New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R), who was one of the GOP’s top recruitment targets for the 2022 Senate midterms, was “pretty close” to throwing his hat into the race — until he found out his only purpose in the Senate would be to help Republicans keep the whole chamber dysfunctional.
Sununu told the Washington Examiner in an interview published on Tuesday that before he ultimately made the decision not to run against Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), he had spoken to most of the members of the Senate GOP to learn more about the job.
The senators’ descriptions apparently amounted to “LOL what job?”
“They were all, for the most part, content with the speed at which they weren’t doing anything,” Sununu told the Examiner. “It was very clear that we just have to hold the line for two years.”
“OK, so I’m just going to be a roadblock for two years,” he continued. “That’s not what I do.”
Sununu said he was “bothered” not just by how the senators were fine with doing nothing, but also the fact that they apparently couldn’t explain why, if the current goal is to obstruct until the GOP potentially wins the White House in 2024, they didn’t do anything even when they did have the White House during Trump’s term.
“I said, ‘OK, so if we’re going to get stuff done if we win the White House back, why didn’t you do it in 2017 and 2018?’” Sununu recounted.
“Crickets. Yeah, crickets,” he said of the senators’ response. “They had no answer.”
The GOP governor’s account aligns with the explanation he gave while announcing in early November that he’d decided against a Senate bid, which was that “I’d rather push myself 120 miles an hour delivering wins for New Hampshire than to slow down, end up on Capitol Hill debating partisan politics without results.”
It also matches Axios’ report that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) won’t release a legislative agenda for Senate Republicans before the midterms and doesn’t plan to have them actually run on anything besides, basically, “liberals bad.”
