The Senate Leadership Fund startlingly announced Friday that it was canceling the remaining $5.6 million it had booked in New Hampshire to help Republican Don Bolduc, a candidate the super PAC tried hard to prevent from getting nominated in the first place, against Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan. SLF’s move comes two weeks after the NRSC also pulled out of the state, which leaves the underfunded Bolduc to fend for himself.
Bolduc may have sensed what was about to happen because he released an internal at the start of the day from Fabrizio, Lee, and Associates that showed him trailing Hassan only 49-47, his closest showing in any released poll. But SLF didn’t even pretend that it was triaging this race because it felt good about where things were going, saying, “As the cycle comes to a close, we are shifting resources to where they can be most effective to achieve our ultimate goal: winning the majority.”
The NRSC was more optimistic, declaring that “our most recent polling has the race inside the margin of error.” However, the committee didn’t say anything about putting its money where its mouth is and returning to the airwaves in the Granite State. Bolduc better hope they change their mind because he’s been depending on outside groups to get his message out: According to the Wesleyan Media Project, GOP super PACs aired 85% of the party’s TV ads from Oct. 3-16. Hassan and her allies, though, still ran 59% of all the spots that ran during this period.
National Republicans were never happy at the prospect of having Bolduc, a Big Lie supporter who also dubbed GOP Gov. Chris Sununu a "Chinese communist sympathizer" with a family business that "supports terrorism,” as their standard bearer, and they took dramatic steps to stop him two weeks before the September primary. A new group called White Mountain PAC launched a $4.6 million ad campaign to promote another candidate, state Senate President Chuck Morse, and savage Bolduc as a surefire loser with "crazy ideas.”
It almost worked, but Bolduc hung on to beat Morse 37-36; a month later, campaign finance reports revealed that SLF was White Mountain PAC’s main funder. The GOP did the best with its nominee by spending heavily to attack Hassan, but Bolduc seemed determined to prove his critics were right about him in the first place. After briefly acknowledging after the primary that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, the Senate nominee went back to calling that contest “stolen” a week later.
Bolduc also made headlines when he dismissed Hassan’s attacks on his opposition to abortion with a “get over it,” a line that Democrats used in ads against him. Bolduc also got unwanted attention this month when he agreed when an undercover Democratic operative called the disposal of embryos for in vitro fertilization “a disgusting practice” and didn’t rule out a national ban. Most surveys still showed Bolduc with only a single-digit deficit, but SLF evidently believed things were far worse for Team Red and that it was done throwing good money after bad.
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