New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu has told TV station WMUR that he’s not running for president:
Sununu cited a few reasons for not running, including the growing field of candidates, former President Donald Trump’s significant lead and what he called the “need for a candid voice.”. . .
“As a non-candidate, I can be a little more unleashed. I can talk a little bit more about where we need to be as a party, about the future, bringing independents and young people onto the ticket,” Sununu said. . . .
“Donald Trump’s the past. He’s trying to re-litigate 2020 and talk about Jan. 6 and all that sort of thing,” Sununu said. “We need to be about the future and get those independents excited that it isn’t just a one-size-fits-all, big-government solution out of Washington.”
“That Donald Trump message killed us in ’18, really hurt us in ’20. We should have 53 U.S. senators right now, but his message killed it,” Sununu added.
This is good. Sununu is well-suited to the moderate New Hampshire electorate — including a presidential primary electorate that lets the state’s vast pool of independent voters into the primary — but as John Kasich or Jon Huntsman could tell you, that’s a very different animal from the national Republican electorate. As a result, when combined with the importance of New Hampshire as an early state, a Sununu campaign would have had a distorting effect in terms of drawing off crucial votes from the candidates with an actual chance to be competitive later. And not running shows that Sununu was sincere when he passed on a 2022 Senate bid on the grounds of preferring to stay home in New Hampshire: He told a recent gathering that the political life was “wicked hard,” and while he hasn’t decided whether to run for reelection again next year (New Hampshire’s governor serves only a two-year term), he clearly isn’t planning on staying in politics forever.
The first four Republican primary states — assuming no changes in the calendar — all have Republican governors. South Carolina’s Henry McMaster, a longtime Trump ally, has already endorsed Trump again. That will leave Sununu, Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, and Nevada’s newly elected Joe Lombardo as much-coveted endorsements.