John Sununu is running a campaign that feels like it was cryogenically frozen in 2008. The former New Hampshire senator, who served one term before losing to Jeanne Shaheen in the Obama wave, is attempting something vanishingly rare in American politics: a comeback predicated not on reinvention but on the premise that he was right all along and the party simply lost its mind.

It is a fascinating gamble. Sununu, now 62, represented a species of Republican that the Trump era has rendered nearly extinct—fiscally hawkish, rhetorically restrained, institutionally deferential. His father was a legendarily combative governor and White House chief of staff; his brother Chris currently occupies the New Hampshire governor's mansion and has made a second career of publicly agonizing over the direction of his party. The Sununus are Republican royalty in a state that increasingly treats both parties' orthodoxies with suspicion.

The New Hampshire paradox

New Hampshire defies easy categorization. It went for Biden in 2020, then watched its Republican governor win reelection by twenty points. It has no income tax and no sales tax, which delights libertarians, but it also expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The state's famous "Live Free or Die" ethos has historically translated into a tolerance for ideological heterodoxy that both parties have struggled to exploit.

Sununu is betting that this heterodoxy creates an opening for a Republican who can credibly claim independence from the Trump White House. His campaign materials emphasize his votes against the Bush administration on spending, his support for bipartisan immigration reform, and his general air of patrician exasperation with populist theatrics. Whether this pitch resonates with a Republican primary electorate that has spent a decade being told that such qualities are disqualifying remains to be seen.

The incumbent problem

Sununu's path runs through Maggie Hassan, who won her Senate seat in 2016 by roughly a thousand votes and has since cultivated a determinedly low profile. Hassan is neither beloved nor despised; she is simply present, which in a polarized era may be its own form of political strength. She has avoided the culture-war controversies that have consumed other Democratic senators and has focused relentlessly on constituent services and local economic development.

The Sununu campaign's theory is that Hassan's blandness is a vulnerability—that voters are ready for a senator with actual convictions, even if those convictions are unfashionable in both parties. The Hassan campaign's theory is that voters are exhausted by conviction and would prefer competent invisibility. Both theories are plausible. Neither is obviously correct.

Our take

Sununu's candidacy is less about winning a Senate seat than about answering a question that has haunted the Republican Party since 2016: Is there a market for the product they used to sell? The honest answer is that nobody knows. New Hampshire, with its ornery independence and its allergy to ideological purity, is as good a laboratory as any. If Sununu wins, it will not prove that Trumpism is dead—but it will suggest that the old religion still has a few believers left, and that they vote.