Debra Smith arrived at a recent candidates forum hating John E. Sununu, the Republican nominee for Senate in New Hampshire.
Here, she thought, was another career politician — a former congressman and one-term senator seeking to reclaim his seat nearly 20 years after he lost it, riding the coattails of his father and his brother, both former governors of the state.
A funny thing happened, though, as Mr. Sununu took questions about health care, housing and transportation policy from Chamber of Commerce types as they picked at caprese sandwiches. Ms. Smith found herself impressed as Mr. Sununu wove facts and experience into his answers, lifting the energy of the room.
“He’s very substantial,” she said.
But before Mr. Sununu left the function room at the Atlantic Grill in Rye, N.H., Ms. Smith, an independent voter, told him she still couldn’t vote for him.
“Because of Trump, I can’t,” she said. “I told him I can’t take the risk.”
Mr. Sununu, 62, has turned his comeback Senate campaign into a test of a tricky premise: that in 2026, it is possible to be both a Republican and independent of President Trump. Selling this idea is critical for any hope of success in a purple state that has never really warmed to the president. And as he trails Representative Chris Pappas, a Democrat, in the polls, he’s running out of time to convince the Debra Smiths of the world to buy it, particularly in a race that is considered critical to determining the balance of power in the Senate.
He is trying. He once wrote an opinion essay that carried the headline “Trump is a loser.” He has insisted in a television ad that he has never even met the president. He rattles off a laundry list of their policy differences to anyone who will listen. And, perhaps more than any other Republican running for Senate right now, he has asked voters to do something that strains the American political imagination: Consider what happens after Mr. Trump.
“In two years, the president will leave office,” he said on a debate stage last month. “And my question is, where do we go next?”
The unsaid part of his bet is that, deep down, voters want a political future that looks like the past.
A New Hampshire dynasty
New Hampshire Republicans have lost every race for the House and the Senate since the dawn of the Trump era, often by quite a lot, even as they have won office at the state level. But the party saw a ray of hope in the Sununu name, which is synonymous with the flinty, establishment Republicanism that used to be a lot more common in New England. Mr. Sununu’s father, John H. Sununu, served as governor for three two-year terms in the 1980s before serving as chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush.
National Republicans had tried unsuccessfully to convince Chris Sununu, Mr. Sununu’s charismatic younger brother and a former governor, to run for the Senate in 2022 against the incumbent Democrat, Maggie Hassan. By early 2025, they were seeking to lure John E. Sununu into the 2026 race. But when Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the longtime Democratic incumbent, announced she would retire, Chris Sununu coyly hinted he might run for the Senate after all. A person familiar with the recruiting efforts said that national Republicans checked in to gauge how serious he was — nobody wanted two Sununus on the ballot, after all — but Chris ultimately demurred.
Today, the campaign signs dotting the state’s landscape read, simply, “Sununu Senator,” without specifying which one is actually running. Democrats have conducted private polling to see if voters know which family member is on the ballot. They say confusion abounds.
One reporter’s text message meant for John E. Sununu recently made it, instead, to his father.
“You have reached the old ancient former Gov. of New Hampshire,” came the reply, which concluded, “not the young dynamic Sen.”
The current candidate says there is no confusion. “Voters absolutely know who I am,” he said.
Mr. Sununu first ran for Congress 30 years ago and held the seat currently occupied by Mr. Pappas for three terms. He won his Senate seat in 2002, in a strong year for Republicans in the wake of Sept. 11, and lost it to Ms. Shaheen in the wave that accompanied the election of Barack Obama in 2008. (He then pursued a lucrative career working at a lobbying firm and sitting on corporate boards.)
On the campaign trail, he tells war stories from another era. He can be trusted to stand up to Mr. Trump, he says, because he stood up to President George W. Bush, insisting that the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, include more protections for civil liberties. He can be trusted to be bipartisan, he says, because he cosponsored legislation with Hillary Clinton. He was the first Republican to call for the firing of Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general for Mr. Bush. (Mr. Gonzales resigned in 2007 after a standoff with congressional critics over the Justice Department’s handling of terrorism investigations and the firing of U.S. attorneys.)
“I think all of those things reinforce a reputation for independence and for directness and honesty,” he said in an interview.
And did his family name help?
“Sure,” he said, quickly changing the subject to how, in 2024, he endorsed former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina for president over Mr. Trump.
Endorsed by the president
In February, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Sununu, saying he would work “tirelessly to advance our America first agenda.”
It was a signal to the party to ignore Mr. Sununu’s primary opponent, another former Republican senator named Scott Brown. But it gave Mr. Pappas his biggest attack line: that, for all his claims of independence, Mr. Sununu is as beholden to Mr. Trump as anyone in a Republican Party that has shown total fealty to the president. Mr. Pappas has also depicted him as squishy on Mr. Trump, saying that Mr. Sununu’s opposition to the war in Iran, for instance, has bloomed only alongside its unpopularity.
Mr. Sununu has tried to keep his focus on his state.
“My focus has been on New Hampshire, on the economy, jobs, affordability, and that message has resonated, and that’s why this is a race that a year ago people didn’t think would be competitive,” Mr. Sununu said.
A New York Times/Siena University poll released in late September found Mr. Pappas with a five-point lead — a sign that Mr. Sununu is running significantly more competitively than the state’s last two Republican Senate nominees. One of them, Corky Messner, lost to Ms. Shaheen by nearly 16 percentage points in 2020; the other, Don Bolduc, lost to Senator Maggie Hassan by 9 points. (In a twist, Mr. Bolduc has endorsed Mr. Pappas.)
In that poll, Mr. Sununu’s favorability rating was slightly higher than Mr. Pappas’s, at 45 percent to 43 percent. And 48 percent of voters said Mr. Sununu would better handle issues related to the cost of living; 46 percent said that about Mr. Pappas.
But 60 percent of voters disapproved of Mr. Trump, and 54 percent said they wanted a candidate who would provide a check on him.
‘Existential threat’
As he spoke to the Seacoast Chamber Alliance late last month, Mr. Sununu seemed, at times, to be inhabiting a kind of Brigadoon where there was no President Trump.
He called for term limits in Congress, lamented the unbalanced state of the federal budget and eagerly parried questions about Social Security, going deep into the weeds.
Mr. Pappas had addressed the group first. When he finished, Jimmy Dykes, an independent voter from the coastal town of Hampton, asked why the congressman had not been more visible in that community. But Mr. Dykes said he was planning to vote for Mr. Pappas, anyway.
He associated Mr. Sununu with the wars that began during his tenure in Congress, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said he simply couldn’t trust him to deal with Mr. Trump, who he believes is an “existential threat.”
Mr. Dykes was, however, considering voting for Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican who has also stayed well away from Mr. Trump. She used to have the job Mr. Sununu wants but narrowly lost re-election to the Senate the night Mr. Trump was elected in 2016. Now, she appears to be cruising to re-election as governor — becoming one of her party’s bright spots in a difficult year.
Mr. Sununu, for his part, declined to say what he thought the Republican Party should look like after Mr. Trump is gone. But does he want to help shape it?
“Absolutely.”
Bayliss Wagner contributed reporting.
The post This Republican Wants Voters to Consider a Post-Trump World appeared first on New York Times.
