2014 New Hampshire Senate - Brown vs. Shaheen

Race Analysis

11/3/14 -- Brown seems to be coming back at the end, but Shaheen is right up against the vote share she'll need to win. This race probably comes down to which pollster has a better view of the electorate: New England College or UNH.

10/28/14 -- Shaheen is clinging stubbornly to a two-point lead, and Brown's momentum seems to have subsided. This is a tossup, but you have to like Shaheen's odds right now.

10/17/14 -- Brown continues to whittle away at the gap. This could go down to the wire.

10/7/14 -- Brown is gaining on Shaheen, but she remains close to 50 percent. It isn’t clear Brown will have enough time to completely close this gap.

9/23/14 -- CNN showed a tied race, but it looks to be an outlier (along with the New England College poll showing Shaheen up 11). Brown has likely picked up “soft” Republicans, and now the harder task of convincing Independents and soft Democrats to vote for him remains.

9/8/14 -- After remaining surprisingly quiet for much of the cycle, this race is finally showing some signs of life. The polls have tightened, but Shaheen maintains a lead in all of them, and has to be considered the favorite right now.

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For most of the late 20th century, New Hampshire’s politics were driven by an influx of citizens from Massachusetts. In the 1970s and ’80s, these voters were sympathetic to the taxpayer revolt and threw out both Democratic senators in favor of Republicans. In the 1990s and 2000s, these same voters, like many Northern suburbanites, began to rebel against the Southern-accented GOP’s conservative values on social issues, and the state elected mostly Democratic governors, while Republicans saw their margin in the Senate races shrink. In 2008 they lost one of their Senate seats, as a scion of a prominent New Hampshire Republican family was handily defeated by a former Democratic governor, Jeanne Shaheen.

But 2010 quickly reminded us that New Hampshire’s politics remain volatile. Attorney General Kelly Ayotte defeated Rep. Paul Hodes by over 20 points, while Republicans picked up both House seats. Republicans won their largest majorities in the state Senate since 1962 and the state House since 1900. In 2012, however, the state swung back, with Barack Obama carrying it by slightly more than the national average while Democrats recaptured both House seats and the state House of Representatives.

Republicans are hoping that New Hampshire will swing back in their direction again in 2014, allowing them to recapture the U.S. House seats as well as the Senate seat that Shaheen claimed in 2008. To that end, they have recruited former Sen. Scott Brown from Massachusetts, who lost to Elizabeth Warren in 2012. Brown is probably a better fit for the state ideologically than Shaheen (who isn’t a bad fit herself), but he bears the carpetbagger label and Shaheen is personally popular. Right now it looks like a wave election would be needed to drag Shaheen under, but that might be where we’re headed.