Rep. Chris Pappas announces bid for NH Senate

Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) announced Thursday 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.), also could launch bids. Pappas’s announcement followed a 10-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 U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa 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.).

Nick Puglia, a regional press secretary for the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, criticized Pappas following his announcement on Thursday, focusing on his record on issues like transgender women competing in women’s sports.

Pappas voted against a bill in January that would require entities who sponsored or operated sport programs and received federally funding to bar transgender women athletes from competing on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity. He‘s previously opposed the legislation, saying in 2023 that “Banning trans women and girls from participating in sports and allowing schools to directly discriminate against students on the basis of their gender identity would do lasting harm not just to them, but our communities as a whole.”

“Pappas is extremely out of touch, and New Hampshire families deserve better,” Puglia said.

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

Updated at 10:59 a.m. EDT