Scott Brown will officially be the Republican nominee for Senate in New Hampshire, after winning the GOP primary with roughly half the vote Tuesday.
Brown will now face Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in the general election. Shaheen has led Brown by a few points on average in recent public polls.
“After six years of missed opportunities at home and growing dangers around the world, we need change,” Brown said in his victory speech Tuesday night. “And the problem is, a vote for my opponent will change exactly nothing.”
The primary result marks the end of the first phase of an unlikely professional turnaround for Brown, who rocketed to national fame when he won a special Senate election in Massachusetts in 2010, only to lose his seat to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, in 2012.
Brown shocked more than a few people when he decided, at the end of last year, to drive his signature pick-up truck across the border to New Hampshire and try his hand at one more Senate election. His roots in the state were tenuous — Brown and his wife, Gail, moved into their longtime vacation home in Rye, N.H. — and Democrats, and some Republicans, panned Brown’s “opportunism.”
Democrats still plan to make Brown’s fledgling residency an issue for the remainder of the election.
“Tuesday was the first time Scott Brown ever voted in a New Hampshire Senate race and not surprisingly, he voted for himself, a fact that perfectly sums up his campaign,” Shaheen’s campaign manager Mike Vlacich wrote in a memo distributed to press.
But, at least for most New Hampshire Republicans, Brown was able to prove his Granite State mettle, if against a weak field of opponents. Brown bested Bob Smith, a has-been New Hampshire senator who has been living in Florida, and Jim Rubens, a former state senator.
