DGA Statement on Kelly Ayotte Entering the Race for NH-GOV

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DGA Statement on Kelly Ayotte Entering the Race for NH-GOV

DGA Deputy Communications Director Izzi Levy issued the following statement in response to 2016 U.S. Senate race loser Kelly Ayotte’s announcement that she will run for New Hampshire governor in 2024:

“Kelly Ayotte has spent her career working to stack the deck against New Hampshire’s working families and attacking their most fundamental freedoms — even leading the charge for a national abortion ban — which is why New Hampshire voters retired her seven years ago after a single term in the Senate. With her announcement today, Ayotte joins a field of losing candidates that is all but assured to grow louder, messier, and more extreme, before Granite Staters reject her once more for a candidate who will actually work to defend reproductive freedom and fix the problems they face.”

New Hampshire is the only state in New England without proactive protections for reproductive freedom on the books, and Kelly Ayotte brings to this race a long record of attacking abortion rights: in 2010, Ayotte called for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, and in 2014, she led a group of 33 Republican senators demanding a vote on a national abortion ban. Ayotte also called a regulation requiring most employers to cover costs of birth control “an unprecedented affront to religious liberty,” and has voted at least five times to defund Planned Parenthood.

Ayotte joins former state Senate President and failed 2024 U.S. Senate candidate Chuck Morse, the architect of New Hampshire’s abortion ban who voted against adding exemptions for rape, incest, and the life of the child to the bill. Like Ayotte, Morse has also voted to defund Planned Parenthood, voted to allow pharmacists to refuse to prescribe patients birth control because of their own beliefs, and voted against a law that would protect patients from harassment while seeking reproductive health care.

As New Hampshire’s field of out-of-touch GOP extremists grows, top analysts have already shifted their ratings for NH-GOV from “solid R” and “likely R” to “toss up,” while Inside Elections notes this is the “best gubernatorial pickup opportunity” for Democrats in the 2024 cycle.

 

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