New Hampshire GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who's running neck-and-neck with her Democratic challenger Gov. Maggie Hassan, is in a Trump-sized bind. She can't fully embrace The Donald’s candidacy lest she turn off swing voters, but she also can't alienate his acolytes lest they mount a primary challenge.
Her antidote—trying to seem as reasonable as possible as she crisscrosses the state. Tarini Parti reports:
At the breakfast early on Wednesday morning, Ayotte name-dropped her Democratic colleague, Shaheen, four times in 45 minutes and emphasized her work on local issues — from fighting back new school lunch regulations to repealing the tax on the medical device industry, which has a growing presence in the state.
In those same remarks and later in the day at a town hall, Ayotte also reminded voters of her past experience in working with law enforcement as the state’s attorney general while addressing the drug epidemic in the state.
But try as she might, Ayotte is facing the same steady drumbeat of questions every other Republican candidate in state races is: voters want to know.
She inevitably gets asked about the presidential race. When questioned about the presidential primary at the Rotary Club breakfast Wednesday, Ayotte joked, “Can we start with the easy questions?”
Establishment Republicans are in the middle of having a national-scale meltdown over Trump because they know what his nomination will mean in the states.
“If Donald Trump is the nominee, Kelly Ayotte might as well resign because it’s all over,” said Fergus Cullen, former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, who tried to keep the businessman off the ballot in the state, arguing he wasn’t a Republican. “He’s hurting every Republican across the country by pushing away the exact constituencies we need to win.”
True. But hey, don’t give Trump all the credit. The GOP built that.