Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire saw off a strong challenge from Republican Scott Brown to secure re-election to the US Senate, handing a consolation prize to Democrats as they lost control of the upper chamber.
Shaheen, 67, beat back Brown’s fierce campaign of attacks that tied her to President Barack Obama, which had left them neck and neck in opinion polls on the eve of the election.
With 85% of votes counted, Shaheen led Brown by 51.3% to 48.7%. The Republican called the incumbent to concede two hours after she had been declared the winner by the Associated Press and television networks, as the count remained close.
“I want to thank the people of New Hampshire for once again placing their trust in me,” she told supporters in Manchester. “I promise you I will continue to get up every day and work hard to put New Hampshire’s working families and small businesses first.”
The first American woman to be elected both a governor and US senator, Shaheen defended herself by painting Brown, who sat in the US Senate for Massachusetts from 2010 to 2012, as an opportunistic carpetbagger who was in hock to out-of-state billionaires. “Tonight the people chose to put New Hampshire first,” she said on Tuesday.
Aided by a hefty amount of external funding, Brown steadily eroded a 10-point polling lead that Shaheen held as recently as late August. His rise was fuelled by disenchantment with Obama, whose approval rating in the state stands at just 37%.
Backed by his wife and one of his daughters, Brown told supporters after calling Shaheen to concede the race that despite his own loss it had been “a good night for America”.
“We have better days, because the Senate has turned Republican, the House is Republican,” he said. “I’m hopeful that the president will come back and try to place our country’s interests first and be a uniter, not a divider.”
Brown repeated during the campaign that Shaheen had voted with Obama “more than 99% of the time”. Signs reading “Stand With Obama, Vote For Shaheen” – which were planted by the Brown campaign – dotted lawns beside roads in the state on Tuesday.
But the incumbent held firm, telling voters that Brown was “not for New Hampshire” and highlighting that he had moved over from Massachusetts only a year after being defeated there by Senator Elizabeth Warren in the 2012 elections.
Shaheen had polled strongly among women after sharply criticising Brown’s record of opposing measures to guarantee women equal pay and co-sponsoring legislation to allow employers to opt out on moral grounds of having to cover contraception in workers’ health insurance packages.
Departing from her prepared remarks, she won roars of approval from her supporters on Tuesday by pledging to continue fighting for pay equality for women and for their right to make their own healthcare decisions.
Shaheen said that her other priorities in her second term would be helping young people to refinance student loans, securing investment in new energy supplies and raising the federal minimum wage.
Shaheen, who serves in the Senate with the Republican Kelly Ayotte, had been a member of the country’s only all-female congressional delegation. However Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter, a Democrat, lost her campaign for re-election against Republican Frank Guinta, her predecessor.
Brown played on voter anxiety about threats such the Ebola virus, Islamic State terrorists in the Middle East and illegal immigration over the southern US border, sharply criticising Obama and his Senate allies as incompetent in dealing with all of them.
Maggie Hassan, New Hampshire’s first-term Democratic governor, also won her own re-election contest against Walt Havenstein, a Republican businessman. Her victory appeared to be another rare glimmer of hope for the party on a grim night for Democratic gubernatorial candidates.
