GOP Climate Hawk Narrowly Loses Senate Seat

Both New Hampshire Senate candidates wanted to fight global warming. The Democrat won.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R) debates Gov. Maggie Hassan (D) in Manchester, N.H., last week.Jim Cole/AP

Unlike nearly every other Senate contest in the country, the New Hampshire race featured a Republican who has been outspoken about the need to combat climate change. Kelly Ayotte, the incumbent, was one of just five GOP senators to vote for a resolution acknowledging that humans are a significant cause of global warming, and she was the first GOP senator to come out in support of President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. But that wasn’t enough to keep her seat; she was narrowly defeated by Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan.

Ayotte’s environmental moderation earned her the ire of some on the right and even resulted in her potentially missing out on millions of dollars in independent ad buys from groups affiliated with the Koch brothers, according to the Intercept. But Hassan argued that Ayotte’s climate advocacy was too little, too late. Back in 2010, when Ayotte first ran for Senate, she told the editorial board of the Portsmouth-Herald that although there was evidence to show human activity affects climate change, “I don’t think the evidence is conclusive.” The same year, Ayotte signed onto a pledge sponsored by the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity, promising not to vote for any climate change legislation that would increase taxes. During a debate last month, Hassan criticized Ayotte for having “doubted whether climate change was real.”

“I was the first Republican in the country to support the president’s Clean Power Plan,” Ayotte shot back. “I’ve crossed party lines, even taken criticism from my own party to protect New Hampshire’s environment, and that goes back to my time as [state] attorney general.”

Environmental advocacy groups didn’t buy Ayotte’s rhetoric, and they threw their support behind Hassan, who as governor committed New Hampshire to an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 to 95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Hassan said that combating climate change would be one of her top priorities should she win the Senate seat. In an interview this week, Melinda Pierce of the Sierra Club emphasized her group’s support for Hassan, arguing that Ayotte’s previous record on climate issues didn’t back up her recent positioning. “You can’t choose to green yourself up on one issue if the rest of your voting record doesn’t support broad action on climate change,” Pierce said.

NextGen Climate Action, a group run by billionaire Tom Steyer, spent more than $420,000 campaigning against Ayotte, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. NextGen sought to reach millennial voters by targeting ads on social media platforms, apps like Tinder, and X-box Live, according to Kate Corriveau, press secretary for NextGen in New Hampshire. The group also sent field teams to campuses across the state hoping to motivate students to vote.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate