Bedford, New Hampshire, moved 29 points against the Republican presidential ticket in twelve years. Mitt Romney won the town by 26 points in 2012; Donald Trump carried it by 7 in 2016 and lost it by 3 in both 2020 and 2024. In 2018, Bedford elected its first Democrat to the state House since 1934. That trajectory is the arithmetic behind the race that will decide whether former senator John E. Sununu returns to Washington, the Boston Globe’s James Pindell reported.
Bedford matters because it is the demographic the national map has been sorting against Republicans: an affluent, highly educated suburb of 23,000 outside Manchester, where the school-dropoff fleet has shifted from Chevy Suburbans to high-end Teslas, as Drew Cline, head of a conservative New Hampshire think tank, described it. Suburbs like it have trended Democratic since 2016 while rural Democratic areas have swung sharp Republican.
A seven-point deficit in the best poll
Statewide, the numbers favor the Democrat. An AARP poll released this past week put Representative Chris Pappas ahead of Sununu 51 percent to 44 percent — a 7-point lead on a sample of likely voters, in a race that had been polling close. The same day, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report moved the contest from “toss-up” to “leans Democrat.” A week earlier, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg campaigned for Pappas in Bedford itself.
The Senate math explains why the race gets national attention. To take control of the chamber, Democrats need to hold their seats in New Hampshire, Michigan and Georgia and flip four more, mostly in Republican-leaning states. Republicans, in turn, see New Hampshire and Michigan as their best chances to break that path.
The same candidate, a different party
Sununu is running much the campaign he ran in 2002, when he won his single Senate term: the same blue-and-green yard signs, some of the same consultants, and positions on taxes, privatizing Social Security and civil liberties that have not moved. His stump-speech accomplishments come with dates attached — leading the coalition of Republican senators that opposed the initial Patriot Act (only Lisa Murkowski of that group remains in the Senate) and authoring the law banning taxes on the internet when the web was less than a decade old.
He lost his seat to Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in 2008, but the family never left the state’s politics. His father, former governor John H. Sununu, became state Republican chair weeks after that loss; his brother Chris Sununu was elected governor in 2016 and became the longest-serving Republican chief executive in state history before stepping down last year. John E. Sununu, a libertarian-leaning Republican with two MIT degrees and a Harvard MBA, opposes Trump’s tariffs, worries about the national debt, and notes that he has never met the president in person — this in a party where a photo with Trump and a red MAGA hat is standard equipment. Trump, all the same, endorsed him in the GOP primary over former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown.
Sununu’s campaign took one visible hit this cycle: super PAC ads labeling him corrupt ran in heavy rotation, and he answered with a 30-second spot called “Bleep” in which he laughs his way through pretending to swear. “Every community goes through its own transition and cycles,” Sununu, who now lives in Rye on the Seacoast, said of Bedford’s shift. “I still campaign everywhere like I did in my first campaigns. What matters more are the issues that people care about in those towns.”
Pappas, who has represented Bedford in one office or another since 2012, reads the same map in reverse: “Democrats have been gaining steam in the southeastern part of the state,” along the Massachusetts border, he said, while “losing ground in northern New Hampshire, in old industrial towns and cities that have gone toward Donald Trump.” Ray Chadwick, longtime chairman of the New Hampshire Taxpayers Association and a Bedford resident, recalls Sununu predicting in past cycles that the town’s results “would put the Republicans over the top.” His assessment now: “It’s not so robust for Republicans here today.”
One number will settle the anecdote: Bedford’s margin on November 3. Sununu has carried the town all five times he has run for Congress, including in 2008, the year he lost statewide. If Pappas carries Bedford the way the 51–44 AARP poll implies he might statewide, the town that hosted Sununu’s 2002 victory party — at a Wayfarer Inn since razed for a Whole Foods where Democratic organizers now canvass — becomes the marker of how far the sorting has run.