Veteran New Hampshire Republicans are chastising President Trump for pushing voter fraud conspiracies in their state.
Trump attributed his narrow loss in New Hampshire to Democrat Hillary Clinton to busloads of illegal voters from liberal-leaning Massachusetts. Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief policy advisor in the White House, seconded that claim, saying in an interview over the weekend that everyone who has ever worked a campaign in New Hampshire knows that voter fraud there is rampant.
But Republicans in the Granite State, host of the first presidential primary contest every four years, are dismissing the conspiracy as entirely without merit. Political operatives in New Hampshire take the voting process perhaps more seriously than colleagues elsewhere, given the prominent role the state plays in the presidential nominating process.
“Repeating: there is no voter fraud in NH. None. Zip. Nada. Hundreds of lawyers, poll workers, watchers, press — not buses rolled in,” Steve Duprey said in a Twitter post.
Duprey is hardly a regular Trump critic. He is a voting member of the Republican National Committee, as New Hampshire’s RNC committeeman, and a close ally of White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, the former RNC chairman. Last July, Duprey helped Priebus block a rules challenge to Trump’s nomination at the GOP convention in Cleveland.
Trump won the 2016 Republican primary in New Hampshire by nearly 20 points, a victory that reset the race after his loss in the Iowa caucuses and put him on a path toward the nomination. He came up just short there in the general election, losing to Clinton by 0.3 percentage points. That finish was in line with the final RealClearPolitics.com average of the most recent New Hampshire polls, but Trump is blaming his defeat on unsubstantiated voter fraud.
Trump made the claims during a private conversation last week with a group of senators at the White House. On Sunday, Miller defended the claims during an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week,” though he did not offer any evidence.
“I can tell you that this issue of busing voters in to New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics,” Miller said. “It’s very real; it’s very serious.”
But so far, that claim is receiving little support from Republican political operatives who have worked in New Hampshire politics, in some cases, for decades. Among them is David Carney, who early on in the 2016 election cycle recognized Trump’s potential political strength.
“Just eye rolling, credibility erosion, nutty alert!” Carney said in a brief email exchange with the Washington Examiner, when asked to react to the president’s accusations of voter fraud in New Hampshire and people being bussed in from Massachusetts to cast illegal votes for Clinton and Democrat Maggie Hassan, who barely edged out incumbent Republican Kelly Ayotte in the race for Senate.
“Let me [be as] unequivocal as possible — allegations of voter fraud in NH are baseless, without merit — it’s shameful to spread these fantasies,” Tom Rath tweeted. Rath backed Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the 2016 GOP primary.
“Yes voter fraud exists + laws should be fixed,” Jim Merrill, who was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s chief New Hamsphire strategist in the 2016 GOP primary, added in a Twitter post of his own. “But there’s no ‘mass illegal voting’ or ‘busloads’ of illegal voters”.
