Today, the Valley News endorsed Senator Maggie Hassan, citing her “enviable record of bipartisan accomplishment” and calling her “in many respects the embodiment of what has been called ‘the New Hampshire way.”
Read the full endorsement from the Valley News below:
Valley News: Editorial: Reelect Maggie Hassan
New Hampshire has long laid its claim to holding the nation’s first presidential primary on the assurance that its residents are well-informed, independent-minded and engaged. Voters have an opportunity to burnish that reputation Tuesday by reelecting Maggie Hassan to the U.S. Senate. In her first term, Hassan has compiled an enviable record of bipartisan accomplishment while managing to be both pragmatic and principled. In short, she is in many respects the embodiment of what has been called “the New Hampshire way.”
Her Republican opponent is Donald Bolduc, a retired brigadier general with no very obvious qualifications to hold high civilian office. More troubling yet is that Bolduc is a loose cannon who doesn’t merely insult the intelligence of the electorate; he slaps it in the face with a series of preposterous claims. More on that later.
In contrast, Hassan displays a formidable grasp of public policy issues and has demonstrated an unusual capacity to find common ground even in a highly polarized Senate. All 48 bills she introduced last year attracted a Republican co-sponsor, helping her to earn the nonpartisan Lugar Center’s ranking as the nation’s most bipartisan senator, with the highest score ever attained by a Democratic senator.
One example is the “no surprise medical bills” legislation she crafted with Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, which shields patients from bills for out-of-network costs they weren’t aware they were incurring. Another is the CHIPS and Science Act introduced with Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota, which aims to increase semiconductor research and manufacturing in the United States.
The Bolduc camp has portrayed Hassan as a reliable vote for “the failed policies” of President Biden. We suppose that these “failures” include newly enacted legislation that will drive down prescription drug costs by allowing Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies; rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure; make unprecedented investments to combat climate change; promote gun safety; expand veterans’ health benefits; and provide timely intelligence and weapons to Ukraine to help repel the Russian invasion. (Many of those measures, by the way, passed with Republican support.)
Bolduc’s apparent calculation is that he can fool enough people long enough to get elected. After proclaiming loud and long for many months that the 2020 election was stolen from his hero, Donald Trump, Bolduc, a couple of days after winning the Republican primary, claimed to have had a road-to-Damascus conversion.
At a debate in August, he told the audience, “So I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying that Trump won the election and, dammit, I stand by my horse. I’m not switching horses, baby. This is it.”
It is perhaps worth noting here that then-Major Bolduc led one of the first American special forces contingents into Afghanistan while riding on horseback, and so presumably has first-hand knowledge of the perils of switching horses. Nonetheless, having secured the Republican nomination on the basis of Trump’s big lie, Bolduc told Fox News shortly after the primary that he had now concluded that — “and I want to be definitive on this — the election was not stolen.” Well, maybe not too definitively. According to The New Yorker magazine, he later told a conservative podcast that “the narrative that the election was stolen, it does not fly up here in New Hampshire, for whatever reason.”
That brand of cynicism is also evident in Bolduc’s disingenuous claim that he would not vote for a nationwide abortion ban despite having insisted during the primary that he would “always default for a system that protects lives from beginning to end.” If you believe Bolduc’s assurances on abortion, Brett Kavanaugh has a bridge he would like to sell you. Bolduc also has a message for women outraged by the U.S. Supreme Court’s extinction of a constitutional right to abortion: “Get over it.” Hassan, on the other hand, has made clear that her priority is to block a nationwide ban, and that’s yet another compelling reason to send her back to Washington.
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We don’t think that people in New Hampshire want to turn back the clock by even an hour or a day. Maggie Hassan can be counted on to keep her eyes firmly on a future in which a prosperous economy and a thriving democracy welcome the contributions of all.
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