Free Republic

The contrast between New Hampshire’s two candidates for U.S. Senate couldn’t have been clearer this past weekend. In one town, Senator Jeanne Shaheen spoke to the International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers over a pancake breakfast, and in another, former Senator Scott Brown received a rowdy and enthusiastic reception at a tailgate organized by College Republicans at the University of New Hampshire. It sounds like a normal weekend in October, so why the significance? I can’t help but marvel at the juxtaposition: a traditional, pre-planned campaign event with the candidate as the main attraction and the other, a tailgate loosely organized...

United States Senate For the third straight week, the US Senate race in New Hampshire is statistically a dead heat. According to Lesperance, “This week Republican Scott Brown leads Democrat Senator Jeanne Shaheen 48% to 46.9%. However, this is well within the 2.98% margin of error. So the Senate race is just too close to call.” 2.8% of respondents would prefer another candidate and 2.3% are unsure.

An affiliate of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s political advocacy group is putting nearly $1 million into New Hampshire to back Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D) in her reelection bid. The Council for American Job Growth is launching a 10-day television spot touting Shaheen’s support on veterans issue. The group has ties to FWD.us, which Zuckerberg founded to advocate for immigration reform and other issues important to the tech industry.

The battle for the House has turned into trench warfare, with Republicans trying to scrape out enough wins to give them a historic majority and Democrats doing everything they can to minimize GOP gains. If the election were held today, strategists from both sides say, Republicans would expand their current majority by between six and eight seats ... Republicans head into the final weeks of the campaign almost exclusively on offense. Of the 31 or so races seriously in contention, 22 — over 70 percent — are in districts held by Democrats. Twenty of the 31 districts were won by...

SEABROOK — A 13-year-old Seabrook boy has been hospitalized for roughly a week in Boston due to paralysis and other symptoms his doctors believe may be connected to enterovirus D68, severe cases of which have been reported across the country since August. Patrick Dugan said his son Dan was brought last week to an intensive care unit at Tufts Medical Center after Dan’s legs gave out multiple times following weeks of headaches, coughing, vomiting, weakness and double vision. Those symptoms were followed by paralysis in Dan’s lower extremities and left shoulder as well as indications of spinal cord nerve damage,...

While New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District went for Obama twice, State Rep. Marilinda Garcia is up 4 points–41/37 (with leaners)–in a new Granite State poll from the University of New Hampshire. Still, 19 percent are undecided so there’s room for both sides to maneuver and grow as the election heads into the final stretch. Needless to say, the Kuster camp fired off this fundraising email upon hearing the news: Last night we got the results of the latest poll in our race. It shows that our opponent’s puppet masters’ - the Koch brothers - attack ads are working. Their relentless...

Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) told Fox News Sunday that she worried President Barack Obama was only confronting ISIS to help Democrats in the upcoming midterms, and that he would ease up on the Sunni militants after the election. “I think we have a problem where the president’s foreign policy is being trapped by his campaign rhetoric,” Ayotte said. “I’m very fearful as we look at the current military strategy that it is surrounding the November elections, and he won’t have the resolve to follow through with what needs to be done in a sustained effort to destroy ISIS.”

Even in privileged circumstances — say, while studying at Dartmouth College — life as an undocumented immigrant can be frightening and uncertain . For Oscar Cornejo, a sophomore from Illinois, it began at age 5, when his mother arranged to bring his brother and him across the border from their home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. When asked what earned him his admission, he hesitated, not wanting to boast. He credited affirmative action and his early decision application, and ultimately, his personal statement, “which blended my migration story in a nostalgic tone to describe my love for botany (at that time!) in...

With one month until Election Day, Republicans' chances for retaking the Senate and picking up seats in the House are improving. The GOP has been buoyed by positive public polling, while red-state Democrats are still struggling to find distance from President Obama. There are bright spots and even some unexpected new targets on the map for both parties, but the overall national environment seems to have ticked a bit toward Republicans. The GOP needs to win a net of six seats to retake control of the Senate, and Republicans seem better-positioned to do so now than they did through much...

If the New Hampshire race is like others in some respects, it is unique in at least one. Brown, 55, moved to the state to run. The race is his third for the Senate in five years. Shaheen, 67, is a known political commodity in New Hampshire. She was elected, to this Senate seat, in 2008 when Obama won the state. "She's won in a wave and lost in a wave," says former Rep. Frank Guinta, a Republican. "I think she's as susceptible as anyone is." That view — that even a well-established politician can lose if enough voters sour...

Consistent: The topline results — Republicans are ahead. Inconsistent: The margins. NPR measures Obama’s job approval at (41/56) in states with contested Senate races, and an abysmal (29/67) among independents. But on the generic Senate ballot, the GOP leads by just three, fueled by a 16-point advantage among those aforementioned independents: In case you’re curious, NPR’s partisan sample is a reasonable, if slightly generous, D+4. Fox News’ pollster included two more states in their survey, but excluded Alaska. Results: Unless I’m missing something glaringly obvious (Fox’s poll sample is D+0, in line with 2010), I can’t quite wrap my...

Ok, I know what some of you are wondering: who’s Marilinda Garcia? Well, she’s a rising star in the Republican Party out of New Hampshire where she’s a state representative. She’s challenging Democratic Congresswoman Annie Kuster in the state’s second congressional district. Garcia has been traveling the district, visiting small businesses, schools, and just announced a town hall tour that will end the day before Election Day. Some prominent national Republicans have endorsed and fundraised on her behalf. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers raised at least $500,000 for her as well as other women running on the Republican ticket in this...

An A-10 Thunderbolt II banks after a strafing run on Aug. 21, 2014, during the Red Flag-Alaska 14-3 exercise at the Yukon Training Area, Alaska. Months after staving off a trip to the boneyard, the embattled A-10 Thunderbolt II is headed to the Middle East where it could be used to fight Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria. An Indiana Air National Guard unit that flies the Cold War-era gunships, known as Warthogs, is planning to deploy about 300 airmen and an unknown number of its aircraft to the U.S. Central Command region early next month, says a Sept. 17...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Thursday ripped U.S. Senate Democrats for blocking his bill that would revoke the U.S. citizenship of those who join the ISIS terrorist organization, noting that they are abandoning something Hillary Clinton supported when she was Secretary of State. The Democrats blocked Cruz’s bill on Thursday, a bill that would revoke citizenship from Americans who join ISIS. Cruz’s bill is very similar to one that then Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA)—who is now running in New Hampshire against Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)—and then Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) offered a couple of years ago.“As then-Secretary of State Hillary...

Cosmopolitan is “picking brains over brawn” in the 2014 Senate race in New Hampshire: the magazine is endorsing not Scott Brown, its 1982 “Sexiest Man in America,” but his competitor, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, the magazine said Tuesday. “While we wish we could support the man who once posed nude in our pages, his policy positions just aren’t as solid as his abs were in the ’80s,” Cosmo said of the Republican candidate, a onetime Senator from Massachusetts who has decamped to the Granite State.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is betting big that the Affordable Care Act will be a drag on Democrats in New Hampshire. The Chamber will begin airing a campaign ad Saturday highlighting Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s vote in favor of Obamacare. Shaheen, who is seeking a second term, is leading Republican challenger Scott Brown, the former Senator from Massachusetts, by about five points. Obamacare has largely been set aside by GOP candidates as a top talking point against Democrats, but polls show the law is largely unpopular. The most recent survey, conducted by CBS News and the New York Times,...

The New Hampshire Republican Party amended its platform this weekend with stricter abortion provisions, including support for "personhood," which defines life as beginning at conception.Personhood has become a hot-button issue in Senate races across the country this year, such as Colorado, where Democrats have successfully attacked Rep. Cory Gardner for having supported such a measure in the past.Now, the issue could spread to New Hampshire, following the state party's decision at its convention.The platform now states: "Support the pre-born child's fundamental right to life and personhood under the Fourteenth Amendment, and implement all Constitutional and legal protections."It added: "Support a...

Voters have soured on President Obama. National and statewide trends favor Republicans. And here in his new home state, Scott Brown’s truck is gaining speed. Analysts and recent polls have found Brown closing in on US Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic incumbent he is vying to unseat, in a race that has become increasingly nasty and expensive. Once largely dismissed by critics as an unlikely second act in a state he moved to only last year, Brown’s Senate bid is increasingly seen as a plausible path back to the US Capitol. Observers see a race that may be largely determined...

A new poll out by Vox Populi Polling has Republican Scott Brown leading Democrat Jeanne Shaheen 47 - 43 percent in their race for the U.S. Senate seat in New Hampshire. Republican Scott Brown 47 Democrat Jeanne Shaheen 43 Unsure 11 Vox Populi Polling was launched earlier this year and former Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Mary Cheney is a founding partners. A small group of top Washington Republicans is teaming up to launch a new polling firm, Vox Populi Polling, that will churn out volumes of survey data ahead of the 2014 midterm elections. Mary Cheney, the political strategist...

Throughout her political career, including during her current race against former GOP Sen. Scott Brown, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.) has touted her experience as a small business owner. Shaheen’s small business “experience” was co-running a store that once sold thousands of dollars-worth of stolen jewelry. “As the former owner and manager of a small retail business, Senator Shaheen knows what it’s like to worry about meeting payroll and inventory costs to keep a business going,” the Issues section of her Senate website declares. Her Senate biography also describes her as a “former small business owner.” This week, the Shaheen...