Ian Underwood

Boy, this is hard. We Republicans know that in many cases we must make "strategic voting decisions," and vote—as we have so many, many times in the past—for "the lessor two two evils." That is, we might have to vote for a questionable even outright bad Republican, over a statist, socialist Democrat. Such is the choice we face in the Senate race between Ayotte and Hodes. We must vote for Ayotte. She is questionable at this point, but the alternative is six years of tear-down-America votes in the U.S. Senate by Paul Hodes. Even worse, control of the Senate hangs in the balance.

However, this is not the case in New Hampshire’s Congressional District #2, where a past GOP congressman who was "part of the problem," is squared off against Ann Custer, a particularly statist Democrat who fully supports socialized medicine and the whole Reid/Pelosi/Obama plan for America. Kuster is a pro-abortion lawyer who opposes the so-called "Bush tax cuts for the wealthy," believes in global warming, and thinks that "government creates jobs." In other words, she is awful.

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What could be causing such a dramatic turnaround in New Hampshire, where all previous polls had shown Shaheen comfortably ahead? TPM Election central spells is out:

Sununu’s upsurge could be happening for any number of reasons – or this poll could just be an outlier – but there is one particular possibility: That the recent attacks from Jeanne’s husband Billy, against Barack Obama’s teenage drug use, might have taken a toll on her Senate campaign.

Sometimes candidates (or, in this case, spouses of candidates) will do really stupid things, and the campaign will change dramatically. This reminds me of the 2005 New York City mayor’s race, in which Ferrer started out with comfortable leads. The turning point in the campaign was when, in March of 2005, Ferrer made a colossal error involving comments over Amadou Diallo. He pissed off what should have been his general election base, and came across as a flip-flopping panderer. In one fell swoop, polls moved 20 points in favor of Bloomberg overnight and a seemingly certain victory turned into a crushing defeat.

I wonder if that is what we are seeing in New Hampshire now, too. Billy’s Shaheen’s attacks against Obama could be doing serious damage to his wife’s standing among New Hampshire Independents, among whom Obama leads. Even apart from hurting Shaheen in a key voting block, this is the sort of incident that could make her look like another crass politician by engaging in vicious, racially-tinted character attacks through a surrogate. That won’t help her among anyone.

I won’t be holding my breath for the Shaheen gang to change from this, their normal procedure anytime soon. Why would they veer off the trajectory that has kept them at the top of the Granite State’s Democratic heap for all these years now? Make no mistake about it, with the gutter politics of her partner/ spouse, and the attack dog instincts of her campaign manager, former NH Dem Party Chair Kathleen Sullivan, Jeanne Shaheen’s NH political machine has no rivals.

"But Doug– Billy said he was sorry. That he made a mistake, and all that. And he has paid the price. Surely they won’t make that mistake again!" Sure thing. It was all a misunderstanding, with absolutely no malice intended, right? Or just maybe, taking one for the team, he got exactly the result he was looking for all along. That’s what Tom Curry, writing at MSNBC seems to imply:

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