The weatherman says there will be as much as two feet of snow on the ground when Gov. Jay Inslee touches down in New Hampshire. Granite State politicos seem to say climate change is the least of the Washington Democrat’s problems.
Before he can compete in that state’s first-in-the-country presidential primary, Inslee must answer for that state’s governor’s race. As chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, he left the Granite State in the cold.
When the Democrat, Molly Kelly, was losing to the incumbent Republican, Gov. Chris Sununu, Inslee steered money south. Under his watch, the DGA dropped $4 million in support of Stacey Abrams in Georgia and another $5 million to Andrew Gillum in Florida.
Both of them lost anyway.
Hence the chilly reception Inslee is now receiving, and his home state Seattle Times has been documenting, from important New Hampshire politicos.
Longtime political hand Judy Reardon, who has advised local and national candidates in the state, said Inslee demonstrated “terrible political judgment.”
.@jayinslee has terrible political judgment. As chair of the DGA he chose to spend zilch of the $138 million the DGA spent on 2018 governors races in NH. Spent a fortune on losing races in FL and GA. A little bit of it could have made a difference in NH #NHPolitics https://t.co/hdmKNkNsn7
— Judy Reardon (@JudyReardon) January 3, 2019
State party brass were similarly unimpressed. New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley told a local TV station he looked forward “to hearing from Gov. Inslee his reasons for abandoning New Hampshire in 2018.”
Buckley would later backtrack those statements slightly. All the same, the chilly reception makes an already uphill climb for a little-known candidate like Inslee that much harder.
Inslee has all but launched a presidential campaign on environmental issues, granting interviews to glossy magazines, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, and now trekking across the country to New Hampshire. Unless things warm a bit between himself and state Democrats, the seldom-mentioned long-shot candidate could freeze to death more than a year before the primary.
