Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., let voters down by “fumbling for months” on whether to support Donald Trump, the Boston Globe wrote Monday in its endorsement of Ayotte’s Democratic challenger, Gov. Maggie Hassan.
“The emergence of Donald J. Trump as the Republican presidential nominee surely would have posed a challenge for any politician in Ayotte’s shoes,” the paper wrote. “But the New Hampshire GOP senator flunked the Trump test, fumbling for months for a coherent position on whether she supported her party’s nativist, misogynistic, unqualified nominee.”
After dodging reporters’ questions about the Republican presidential nominee for several months, a spokeswoman for Ayotte said in early May that she would “support the nominee” without naming Trump explicitly. However, Ayotte withdrew her support earlier this month after Trump was caught making lewd comments about women in a 2005 audio tape.
Ayotte’s tepid endorsement and subsequent disavowal of Trump “reinforced doubts about her independence,” the Globe wrote, adding that “with a candidate as bad as Trump, she never should have hesitated.”
“[W]hen the chips are down, Ayotte too often falls right into line with the worst actors in the national GOP. It’s not just her reluctance to dump Trump … She also followed [Ted] Cruz and Mitch McConnell’s shameful blockade of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, a transparently partisan ploy,” the Globe wrote.
The Globe said Hassan, New Hampshire’s two-term Democratic governor, has the “backbone” that Ayotte lacks. “If, four or eight years from now, Democrats were to nominate a candidate who promises to ‘open up’ the First Amendment, it’s difficult to imagine Hassan ducking and weaving the way Ayotte has in response to Trump,” the Globe wrote.
The Globe declined to mention a controversial interview Hassan gave to CNN earlier this summer when she came under fire for declining to say three times whether Hillary Clinton, whom she endorsed for president, was honest and trustworthy.
Hassan leads Ayotte, who secured three separate newspaper endorsements over the weekend, including one from Hassan’s hometown paper the Portsmouth Herald, by 2 percentage points in the latest RealClearPolitics polling average of likely voters in the Granite State.
