19, HELP OR HARM FROM ABOVE?
dynamics of a wave election,” Spiliotes said. Rather than Democrats being propped up by a swell of support for their nominee or united by a common enemy in the form of an unpopular incumbent, war or economic woes, Spiliotes said Republicans might be pulled out to sea by a riptide. Key to all of this is party unity. While divisions are clear at the national level, they’ve also played a part in New Hampshire. Republicans are not campaigning as a team. Some major GOP candidates like Ayotte and gubernatorial candidate Chris Sununu called on Republican Congressional District 1 Congressman Frank Guinta to resign last year over his campaign finance problems. Some candidates support Trump unapologetically while others hedge or don’t support him at all. Ayotte and Guinta, both incumbents, faced primary challengers, while their opponents ultimately did not. New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Raymond Buckley says GOP candidates are fighting like it’s every man for themselves. Meanwhile, he says Democratic candidates are running as a team from the top down. “The real big difference is we have a ticket that is united and working together,” he said. It’s also well funded compared to past elections. Buckley said thanks to an aggressive fundraising campaign that started last year, they had a stronger grassroots infrastructure. In 2012, they had about 110 to 120 field workers and about 18 offices. This year, they have about 150 field workers and 27 offices. And if you’ve seen a lot of mailers from the NHDP, Buckley said they’ve spent
17, THE MONEY GAME
campaign spending. “In general, it’s hard to enforce those sorts Campaign finance numbers Total outside spending Kelly Ayotte: $38,715,064 Maggie Hassan: $33,447,281 Top super PACs • Granite State Solutions Super PAC Conservative $18,657,191 • Senate Majority PAC Super PAC Liberal $11,369,239 • Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte PAC Liberal $7,614,170 • National Republican Senatorial Cmte PAC Conservative $6,807,167 Source: OpenSecrets.org
“a couple million” on that this year.
Down ticket
As recently as Oct. 6, Sen. Kelly Ayotte was running ahead of Trump, apparently not getting bogged down by the negative associations with the top of her party’s ticket, when a Suffolk University poll showed her leading Gov. Maggie Hassan in the U.S. Senate race by 6 percentage points. Now, the tables have turned. Ayotte is trailing Hassan by 8 points among likely voters and 9 points when undecided voters are pressed to make a choice, according to an Oct. 20 UNH poll. The 2nd Congressional District is considered safe for Democrats either way, so political analysts like Dean Spiliotes predict incumbent Ann Kuster will handily defeat her Republican challenger, Jim Lawrence. “The district has, in the years that I’ve lived in New Hampshire, I’ve watched it gradually shift to the left. That doesn’t seem to be changing,” Spiliotes said. He said even before recent events Democrats were considered to have an edge in House races, but the 1st Congressional District (between Republican Frank Guinta and Democrat Carol Shea-Porter) would probably have been tight if Clinton’s unpopularity were to depress Democratic and independent turnout. While turnout seems to favor Democrats based on more recent polls, Spiliotes said another wild card is independent candidate Shawn O’Connor, who originally ran as a Democrat in the primary. O’Connor’s campaign has outspent Shea-Porter’s but hasn’t raised as much.
of things in a race featuring an incumbent, because incumbents are able to raise money much more easily from political action committees, which tend to be from outside of the state. So, for the most part, outside spending tends to advantage non-incumbents,” Boatright said. Ayotte hedges when asked about campaign finance reform that includes overturning Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling that opened the floodgates of outside spending, saying she wants to be careful not to infringe on First Amendment rights. Hassan says she wants to overturn it. “That’s why I consistently work for campaign finance reform, first in the New Hampshire state Senate. Right after Citizens United was passed, I worked on a state-level disclosure bill. Then and now I support overturning Citizens United,” Hassan said in a phone interview. Some of the trends with spending for the presidential race are having some impact now on the Senate race. Boatright said Republican donors were holding back on giving to Trump. Now that many are seeing his chances as a bad bet, they’re focusing on Congressional races.
HIPPO | OCTOBER 27 - NOVEMBER 2, 2016 | PAGE 20
In another UNH poll released Oct. 20, Democrat Colin Van Ostern came out ahead of Republican Chris Sununu in the governor’s race, 41 to 35 percent. When undecided voters are included, the gap shortens to 44 to 38 percent. However, a majority of voters are still undecided and Sununu leads slightly among independent voters with 35 percent to Van Ostern’s 31 percent. Just weeks before, Sununu was ahead of Van Ostern in a Suffolk poll by 4 points. Many of the rosier scenarios for state Republican candidates hinge on a narrow victory for Clinton, according to Scala. “If Trump loses by 4 points in New Hampshire, then that’s not so bad. Because maybe Ayotte wins narrowly, maybe Sununu wins narrowly and maybe Republicans keep their majority in the state legislature,” Scala said. “But if it’s not 4 points, if it’s 7 or 10, that’s another order of magnitude of difficulty that down-ticket Republicans face.” So Clinton’s 15-point lead in the most recent poll could mean a virtual Democratic takeover. This is mostly to do with turnout trends. While Republican voters may not have anything against the Republican candidates down the ticket, their disenchantment with Trump may demotivate them from going to the voting booth. “When that happens … when the leaders of a party are in disarray and renouncing the party’s nominee or distancing themselves, you probably get a lot of people who just get disgusted and stay home,” Galdieri said.
Smith says that besides the 75 percent GOP support for Trump (see page 15), there are some signs in the polling process that might lend credence to the likelihood of low Republican turnout. He points to something called the Spiral of Silence theory. “If people perceive their candidate to be ... unpopular, a candidate who’s not socially acceptable, they’re less likely to put a yard sign in their yard or a bumper sticker on their car, they’re less likely to talk to their neighbors at cocktail parties and so forth about their support for a candidate and they’re also less likely to talk with pollsters about it,” Smith said. While conducting the UNH polls, Smith found it harder than usual to get Republicans on the phone. That, he says, tends to correspond to low turnout. Recent polls also showed a strong Democratic advantage in the New Hampshire House, Senate and Executive Council. The balance of power in New Hampshire is precarious and easily swayed, but to understand just how overwhelming a force the election year is expected to be, one need only look at what’s happening with the U.S. House, which before the Access Hollywood tape came out was expected by all to continue to have a Republican majority. Now even that safety is in doubt. And if there isn’t a divided government — or even if there’s a less divided government — at the federal level, experts say chances are the Granite State won’t have a divided government either. That will be a change of pace we haven’t seen since before the 2010 midterms.
“Clinton has a huge financial advantage over Trump. In terms of her own money, it’s been more like three to one,” Boatright said. “Trump has not been effective at raising money. He’s not managed to motivate traditional Republican donors. People who contribute to super PACs have looked more and more at the Senate. So there’s a huge difference.” This might have given Ayotte a slight boost in recent weeks. Boatright said a conservative super PAC that formed seemingly overnight called Senate Leadership Fund has disclosed more than $50 million in independent expenditures, with more than $20 million from casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson. It’s planning on spending more than $20 million in six battleground states including New Hampshire, but we won’t fully know how much they’ve spent in the state until after the election. But this year Republican ad spending has been divided and decentralized overall. Boatright said this is a symptom of an ideological split within the party, despite efforts by some like Rove to set himself up as the go-to central fundraiser for Republican candidates. Other folks like South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint have raised money from other
factions within the party. Meanwhile, Democratic groups are working together to make sure spending in New Hampshire is coordinated in support of Hassan. “These groups can talk to each other about what they are doing, so there’s clearly a coordinated strategy to spend money on behalf of Hassan and to have everybody effectively take their turn so that nobody’s stomping over everybody else,” Boatright said. So one week you’ll see ads funded by Planned Parenthood and the next week ads by the League of Conservation Voters. In the end, however, it’s likely all the ad spending will amount to an arms race that keeps all things equal, since spending on each side is about equal. Political analyst Dean Spiliotes says the spending outcome will likely be a wash and the race will depend on the larger forces of the presidential race. The big winners from all this spending will be the TV stations. In retrospect, this may leave big donors and PACs to reevaluate their strategies. “I think this is something that will be researched for many years to come,” Spiliotes said.
Spiraling or turning out