As polls show dismal support for Donald Trump in New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte did nothing to acknowledge the visit of one of the most senior members of his administration
Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte was nowhere to be seen during Friday’s visit to the New Hampshire State House by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s controversial secretary of Health and Human Services.
Her office declined to comment on why the governor did not appear alongside Secretary Kennedy or acknowledge his visit in any public capacity.
One possible reason? The visit came one day after new polling from the University of New Hampshire Survey Center found Granite Staters overwhelmingly blaming Trump for the state’s surging gas prices, which have climbed roughly $1.60 a gallon—about 56%—over the past year, from $2.87 to $4.48.
The poll showed fully 82% of the Granite Staters blame Trump for those higher gas costs—and two-thirds of all residents say he is “very responsible” for the increase. Forty-two percent have cut spending because of high gas prices, and just 16% say they’re better off financially than they were a year ago.
During his trip, Kennedy held a closed-door roundtable with Republican lawmakers and state officials, followed by a tightly controlled press conference where reporters were told to ask only about Lyme disease, the stated reason for his visit.
“Speaker Packard refused to allow questions of @RobertKennedyJr unrelated to Lyme disease,” wrote New Hampshire Bulletin reporter Will Skipworth in a post on social media. “Disappointing missed opportunity to learn about other aspects of the secretary’s expansive agenda. It’s not often high level federal officials come to small states like ours.”
House Speaker Sherman Packard, who moderated the press conference, allowed questions only from a pre-selected list of reporters—many of whom did not attend. The format shut out any questions about Kennedy’s long record of false claims about Lyme disease, which he has called “highly likely to have been a military weapon.”
Nor was Kennedy asked how low-income Granite Staters would afford treatment if they contracted Lyme, given that the Medicaid work requirements he supported are projected to strip coverage from roughly 20,000 New Hampshire residents, according to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute.
Not everyone accepted the limits. State Rep. Heath Howard—a Strafford Democrat and one of the candidates running for New Hampshire’s open 1st Congressional District seat—followed Kennedy through the State House hallways to press him on the secretary’s false claims that vaccines cause autism, an assertion decades of research have repeatedly debunked. “I needed a long hand washing session,” Howard said in a video he posted afterward, describing his handshake with the secretary.
Stefany Shaheen, who co-founded the chronic-care company Good Measures and is also running for the 1st District seat, pressed Kennedy on access in an interview immediately after the event, pointing to the roughly 77,000 Granite Staters hit by the collapse of the state’s Medicare Advantage market as several major insurers pulled out for 2026.
“70,000 Granite State seniors are now faced without Medicare Advantage because their plans have left the state, and now they’re facing more costs for vision, dental, and hearing,” Shaheen said in an interview after the press conference.
“So what I want the secretary to explain to the New Hampshire families I hear from and have been talking to for months now is how do you expect people to get care for things like Lyme disease, which are serious concerns when they don’t have health insurance?”
She did not mince words about Kennedy himself.
“I think the health and wellbeing of the American people is serious business and I think he’s a very unserious person and he’s not qualified to do this job and he should be impeached.”
