It’s official.
U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan is running for re-election in 2022.
To the surprise of no one, the Democrat from Newfields and former two-term governor on Friday announced her bid to seek a second six-year term representing the Granite State in the Senate.
“It is an incredible honor to serve our state as senator, and I hope the people of New Hampshire will again put their trust in me in 2022,” Hassan tweeted after breaking the news in an interview with WMUR-TV.
The balance of power for the next Senate coming out of last month’s elections is 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats. This means Democrats must win both of Georgia’s twin runoff elections to make it a 50-50 Senate. If that occurs, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would be the tie-breaking vote, giving her party a razor-thin majority in the chamber.
Regardless of which party controls the Senate over the next two years, the majority will be razor thin – meaning New Hampshire’s 2022 Senate race could turn into one of the most fiercely fought and expensive contests in the country. And it could decide which party will control the chamber going forward.
More than $50 million was spent by the campaigns, the political parties and outside groups such as super PACs in Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s single-digit victory over GOP challenger and former senator Scott Brown in 2014, making it the most expensive election in New Hampshire’s history.
But that record was shattered just two years later, when roughly $130 million was dished out by all sides in Hassan’s edging out of Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte in 2016 by roughly 1,000 votes.
Only a fraction of that amount was spent this cycle in Shaheen’s trouncing of GOP challenger Bryant “Corky” Messner in an uncompetitive race.
But overall, the costs of competitive Senate races has skyrocketed, with a record-breaking $280 million spent in North Carolina’s battle this year between Republican Sen. Thom Tillis and Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham. And more than $300 million has been spent so far in just one month in Georgia’s twin runoff elections.
With such sticker shock, Hassan’s 2022 re-election will likely break Granite State records again.
Shripal Shah, Shaheen’s 2014 deputy campaign manager who currently serves as a vice president at the pro-Democratic group American Bridge, told the Monitor that “New Hampshire is going to be home to one of the biggest and most expensive Senate races on the map in 2022. There’s no doubt about it.”
Veteran GOP strategist Colin Reed, who managed Brown’s 2014 campaign, highlighted that “in politics and especially in New Hampshire, message and momentum always trumps money in terms of importance. However, to really drive a message and make it stick with New Hampshire voters, you’ve got to advertise in the Boston media market, which is so exorbitantly expensive, so it requires resources.”
Of course the final tab two years from now will depend on which Republican ends up challenging Hassan.
Retired Army Gen. Don Bolduc, who lost to Messner in September’s GOP Senate primary, has already filed paperwork to run in 2022. But the spotlight’s on Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who was just overwhelmingly re-elected to a third two-year term steering New Hampshire, and at Ayotte.
As she runs for re-election, Hassan could face the headwinds of political history.
President-elect Joe Biden is just six weeks away from being inaugurated, and the party that controls the White House traditionally loses seats in Congress in the first midterm of a presidency. Democrats in New Hampshire were crushed in the 2010 election, the first midterm under President Barack Obama. And Granite State Republicans were wiped out by the Democrats in 2018, two years into President Trump’s White House tenure.
Reed predicted that “even a nominal Republican challenger got just an instant leg up because Hassan will be carrying the baggage of the first two years of the Biden administration and recent political history in New Hampshire tells us that the state swings wildly in the midterms against the party in power.”
But Shah noted that the GOP has lost every federal race in New Hampshire (president, Senate, House) since 2016.
“At the federal level, New Hampshire Republicans have repeatedly fallen short in recent years. Considering Sen. Hassan’s strength, I’d be on the NHGOP’s losing streak to continue,” he predicted.