Gail Huff Brown watched close-up as her husband endured three brutal campaigns for the U.S. Senate, only one of them successful, and still, the New Hampshire Republican decided to enter politics and mount a 2022 bid for a seat in the House of Representatives.
Huff Brown, 58, said watching a botched U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan that left scores of American citizens and allies abandoned pushed her into the race for the Republican nomination in the Granite State’s 1st Congressional District. “I thought it was criminal,” she told the Washington Examiner in a telephone interview just before Christmas. “I still think it’s criminal.” But that was hardly the only reason this 30-year career television reporter is running for office, despite seeing the pitfalls of running for office, and serving in office, firsthand.
“I’m doing this because I feel like it’s an important thing I need to do for the next generation. I recently became a grandmother, and I look at my granddaughter and say, ‘What kind of America will she grow up in?’” Huff Brown said. “I don’t want it to be a socialist America.” Throughout the interview, Huff Brown declared herself a supporter of the “America First” agenda, a tip of the cap to former President Donald Trump.
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If Huff Brown seems familiar, it is because her husband is Scott Brown.
Brown is a Republican former senator who took Washington by storm in early 2010, when he won a special election to replace iconic Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, who died in office, in deep-blue Massachusetts. A bit under three years later, Brown was ousted by Democrat Elizabeth Warren; two years after that, Brown attempted a comeback in New Hampshire but fell short against Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Two years after that, Brown was appointed U.S. ambassador to New Zealand by Trump.
Brown’s up-and-down experience in campaign politics did not discourage his wife from following in his footsteps. And now that Huff Brown is the politician in the family, her husband is playing the role she once did for him — fundraising and all-around senior political adviser, with the added bonus that he’s lived it. Brown left his position at New England Law School to focus full-time on his wife’s congressional bid.
“We live in a very toxic political environment, now, so of course he’s worried,” Huff Brown said. But I’m a patriot … We need to take back the House. We don’t have one single Republican in the House in all of New England.”
Huff Brown’s four years overseas were formative. During her husband’s tenure in Wellington, she was elected president of the Diplomatic Spouses Association. Huff said her time abroad would have a direct impact on how she would operate in Congress if she wins her 2022 primary and defeats incumbent Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas in a district state Republicans are redrawing to make more favorable to the eventual GOP nominee. In particular, Huff Brown said living in the Asia Pacific provided her a front-row seat to China’s machinations and the lengths Beijing is going in its effort to supplant the United States as the globe’s preeminent superpower.
“China is literally eating up that region,” Huff Brown said. “China is New Zealand’s No. 1 trading partner, and there are so many things happening in China that I disagree with — and I disagree with the New Zealand government and the way it was dealing with China, overlooking the human [rights] problems and the Uyghurs.”
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Huff Brown also plans to put skills she honed over decades as a television journalist, including a three-year stint at the ABC affiliate in Washington while her husband served in the Senate, to do her job as a lawmaker. In a break with many Republicans running for office in the Trump era, Huff Brown declined to tar reporters as the purveyors of “fake news” or accuse them of consciously joining forces with the Democratic Party to defeat the GOP.
“I have a great deal of respect for the media and for reporters” Huff Brown said. “Every profession has bad apples, and the media is no different.”
