Gov. Chris Sununu has been teaming up with the Republican presidential candidates on the campaign trail in New Hampshire this autumn.
But the Granite State’s popular GOP governor won’t be joining Vivek Ramaswamy when the 38-year-old multi-millionaire biotech entrepreneur, culture wars crusader, and first-time candidate, returns to New Hampshire on Saturday.
Sununu’s closing in on making a decision for his much-coveted endorsement in the state that for a century has held the first primary in the Republican presidential nominating calendar. But don’t expect that endorsement to go to Ramaswamy.
“Ramaswamy hasn’t done anything. He has no understanding of how to work in the public sphere. He claims to have been a CEO, but he really couldn’t have been that good even at that,” Sununu said on Thursday evening as he spoke with reporters after teaming up with another of the candidates – former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie – at a town hall in Merrimack.
Christie was back in New Hampshire after facing off with Ramaswamy, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former United Nations ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, on the stage at the third Republican presidential nomination debate, in Miami, Florida.
Ramaswamy, who’s been spotlighting his “outsider” credentials since launching his campaign in February and who’s been one of the biggest surprises so far in the 2024 election cycle, once again dropped bombs on his rivals, including Haley, who has been rising in GOP primary polls for several months. His verbal fireworks with Haley got personal, as Ramaswamy spotlighted her daughter, and she fired back, calling him “scum.”
Sununu argued that “Haley showed amazing restraint, amazing leadership and poise, because I would have lost it altogether if someone talked about my kid like that.”
And Sununu called Ramaswamy’s overall debate performance “embarrassing.”
Hours earlier, in a Fox News guest appearance, Sununu said that Ramaswamy “looked a bit unhinged, unfocused,” on the debate stage. “He tried to, you know, take hits at Nikki Haley. It came off as just unprepared and rude.”
Sununu, a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, who remains the commanding front-runner in the GOP nomination race as he runs a third straight time for the White House, flirted for months with making his own presidential bid. But he announced in early June that he’d pass on launching a 2024 White House campaign. And this past summer he also announced that he’d forgo running next year for what would have been an unprecedented fifth two-year term steering New Hampshire.
Pushing back against Sununu, the Ramaswamy campaign said in a statement that “we wish Chris Sununu the best in figuring out his future endeavors, whatever they may be. Vivek is focused on reviving this country. If Sununu were going to do that himself, he would be doing that beyond commenting from the peanut gallery.”
Sununu’s teamed up on the campaign trail with North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who’s a longshot for the 2024 GOP nomination. But the governor, involved with Veterans Day activities, didn’t join Burgum as the North Dakota governor spent Friday on the New Hampshire campaign trail.
Last week Sununu joined Haley on the campaign trail, and the week before he spent an entire day with DeSantis.
He’s also joined Scott at campaign events in New Hampshire. But Scott is now focusing spending nearly all his time and resources on Iowa, whose caucuses lead off the Republican nominating calendar. Sununu also joined former Vice President Mike Pence on the New Hampshire campaign trail. But Pence, failing to gain traction, dropped out of the race late last month.
Sununu, updating his endorsement timetable, told reporters on Thursday that he’s likely to back a candidate after Thanksgiving. And he said it’s likely to come down to DeSantis, Haley, or Christie.
“Right now, those three candidates, I think for most folks in the Republican Party, have proved themselves to be the top choices,” to rival Trump, Sununu said.
New Hampshire Secretary of State Dave Scanlan next week will announce the date of the state’s 2024 presidential primary. Scanlan is scheduled to unveil the date of the primary at an event at the State House in Concord on Wednesday.
The general consensus is that Scanlan will announce that the primary will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 23. That would put the contest eight days after Iowa holds its presidential caucuses and would place the primary more than a week ahead of South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary, which is scheduled for Feb. 3.
A primary held on Jan. 23 will put New Hampshire out-of-compliance with the Democratic National Committee’s 2024 nomination calendar.
New Hampshire has held the first presidential primary in both major political parties’ nominating calendars for a century, and Iowa’s held the lead-off caucuses for the Democrats and Republicans for half a century.
But Democrats for years have knocked both Iowa and New Hampshire as unrepresentative of the party as a whole, for being largely white with few major urban areas. Nevada and South Carolina, which in recent cycles have voted third and fourth on the calendar, are much more diverse than either Iowa or New Hampshire. Nevada and South Carolina were added to the Democratic calendar nearly two decades ago to increase the diversity of the early states’ electorate.
While Republicans aren’t making major changes to their schedule, the DNC earlier this year overwhelmingly approved a calendar proposed by President Joe Biden to move South Carolina to the lead position. New Hampshire and Nevada were scheduled to hold primaries three days later, with Iowa entirely losing its early state position. The president and supporters of the new calendar argued that it would empower minority voters, whom Democrats have long relied on but have at times taken for granted.
But New Hampshire has a nearly half-century-old law that mandates that it hold the first presidential primary, a week ahead of any similar contest.
To comply with the DNC, New Hampshire would have needed to scrap its state law protecting its first-in-the-nation primary status and expand access to early voting. However, with Republicans in control of governor’s office and both houses of the state legislature, Democrats repeatedly argued that was a non-starter.
With the certainty that New Hampshire would move up the date of its primary and hold an unsanctioned contest, the president’s 2024 re-election campaign announced on Oct. 24 that Biden would not file to place his name on the primary ballot.
Aiming to prevent the president from suffering an electoral embarrassment in New Hampshire’s primary, a week later a large group of prominent state Democrats launched a ballot write-in effort on Biden’s behalf.
And an email from the group’s leaders highlighted that “more than 100 grassroots leaders and volunteers from across New Hampshire are launching ‘Write-In Biden,’ a statewide effort to encourage New Hampshire voters to commit to writing in Joe Biden during the 2024 NH Presidential Primary this winter.”
Biden faces uphill primary challenges from two Democrats. Three-term Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, one of the wealthiest members of Congress, formally announced his presidential bid as he filed at the State House on Oct. 26 to place his name on the state’s ballot. Also on the Granite State ballot is the other challenger, bestselling author and spiritual adviser Marianne Williamson, who is making her second straight White House run.
While the president, who turns 81 later this month, is the commanding frontrunner for re-nomination, polls indicate Biden faces mounting concerns from Democrats over his age. Those surveys also suggest that many Americans, including plenty of Democrats, don’t want the president to seek a second term in the White House.
And there are concerns among Granite Staters that the move by the president and the DNC to revamp the nominating calendar, and Biden’s absence from the primary ballot, could lead to an electoral embarrassment in the New Hampshire primary.