The governor of New Hampshire predicted President Trump would carry his state in 2020 after a narrow loss there to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“When [voters] go into that ballot box, that’s why they are going to be pulling the lever, and Donald Trump is going to win New Hampshire — because we kind of match our pro-business message with his economic success,” Gov. Chris Sununu told Fox News on Monday.
Clinton won the Granite State by less than 1 percentage point three years ago, with the bulk of Trump’s support coming in from the more rural northern and eastern sections of the state.
Sununu, a Republican, was elected in 2017 and has shown confidence in Trump’s popularity in the state he leads. As the Republican Party, in several states, canceled primaries in the run-up to this year’s election, Sununu balked at the idea.
“There are some folks who we’re talking about that, but that’s not part of the process, right?” he told the Washington Examiner. “Even if there were a primary here, Bill Weld or whoever wants to jump in the race, it’s great, because Donald Trump is going to win 95% of the vote.”
Sununu, however, hesitated to criticize Trump after Democrats and some in the media shamed him for tweeting that four freshman congresswomen, one of whom is an immigrant, “go back” to where they came from.
“I think everything coming out of Washington, D.C., is pretty toxic and offensive, and the American people are fed up with it,” the New Hampshire governor told the Union-Leader last year. “As elected officials, we have to get stuff done, work together, be respectful of one another and across the board. I think Washington has just dropped the ball over the last couple of years in a variety of ways and different areas.”
Trump held a rally Manchester, the state’s largest city, on Monday night. He repeated a debunked theory that Democrats had been driving over from Massachusetts and other states to vote for Clinton, complaining that he “should have won” New Hampshire in 2016.
The New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary is Tuesday, a contest that leading pollsters and analysts expect Sen. Bernie Sanders, of neighboring Vermont, to perform well in, if not win.
“The [Democrats] that are clearly phonies,” Sununu said. “[They are] just pandering to constituents, those are the folks that are falling off.”
