“Why do you keep implying that New Hampshire voters are dumb?”
That’s what one X user wrote to Republican Victoria Sullivan on Nov. 7, four days after Democrats flipped the New Hampshire House, Senate, and Executive Council and Sullivan lost her Manchester state Senate seat.
From Washington DC to Concord, Republicans who were voted out of power last week are landing on the same explanation: the voters got it wrong.
On Monday, outgoing US House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has said he won’t run to lead House Republicans in the new minority, told CNN’s Manu Raju in a Capitol hallway, “I’m sorry that the voters made the wrong choice.”
In New Hampshire, some of the state party’s most prominent voices are saying the same thing, Sullivan among them.
What did Sullivan say?
On election night, Sullivan posted that voters had “Massed up NH,” a twist on the Republican slogan warning against turning New Hampshire into Massachusetts.
“It makes no sense that they would vote to so drastically change our state,” she wrote.
But why did Manchester voters turn on Sullivan? Her own record offers plenty of answers.
Sullivan spent her one term as a vocal defender of President Donald Trump. When “No Kings” protesters rallied across the state in June 2025, she called it “a giant temper tantrum by a bunch of folks who did not get their own way.”
Months earlier, she credited Trump and Elon Musk for their roles in slashing federal agencies, defending them and dismissing the backlash.
Her record in Concord ran just as far to the right.
She said she would only back funding for the state’s child advocate, the office that watches over kids in state care, if it dropped what she called the “distraction” of advocating for LGBTQ+ youth.
She publicly shamed a constituent over what they bought with food stamps.
This fall, Senate Republicans’ campaign arm ran an AI-generated ad in her race that turned a family photo of her opponent, Leonard Bell, a Black Navy veteran, into a caricature of him buried in cash and gold chains. Sullivan never answered whether she approved it.
For voters in her district, Sullivan was the face of the Trump agenda at the State House, and they chose Bell over her by 10 points.
Who else is blaming the voters?
The sentiment runs through the party’s establishment too. Chris Ager, the former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, told the Concord Monitor the candidates were not the problem. “It wasn’t that Republicans in New Hampshire did something wrong per se,” he said, casting the result as a national wave. “It seems like it was more of a Washington-based vote than a New Hampshire-based vote,” he said, and the state’s Republicans “seem to be caught in the wave of negativity towards the president’s party.” The clearest sign, in his view, was voters turning on the whole ticket at once. “It looked like there was straight ticket voting against Republicans,” he said.
That isn’t what happened. On the same ballot, voters gave Ayotte a second term.
Some Republicans did not blame voters, opting instead to go after reporters.
Rep. Kristin Noble, a Bedford Republican and chair of the House Education Policy and Administration Committee, lost her seat after a year shadowed by scandal over a leaked Signal chat of top NH GOP education leaders, first reported by the Granite Post in January.
In the chat, a user bearing Noble’s name wrote, “when we have segregated schools we can add all the fun stuff lol,” and “imagine the scores though if we had schools for them and some for us.”
On election night, Noble shared this reporter’s post linking to that story and wrote: “This lying scumbag caused harm to my reputation, threats to myself and my family all based on a lie and here he is again telling this sick lie. Just a disgraceful human. Lawyer up.”
Last Tuesday, Democrats won all seven of Bedford’s state House seats, which had been split five Republicans to two Democrats.
How confident were Republicans going in?
In June, House Majority Leader Jason Osborne was so sure of where his party was headed that he launched a public campaign to be the next speaker of the New Hampshire House. “I am not waiting for November,” he said in announcing the run. “We are running to grow our ranks.” Five months later, his party lost its majority.
Democrats flipped both chambers of the Legislature, swept all five seats on the Executive Council, and unseated a string of veteran Republican lawmakers. Gov. Kelly Ayotte, who won a second term, was the only Republican left standing at the top of the ticket. For a party that walked in holding the state House, and a leader who spent the summer running to expand its majority, the idea that nothing went wrong leaves a lot to explain.
This week Osborne was narrowly selected by his caucus to be minority leader of the NH House GOP.
