New Hampshire Voters Ratify Preapproved Senate Choices

Voters ratified Washington’s preferred Senate menu Tuesday, decisively narrowing the field to two candidates already inspected by party leaders, major donors, national consultants and the federal government’s unofficial Department of Familiar Names. Former Republican Sen. John Sununu defeated former Sen. Scott Brown, while Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas dispatched challenger Karishma Manzur, producing a November contest for the seat of retiring Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. The race could help determine control of the Senate, allowing residents of America’s fourth-smallest state to enjoy several months in which every mailbox, television and unguarded patch of roadside is occupied by a super PAC.

Sununu enters the general election with a renewal agenda built around returning to Washington a man first elected to Congress in 1996. Pappas is offering a competing vision of change in which a four-term House member moves to a different chamber of the same building. Together, the candidates provide voters with the full ideological spectrum available under modern democracy: an established Democrat, an established Republican and no danger whatsoever of accidentally meeting a stranger. Party officials praised the outcome as proof that ordinary citizens remain free to choose between whichever options survived the donor calls, endorsement rituals and televised viability assessments conducted before voting began.

President Donald Trump endorsed Sununu despite Sununu having previously called him a loser, a disagreement Republicans resolved through their traditional reconciliation process of declaring the documented past both irrelevant and evidence of lifelong loyalty. “I’ve always liked John, a tremendous person, and when he called me a loser, that showed perfect loyalty, perfect judgment and total agreement with everything I have ever said,” Trump said. Pappas quickly tied Sununu to Trump, while Sununu prepared to present himself as both Trump’s handpicked candidate and an independent New Hampshire moderate who stores the endorsement behind glass for use during partisan emergencies. The arrangement leaves each campaign free to accuse the other of representing Washington while seeking a six-year lease there. New Hampshire has therefore completed democracy’s highest function by approving the candidates it was assigned.

* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.