Gov. Kelly Ayotte had just made her way through a sea of supporters lining the halls of the State House and handed her declaration of candidacy to the Secretary of State, making her reelection campaign official.
The question came as she faced a gaggle of reporters: If President Donald Trump came to New Hampshire, would she stand with him?
Ayotte evaded it in a familiar fashion: “I’m standing with the people of New Hampshire, and I look forward to continuing to do that.”
Such comments are emblematic of her approach to the president. During her 16 months in the corner office, the governor has walked a narrow line and, for the most part, steered clear of all things Trump.
She’s a Republican seeking reelection in a swing state in a midterm year, when the political winds tend to favor the party that doesn’t occupy the White House. Democrats are expected to make gains across the country, and although Trump won’t be on the ballot, he still holds a grip on GOP politics.
Ayotte’s history with the president is a complicated one. She withdrew her endorsement of Trump in 2016 after learning of his comments about groping women. Eight years later, during her 2024 gubernatorial campaign, she called him the “right choice” for the White House.
Nowadays, Ayotte rarely praises or talks about the president. That’s a path not taken by many Republicans, but in contrast to some of her New England counterparts, her party alignment and deflection from national politics may keep New Hampshire out of federal crosshairs.
Her detractors, including her Democratic opponent Cinde Warmington, have criticized her for not doing more to publicly “stand up” to Trump.
“We need a governor who will actually stand up and fight for the people of our state, even when that means taking on somebody as powerful as Donald Trump, and Kelly Ayotte is afraid to do that,” Warmington said in an interview last month.
While answering questions from reporters recently, Ayotte told the Monitor her strategy for dealing with the White House depends on the situation.
“There are times when I publicly disagree with the administration. There are times when I have discussions directly with them, behind the scenes,” she said. “I look at every situation as, ‘What can I do best to advocate for the people of New Hampshire?’ We’ll take whatever approach fits the situation to get results for the people of New Hampshire.”
The governor’s office did not respond to an interview request for this story. In response to a public records request from the Monitor seeking communications among her staff regarding federal actions, Ayotte’s legal counsel said it would take 90 days to find and review those documents.
Staying away from public criticism of the president, especially for a Republican governor in the northeast, is “not a bad strategy,” said Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire. He recalled Ayotte’s 2016 U.S. Senate loss to Maggie Hassan after she jumped off the president’s bandwagon.
“I can’t help but think that, when she’s thinking about how to deal with Trump, that that’s in the back of her mind, that you don’t want to … get too far out there on a limb,” Scala said.
Behind the scenes
Ayotte, a former senator and New Hampshire attorney general, is running on a platform of public safety and building on what she calls the “New Hampshire advantage”: making the Granite State more attractive to families and businesses through low taxes, catering to workforce needs and improving quality of life.
At her filing ceremony, she touted a wide range of accomplishments: Among them were increased retirement benefits for law enforcement and a slate of loosened and expedited housing regulations aimed at increasing development, alongside funding she’s allocated for education and mental health. She said her vision for the next two years, if she gets them, is to maintain New Hampshire as a “beacon of freedom, hope and opportunity” — a core message she relays often.
One thing she rarely talks about, however, is national politics. Ayotte frequently abstains from opining on and almost never criticizes the president in the public eye, usually opting to address issues privately and acknowledge those maneuvers once the situation has been resolved.
Take, for example, the immigrant processing facility the Trump administration proposed in Merrimack. Some Republicans rejoiced; Democrats launched a campaign of outcry. Ayotte, blindsided when the plans were made public, never said whether she supported or opposed the project. Instead, she reiterated a need for communication from the federal government and involvement from local residents in decision-making.
“In my view, the local town of Merrimack should have an ability to know what is happening in their community, and they should be able to weigh in on what is happening in their community,” Ayotte said at a meeting in February, where state employees took the hit for not elevating the proposed ICE facility to the governor’s office.
It wasn’t until after a deal was made, following weeks of public contention and a meeting in Washington, D.C., with former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, that Ayotte released a statement saying she was “pleased to announce” that the Trump administration wouldn’t be moving forward with the facility.
“I thank Secretary Noem for hearing the concerns of the Town of Merrimack and for the continued cooperation between DHS and New Hampshire law enforcement to secure our northern border, keep dangerous criminals off our streets and ensure our communities are safe,” Ayotte said.
The ICE facility is one symbol of how Ayotte interacts with Trump: negotiating behind the scenes while staying on a New Hampshire-focused message, rarely speaking for or against the president’s decisions in public.
When asked by reporters last month about the war in Iran, for example, Ayotte said she was focused on supporting the New Hampshire national guardsmen who’d been called into action. Questions about the war, she said, should go to those in D.C.
Ayotte has spoken against a few of the president’s moves. Among those are tariffs on Canada, which she said risked threatening New Hampshire’s trade relationship with its northern neighbors. Many Canadians have boycotted the U.S. and American-made products, dealing a blow to New Hampshire’s summer tourism industry.
She also spoke out against cuts to federal programs that helped kids prepare for and navigate college applications, saying she reached out to Education Secretary Linda McMahon to strike a deal. Those grants were reinstated following a court order this winter, but the federal government is still moving to slash future funding opportunities, leaving the programs in a place of uncertainty.
‘Riding on the coattails’
States that have objected to Trump’s policies more forcefully are paying for it. After Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, clashed with the president over his executive order banning transgender girls from competing in school sports, the Trump administration pelted Maine with investigations and freezes in federal funding.
Ayotte and her attorney general, John Formella, have refrained from joining multistate lawsuits against the Trump administration, though Secretary of State David Scanlan is resisting the federal government’s attempts to access the state’s voter files.
Meanwhile, state government has worked behind the scenes with a coalition of states to mitigate the fallout of federal shakeups. Although New Hampshire never publicly joined the Northeast Public Health Collaborative, the state is actually deeply involved with the effort, as reported by the New Hampshire Bulletin.
Ayotte has also taken credit for some of the Trump administration’s broader reversals after the fact, like the release of billions of dollars in frozen federal education funds last year, $27 million of which were for New Hampshire.
The reversal came after 24 states, including the rest of New England, sued for the money. While New Hampshire’s Republican leaders were not among them, Ayotte said she’d met privately with McMahon multiple times. New Hampshire’s members of Congress also touted their advocacy.
Warmington has made it a cornerstone of her campaign to cast Ayotte as “afraid” and “incapable” of dealing with Trump.
“What we have is other governors who are courageous enough to stand up and fight for the people of their state, filing lawsuits, winning those lawsuits, and that benefits all of the states,” Warmington said. “She says that she is having these behind-the-scenes conversations, but I think what she’s really doing is riding on the coattails of other people who have the courage to actually do what needs to be done to fight for the people of their state.”
Ayotte’s senior adviser and campaign spokesperson, John Corbett, said in response that the governor “will always do what is in Granite Staters’ best interest” and shot back at Warmington for her past lobbying for the opioid industry.
Warmington’s strategy — trying to tie New Hampshire Republicans to Trump — has historically failed, said Scala, the political science professor. Democrats attempted it with former governor Chris Sununu as well, he added, but he thinks most New Hampshire voters won’t buy the message that Ayotte is “joined at the hip” with the president.
He thought back to the ICE facility that didn’t come to pass.
“She effectively took care of that problem in Merrimack,” Scala said. “That struck me as, ‘Boy, this could be a real problem,’ because that’s the connection to Trump right there that Democrats have always been looking for.”
