshire Democrats skewing more towards highly educated, high-earning, white and middle-aged voters than the young, ethnically diverse working poor who were key to Obama’s wins but are notoriously difficult to turn out in midterms.
In addition to pulling in the star power of Hillary Clinton for an event on the final Sunday before polling day, Shaheen brought over allies such as senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin to rally her hardcore base. “These are not surrogates whose appeal are for centrist swing voters,” said Cullen, the former Republican state chairman.
While Brown is frequently hailed by Republicans as an accomplished retail politician, this appears to be strangely overstated. He was often at a loss for conversation when greeted by supporters at a series of campaign stops since the weekend. The contrast drawn by the arrival of Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, a glad-handing whirlwind, at a Brown event on Monday, was stark.
And instead of trying to match the truck-driving, guitar-playing Brown for folksy charm, Shaheen stuck to the details and seems to have come across as authentic. In a state where voters take their politics particularly seriously, she buried Brown in policy detail during televised debates. While Brown got stuck in a dispute with a debate questioner about which of them had made a gaffe about the state’s geography, Shaheen left it to Clinton to tell voters that she was a class apart.
“Jeanne doesn’t just know that Berlin is in the north country, she understands that veterans there need better access to healthcare,” Clinton told a rally in Nashua. “Jeanne doesn’t just know that Durham is in Strafford County, she understands that students there are graduating with one of the highest rates of debt in the country.”
Declaring that there were “too many showhorses” in Congress, Clinton summed up. “We don’t need another showhorse,” she said. “We need to send a workhorse to Washington.”
