Rep. Chris Pappas announces bid for NH Senate

Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) announced on Thursday that he’s running for a Senate seat in New Hampshire to replace Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who's retiring.

“Granite Staters know my record of taking on the big fights and looking out for them – pushing tax cuts for working families and small businesses, taking on predatory companies and corporate polluters, and standing up to Big Pharma to lower drug costs,” he said in a statement. “Like Senator Shaheen, I’ll always put New Hampshire first.”

Pappas is the first Democrat to throw his hat in the ring for Shaheen’s seat, though others in the party, including first-term Rep. Maggie Goodlander (D-N.H.), could also launch their own bids. Pappas’s announcement followed a ten-county listening tour he took as he mulled a potential bid.

Should Pappas win the seat, he would make history as the first openly gay man elected to the Senate.

Meanwhile, former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) and former Amb. Scott Brown are mulling bids on the Republican side. The last time New Hampshire elected a Republican senator was in 2010, when then-candidate Kelly Ayotte, now New Hampshire governor, won the election.

Ayotte later lost reelection in 2016 to Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).

The nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report rates Shaheen’s seat “lean Democrat.”