New Hampshire’s First Congressional District (CD1) has been represented by Democrat’s the last four years after Chris Pappas took the reins from Carol Shea-Porter in 2018, but it has been a true swing district having flipped back and forth every term in the prior decade. Preceding Shea-Porter’s initial win in 2006, the seat was continuously held by Republicans for over 20 years.
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So, there is no sort of “built-in advantage” for either side in the district.
In 2020 we had Matt Mowers as the challenger to incumbent Chris Pappas. Mowers came into the general election with a robust win in the primary and an endorsement from President Trump. An additional strength came from Pappas taking a setback from one of the debates where he was caught being deceptive regarding his relationship with a lobbyist, which when confronted with he instead chose to falsely accuse Mowers of somehow being homophobic for pointing out this conflict of interests. After the debate, Pappas admitted to the relationship and many voters took note.
If you were like me on election night, you noticed Mowers had a healthy lead all evening of around 10%. I was checking in with the New York Times “Needle” which was an indicator of which direction each race was going. I stopped paying attention to that race around 10pm and at that time Mowers was up by 13% and the NYTimes Needle forecast was indicating Mowers had it in the bag. Ultimately Mowers won 49 of the communities in the district with Pappas only securing 31 of them. But we all know now that after waking up the next morning the final results had flipped to Pappas ending up winning by 5%.
Some might be surprised if I told you that Mowers got the most votes of any candidate of either party in the history of the state, even better than the winner in the “Democratic Peak” of 2008. Well, except for Pappas in this current cycle, of course. We can see this in the graph above. The graph also shows us that Republican support is more stable in CD1 while Democrat support tends to be more volatile. So, the story goes from the data put into context with events surrounding the lead up to the election that Chris Pappas, who was off-balance after the debates was able to pull a significant overnight rally to overtake Mowers who had a sizable vote total lead all evening, a presidential endorsement, winning about 62% of the communities in the district, and having solid primary support which led to Mowers garnering historic vote totals.
But in the end Pappas still came out the victor, another seemingly miraculous result.
