Scott Brown’s wife files to run for Congress

Former news anchor Gail Huff Brown, the wife of former ambassador and Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), has filed papers to run for Congress in the couple’s adopted state of New Hampshire.

Huff Brown filed papers Thursday to challenge Rep. Chris Pappas (D) next year. She is among a handful of Republicans — including two former members of the Trump administration — to submit paperwork to the Federal Election Commission.

Huff Brown has not formally declared she will run for office, but she told WMUR she would explore the race.

“I’m taking my time to do due diligence, to talk to as many people as I can and really get a feel for whether or not this is winnable,” Huff Brown told the New Hampshire outlet. “If I found that I wasn’t able to have the resources that Republicans in the First District deserve, then I wouldn’t take it on.”

Huff Brown reported for CBS affiliates in North Carolina, Rhode Island and Connecticut before moving to Boston-based WCVB-TV. She briefly joined WJLA-TV in Washington, after her husband won a special election to fill the remainder of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) term after he died in 2009.

Scott Brown lost reelection to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) in 2012. The Brown family moved to New Hampshire the following year, when Gail Huff Brown returned to television at NH-1. Scott Brown lost a race against Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) in 2014.

The couple then moved across the world when then-President Trump appointed Scott Brown to be the U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. After his post, Scott Brown spent eight months as dean of a private law school in Boston. He eventually quit to get back into politics, he told the Boston Globe.

Some New Hampshire Republicans thought his resignation meant Brown would challenge Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.). But rumors have floated through Republican circles in the Granite State in recent weeks that it was Gail, rather than Scott, who intended to get back into electoral politics.

Gail Huff Brown will face Matt Mowers, a former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party and a White House aide in the Trump administration, who lost to Pappas by a 5-point margin in 2020. Karoline Leavitt (R), another former White House adviser during the Trump administration, is also running. So is state Rep. Tim Baxter (R), who at 24 years old is one of the youngest people serving in the 400-seat New Hampshire state House.

President Biden carried the Manchester-based 1st District by a 52 percent to 46 percent margin, a veritable landslide in a swing district that gave both former Presidents Obama and Trump 1-point wins in 2012 and 2016.

But the district is likely to change significantly in the coming months, as New Hampshire’s Republican-controlled legislature redraws district maps in conjunction with Gov. Chris Sununu, also a Republican.