I had originally planned to meet Scott Brown on Saturday at a poutine festival outside of Manchester, N.H. — until a campaign aide told me the festival had sold out before Brown could get a ticket.
Brown is, in case you have forgotten, the former Republican senator from Massachusetts who rocketed to political stardom when he notched a stunning upset victory in the special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in January 2010. He went on to serve in the first Trump administration as the ambassador to New Zealand, a post so plum that the Boston Globe called him “the luckiest Republican on earth.”
Today, he is chasing the political limelight once more with a seemingly improvised campaign for Senate in New Hampshire. He is undaunted by the fact that he lost his 2012 re-election bid to Senator Elizabeth Warren, as well as his 2014 battle in New Hampshire against Senator Jeanne Shaheen, whose retirement has opened up the seat. He has shrugged off his lack of support from the Republican establishment, which has thrown its weight behind a different former senator, John E. Sununu, as well as polls showing him 40 points down in the primary.
He was additionally unfazed by his inability to enter the poutine festival, a celebration of the French Canadian snack (French fries, cheese and gravy) that’s beloved in parts of northern New England. I had been instructed to meet Brown instead near a firehouse in Manchester, where he would be knocking on doors. But when I arrived, Brown told me he had gone to the festival after all — and just greeted voters as they went in and out.
“It was like $75 a ticket!” Brown said.
Guy with a truck
Sixteen years ago, Brown’s victory in Massachusetts made him an instant G.O.P. sensation, a guy with a truck and a barn jacket whose unexpected cannonball into the Senate threw Republicans a lifeline and created a major roadblock for the Obama administration’s plans to reform health care. His unsuccessful re-election effort was, at the time, one of the most expensive Senate races history.
The Scott Brown campaign of 2026 has generated a lot less attention and a lot less money — he has less than half a million dollars on hand, according to campaign finance filings — and practically no institutional support. President Trump has endorsed Sununu, who also has the support of major outside Republican groups.
“I’m the guy that stopped the Democrat supermajority — short memory,” Brown said, as we walked through the dense neighborhood, studded with triple-deckers and short on shade. One voter was thrilled to see him; several others seemed not to know who he was.
“I’m the old guy with the new knee, so I’m taking my time,” Brown, 66, said, explaining his stiff gait as he approached a woman on her porch. “Hi, I’m Scott Brown, former U.S. senator, U.S. ambassador, running for the Senate.”
Brown has wended a winding path since he was last on the ballot, serving briefly as a law school dean and promoting a weight loss supplement in addition to his ambassadorial post. He’s endeavored to be a New Hampshire kingmaker by hosting backyard barbecues for presidential hopefuls. He coaches youth basketball — “We made the playoffs the last two years, and we’re loaded this year!” — and he is still training for triathlons, despite his knee.
Brown also plays in a band that, he said, has two gigs this coming weekend (even though an aide told me he had asked Brown to stop playing shows for two weeks before the primary).
“I’m really enjoying this,” Brown said of the campaign. “There’s no pressure on me — like, there’s none.”
Ignored by Sununu
The Republican primary, next Tuesday, will pit Brown, a former senator who lost to Shaheen, against Sununu, a former senator who also lost to Shaheen. The winner will likely face Representative Chris Pappas, a Democrat, in the general election, a race considered important by both parties as they battle over control of the Senate.
Sununu has mostly ignored Brown. Brown has accused him of dodging debates and of letting voters think he is either his brother, the charismatic former Governor Chris Sununu, or his father, John H. Sununu, also a former governor.
“They think it’s Chris; they say, ‘Oh, I love the governor,’” Brown said. He added, “They think it’s the Kennedys in New Hampshire. Well, no offense. People don’t like the Kennedys.”
Sununu’s campaign has said he and Brown have appeared together plenty.
On Saturday, Brown and I made our way through the neighborhood and back to the firehouse, where he planned to attend a town hall-style event with two other local candidates. He took a call from his daughter, who hoped he would be free to babysit the grandkids in the evening. He seemed concerned that nobody would show up for the event, although a handful of voters did.
He insists the race is closer than people think, but he told me what he would do if he loses.
“I’m gonna grab a couple of drinks and, the next morning, get up and work out, drink and go gamble and come home and take a nap for a day or two,” Brown said. “Life goes on.”
And he swears he won’t run again. “This is it. Win or lose. This is it.”
number of the day
$1 billion
That’s about the amount of anonymous money sloshing through the political landscape in 2026, according a New York Times review of advertising data, campaign-finance filings and tax records.
It’s a staggering sum and yet almost certainly a low-end estimate, given how difficult this money is to trace.
Read more about the secret spending that could upend the midterms.
What I’m watching
Tomorrow, voters in Massachusetts head to the polls for the state’s primaries. Here are the key races I’ll be following:
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Senator Ed Markey, 80, is trying to fend off a challenge from Representative Seth Moulton, 47. Markey is trying to outrun his party’s distaste for octogenarians by showing his energy and leaning into his progressive bona fides. Will it work?
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There’s a crowded field to replace Moulton in Massachusetts’ Sixth Congressional District. Dan Koh, a former aide in the Biden administration, and state Representative Tram Nguyen are seen as leading contenders.
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Representative Stephen Lynch, a 13-term congressman from South Boston, is facing a challenge from the 39-year-old lawyer Patrick Roath.
ballot watch
More mail ballots are getting tossed
The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, my colleagues Adam Sella and Nick Corasaniti have found.
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In Michigan’s primary, more than 10,000 mail ballots were rejected for arriving late — nearly double the number of ballots rejected in 2024.
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In Wisconsin, lateness accounted for about 5,000 rejected mail ballots in the spring primary this year, or 78 percent of all tossed ballots.
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In Washington, the number of late-arriving mail ballots increased from about 16,000 in the 2024 primary to more than 20,000 this year.
This is all prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms. Read more here.
ONE LAST THING
Are there really D.E.I. bike lanes?
The Trump administration thinks so, and it’s revoking millions of dollars in federal grants for bike lanes as it turns its aversion to cycling into policy.
The Times’s Richard Fausset took a spin through the issue. Polling suggests that nearly three quarters of Americans — including 66 percent of Republicans — like having bike lanes around. The country has added thousands of directional miles of protected bike lanes since 2000. But the Trump administration is trying to put the brakes on the trend.
