There were three main reasons Chris Sununu won reelection as Governor of New Hampshire in a landslide:
The first is COVID.
Nationally, Democrats used COVID as a political weapon. For example, there was the constant drumbeat of “COVID-out-of-control” and “Trump-in-denial” or “Trump-to-blame” from the FakeNews, designed to make the election about COVID not the thriving economy we were enjoying before the CCP exported COVID to the world. Additionally, Democrats pushed COVID-hysteria as an excuse to adopt mail-in voting (where everyone on the voting list – even if deceased or no longer living in the State was mailed a ballot) or relaxed absentee voting. Democrats used the new voting rules to commit massive fraud in Democrat-run big cities, and steal States such as Wisconsin and Michigan and possibly Pennsylvania and even Georgia.
Sununu, however, was just better at using COVID as a political weapon than the NH-Democrats. Remember locking down New Hampshire was not Sununu’s idea. It was the NH-Democrats’ idea and it was their pressure on Sununu that led to Sununu “coopting” the issue.
But for the NH-Democrats it turned out to be an instance of be careful what you wish for. Sununu’s “COVID briefings” … while total gaslighting … gave him tons of free publicity. And the NH-Democrats, in response, badly overplayed their hand. Their nothing-Sununu-did-was-ever-enough demands made Sununu’s extreme overreaction to COVID look reasonable and statesmanlike in comparison.
Also, the NH-Democrats’ lawsuit to prevent Sununu from unilaterally deciding how to spend all the federal COVID dollars showered on the State made them look petulant and unserious.
Reason number two: the NH-Democrats allowed Sununu to make the election about an income tax. I am talking about “Paid-Family-Medical-Leave”. If you are telling people people that taxing their incomes is not really an income tax … as the Feltes campaign was … you are telling voters that you think they are really dumb or that you are really dumb.
Additionally, Democrat voters want “free stuff.” They want to be told they can have free health care, free paid leave, free you-name-it … because “the rich” or “the big corporations” are going to be made to pay for it. That’s not how the politics of “Paid-Family-Medical-Leave” worked. Feltes and his fellow Democrats were not telling voters that they were going to give them eight-weeks of paid leave, paid for by “the rich” or by “the big corporations.” Instead, Sununu and the local Koch organization hoist Feltes with his own PFML petard.
The third reason is Feltes was a lousy candidate and ran a lousy campaign. Telling voters that Sununu was a Trump-clone and making that the centerpiece of your campaign was … in a word … STUPID. Sununu has essentially been a continuation of Lynch, Shaheen and Hassan. That is, he has moved the State incrementally, but steadily, to the Left. For example, it was under Sununu that all the Obamacare mandates were adopted as State-law and that New Hampshire joined the pending Obamacare lawsuit, not on the side of Trump, but against Trump. Sununu has been one of the most anti-Trump Republican Governors in the country. Voters knew this and trying to convince them otherwise made Feltes look desperate and dishonest.
