New Hampshire voted in its state primaries on Tuesday, and the results set up an open Senate contest for November — the state’s first in some time, after Democratic incumbent Jeanne Shaheen declined to seek a fourth term.

Former Senator John E. Sununu won the Republican nomination, defeating another former senator, Scott Brown. Congressman Chris Pappas took the Democratic nomination. The general election is on 3 November.

The rest of the ballot

In the 2nd Congressional District, first-term Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander comfortably won her Democratic primary against State Representative Paige Beauchemin. She faces Lily Tang Williams, who took the Republican nomination in her third campaign in the district and who Goodlander defeated in 2024 by roughly 212,000 votes to 188,000.

In the 1st District, Anthony DiLorenzo of Portsmouth won the Republican nomination. New Hampshire also nominated candidates for governor, the Executive Council, all 400 state House seats and all 24 state Senate seats. Incumbent Republican governor Kelly Ayotte is seeking a second term.

Why a small state gets this much attention

New Hampshire has fewer than 1.5 million people and two House seats. It attracts national coverage for two structural reasons rather than its size.

The first is that every state elects two senators regardless of population, so a Senate seat in New Hampshire counts exactly as much as one in California. In a chamber where control often turns on one or two seats, small competitive states carry weight out of proportion to their populations.

The second is that New Hampshire genuinely swings. It has elected Republicans and Democrats statewide in recent cycles, which makes it one of a shrinking number of places where the outcome is not effectively determined by the state’s partisan lean.

Two former senators, one nomination

The Republican primary was unusual in featuring two people who have each already served in the Senate. Sununu represented New Hampshire; Brown represented Massachusetts before later running in New Hampshire.

Contests between former officeholders tend to turn on different questions than contests between newcomers. Name recognition is not a differentiator when both have it. The argument becomes about record, and about which candidate a party’s voters think can win in November rather than which they prefer in September.

How much that calculation actually drives primary voting is disputed among political scientists. Some find substantial evidence that voters weigh electability; others argue that what looks like strategic voting is mostly voters preferring the candidate closest to them who also happens to seem viable.

What tonight does not tell us

Primary turnout is a poor predictor of general election results. Primary electorates are smaller, older and more partisan than November electorates, and the two parties’ primaries are contested with different levels of intensity in any given year.

Margins within a primary are also weak signals. A candidate who wins a nomination narrowly is not thereby weakened in November, and one who wins overwhelmingly is not thereby strengthened — the opponent changes entirely.

What the night established is who is on the ballot. Everything else is eight weeks of campaigning that has not happened yet.

Sources

• New Hampshire Public Radio live election results and coverage, 8 September 2026
• Associated Press race calls for the New Hampshire Senate and House primaries
• Washington Post, New Hampshire US Senate primary results, 8 September 2026
• Ballotpedia, United States Senate election in New Hampshire, 2026