NORTH WOODSTOCK, N.H. – Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., plopped down on a barstool across from the owner of Fadden’s General Store, a century-old family business just down the road. It was her seventh campaign stop on Saturday and barely 3 o’clock in the afternoon.
“I think there are people who are still undecided in this race, or still have questions, and so that’s why I’m out here meeting people,” Ayotte said in an interview aboard her campaign bus shortly after she finished stop No. 6. “The best parts of this campaign are really the people I meet on the campaign trail. They come up to me and they hug me and thank me for the work I’m doing, and they really buoy me in terms of wanting to serve.”
To continue serving locals like Jim Fadden, a longtime supporter who described the 48-year-old senator as “pragmatic” and “whip-smart,” Ayotte must defeat Democratic New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan on Tuesday. The two women are locked in a heated contest for the Senate seat that Ayotte currently holds and are fighting tooth-and-nail for their political futures in the final 72 hours of the race.
For Ayotte, that means speaking to voters until the moment she casts her ballot.
“In the final 24 hours, she’s actually going to be campaigning 24 hours straight – starting Monday at 5 a.m. to Tuesday at 8 a.m., when she goes to vote with her family,” Ayotte spokeswoman Liz Johnson told the Washington Examiner, saying the incumbent Republican senator will visit truck stops and pancake houses, “where some people might be” in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Ayotte is clinging to a 2-point lead over Hassan in the Granite State and refuses to go negative in the waning days of the election. The issues, she said, are what New Hampshire voters care about and thus her only focus between now and Tuesday.
“This has got to be one of the dirtiest elections of all time and the secret of success a lot of time isn’t to make everybody else look bad to make yourself look good,” Fadden told the Examiner shortly before Ayotte joined him at his high top table inside a local brew pub. He commended her for “running a positive campaign.”
Ayotte has left attack ads against her Democratic opponent to outside groups and saved her sharpest criticism for their six Senate debates. But when it comes to Hassan’s steadfast support for Hillary Clinton, which has not wavered since the FBI reopened its investigation into the former secretary of state’s email server, Ayotte refuses to bite her tongue.
“She’s a rubber stamp for Hillary Clinton, it’s plain and simple,” she said. “If you look at what Hillary Clinton did with her email server, Gov. Hassan said, ‘Oh you know it was a mistake.’ She’s made excuses for Hillary Clinton and she has failed to call her out on the potential impact on our national security on how she handled classified information on her server, and even most recently with the reopening of the investigation, she’s basically making excuses for her.”
Hassan’s campaign has had its own fun hanging Donald Trump around the neck of Ayotte, particularly after the incumbent Republican senator said she would “absolutely” consider the GOP nominee to be a role model for her two children — a comment she later walked back. However, it has become tougher for the Democratic Senate hopeful to tie her rival to Trump since Ayotte withdrew her support for him last month.
“I think it’s what the people of New Hampshire expected,” Ayotte explained. “They have a level of independence themselves and they want someone who’s going to represent them and also, when both parties are going in the wrong direction, be willing to stand up for them, which I will do.”
In a state like New Hampshire, where roughly 40 percent of the electorate belongs to neither major party and split-ticket voting is not uncommon, Ayotte’s decision to distance herself from Trump could be a deciding factor for Granite Staters who worry about giving either presidential candidate a blank check in Congress. It could also turn off pro-Trump GOP voters who carried the billionaire to his first victory here in the February primary and have since grown increasingly vitriolic toward Republican lawmakers who refuse to support him.
“It’s kind of a flip of the coin,” said Allan Clark, president of the North Country Public Safety Foundation and a Sugar Hill resident who said he has “never voted a straight ticket” in his life. “We’re a state that looks at and weighs every candidate very carefully and makes an informed decision based on who they are and what they have done or will do.”
An aide to Ayotte echoed that sentiment on Saturday while waiting for the senator to finish greeting voters at a roadside restaurant in Woodsville: “Kelly has really shown that she is willing to stand up, even if that means standing up to her own party, and it’s important to make that known here because that’s really something New Hampshire voters look for.”
“That’s why she’s out here talking to people and earning their vote,” the aide said. “We’re not taking anything for granted.”
Ayotte has another seven stops planned for Sunday when she plans to make her way through Rockingham County, a Republican stronghold that has become slightly less conservative in recent years. On Friday and Saturday, Ayotte was joined by her mother, Kathy Veracco, who seemed confident in her daughter’s re-election prospects after meeting voters along the trail.
“They talk about things she’s worked on that have helped them and it’s wonderful to listen to,” Veracco told the Examiner, adding that her daughter’s campaign has “been very upbeat and positive.”
“Voters seem to recognize that and so I think we’re going to have a good night on Tuesday,” she said.
