I was one of the people holding out hope that New Hampshire would go red in the 2024 presidential election. The state has not done so since the 2004 election of George W. Bush. If ever there was a year when the Granite State might go red again, this was it.
After the state was called for Kamala Harris on Tuesday night, I tweeted this:
As you can see from this 2024 election map via NBC News, there were plenty of towns in New Hampshire that went red, but the state’s largest cities of Concord, Manchester, and Nashua are solid blue. The more rural areas are too sparsely populated to overcome this.
The political transformation of New Hampshire began in the 1980s. Liberals from Massachusetts, who voted for Democrats and higher taxes, realized that they could move to New Hampshire to avoid the policies that they supported and still be only an hour’s drive to their jobs in the greater Boston area.
Unfortunately, they brought their voting habits with them and over the course of a decade or two, permanently changed the state from red to blue.
Some of you will point to the fact that the outgoing Governor Chris Sununu is being replaced by Kelly Ayotte, another Republican who just won the 2024 gubernatorial election. I can explain that, too.
Ayotte, like Sununu before her, is a moderate Republican. They are the only kinds of Republicans who can win races in New England. Also, history has shown that New Englanders are sometimes willing to allow Republicans to become governors. See Phil Scott, who just won reelection in Vermont (and voted for Kamala Harris), or Mitt Romney, who served as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007.
I’m not suggesting that New Hampshire should be ignored or punished in any way. I’m just saying that we should all accept the fact that New Hampshire is now a blue state until they prove otherwise.
I don’t see that happening any time soon.
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