Democrats didn’t do so well at the state level in New Hampshire. At the tip of that spear was Republican incumbent Governor Chris Sununu. He beat his Democrat challenger, Dan Feltes, 66.2% to 33.7%. That’s a flogging, and it’s bad, but it’s actually must worse than that.
Related: ReopenNH Sends Voting Block to Concord to Restore Freedom
Feltes only won about two-dozen towns or wards in the entire state. Only Hanover (+3278) and Durham (+1312) – both college towns top-heavy with non-resident remote voting college kids – handed Feltes a victory of 1000 votes or more in any town statewide while failing to carry either Keene or Plymouth, also college towns.
His performance on Democrat towns was all downhill from there.
Dan won all three wards in Lebanon but only took the town by 941 votes.
Over in Portsmouth, which wants to be the East Coast Left Coast (without the poop map), Dirty Dan won three out of five wards but only took the city by 489 votes.
Concord? The State capital and home to our bureaucratic swamp? Feltes only won 4 out of 10 wards and lost the city by 1,273 votes.
He won liberal Peterborough, but it’s not a big place and only by 449 votes.
Back toward the Seacoast, we have Dover, the land of the militant leftist NH House Rep Sherry Frost (who won re-election easily) Feltes won two of the six wards and lost the city by 1803 votes.
Unless I missed one (always possible), Dan Feltes failed to win a single town or ward in Belknap, Carroll, Coos, and Sullivan Counties. In the other six counties where Dan won towns, the numbers were faint to sparse to barely worth mentioning.
In other words, Dan Feltes was a lousy candidate, with a lousy message, in a year when Democrats in New Hampshire kept a US Senate Seat, two US House Seats, and pushed Dementia Joe past Donald Trump.
But Dan shouldn’t feel too bad. Or maybe she should. Democrats at the state level blew their majorities across the board, and no one expected Sununu to lose. Dan the bad candidate might have made it worse.
It is not beneath Bernie-Bro Volinsky Voters (Andru Volinsky lost the Democrat primary to Feltes) to not vote or vote for the Republican in spite. Maybe Dan cost them their majorities?
Or, maybe Chris Sununu learned something from 2018 when he won and Republicans saw their legisaltive majorities, soft as they were, get flipped.
Republicans had a lot of grassroots support in 2020 (as always), but he does deserve some credit. He was invested in down-ticket races, messaging, and working as a party. And he had coattails at the ballot box this year and it got Republicans elected.
Democrats ran on pretending they wanted to lower taxes after trying so hard to raise them. A few even tried to tell voters Republicans raised their taxes. It’s not a stretch to suggest that even Democrats didn’t believe them.
Final Vote Totals: Sununu(R) 518,400 Feltes (F) 263,988 Darryl Perry (Lib) 11,328
Numbers are pulled from the secretary of States’ final results. Bad math or a missed town or ward is a possibility so let me know if you see anything that doesn’t add up.
