“I made the decision I made as a matter of principle,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte said of her decision to disavow Donald Trump. | Getty Ayotte sticks with Trump disavowal While other GOP lawmakers waver or flip-flop, the New Hampshire Republican is done with Trump.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Just minutes after news broke of women alleging that Donald Trump had touched them inappropriately, Kelly Ayotte realized the benefit of withdrawing her endorsement of the Republican presidential candidate.

She no longer has to defend the guy.


“What comes out about him, I think I’ve already said my piece on it,” Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican, said on Wednesday after attending a fallen police officer ceremony here in the state’s largest city.

For the first-term senator, her decision to disavow Trump after he was caught bragging about making unwanted sexual advances with women is not without political risk. Standing up to Trump will help burnish her independent credentials, but Republicans are worried that her reversal on Trump will depress turnout among his core supporters.

Clearly, that's a worry for enough of Ayotte's GOP colleagues that they took back their un-endorsements on Wednesday, after calling for their nominee to resign over the weekend. But Ayotte says she’s willing to lose her race in order to repudiate a Republican standard bearer who has bragged about unwanted sexual advances on women and was accused in a Wednesday New York Times report of touching women without their consent.

“I made the decision I made as a matter of principle,” said Ayotte, who had spent months criticizing Trump while maintaining she preferred him over Hillary Clinton. “That’s more important to me than winning an election.”

Still, GOP officials in New Hampshire and Washington are worried that Ayotte will be dragged down by Trump's spiral of scandal and controversy. They're bracing for polling that could show Ayotte’s slim lead evaporating — or worse. A Public Policy Polling survey that took into account some of the fallout over Trump, as well as Ayotte’s rescinded endorsement, showed her opponent — Gov. Maggie Hassan (D) — up just one point, suggesting that she's not suffering political consequences, at least not yet.

Earlier Wednesday, a few miles down the road in her hometown of Nashua, two voters — one a Democrat, one a Republican — offered a window into the embattled senator's best chance for holding onto her seat in one of the most important Senate races in the country. Despite hailing from opposite ends of the political spectrum, both plan on voting for Ayotte even after her surprise decision on Saturday to retract her endorsement of Trump.

“I certainly am supporting Kelly. And I’m a Democrat. She’s really a shining star in the Senate,” said Stanley Stoncius, who opposes Trump and may have to “hold my nose” for Hillary Clinton. “She’s the state senator. She’s not representing Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton."

“I want to keep the Senate to stay the way it is. I don’t want the communists to take over,” said Trump supporter Jacques Cattiaux. Her decision to not endorse Trump “was calculating,” he admitted. “But that’s the filth of politics.”

For Ayotte, a first-term New Hampshire Republican senator, to defeat Hassan next month, the Republican will need a blend of thousands of voters just like Stoncius and Cattiaux going to the ballot box in a race that’s been deadlocked for a year and half.

Democrats are in the field conducting internal polls this week to measure the fallout of Trump — and some senior staffers believe the state is now a surefire win for Democrats with Trump’s implosion.

But Hassan is making a counterintuitive argument: That Ayotte made her about-face after sheepishly standing by Trump for months because it will earn her political points in a state that favors independence.

“She finally decided that that was enough and what I would ask her is: Why now? And I think the answer is very clear that this is a political calculation on her part. She’s trying to walk back her support because she understands it could cost her politically,” Hassan said.

The disciplined governor, who is among the most careful politicians running for the Senate this year, is going all-in behind a strategy to portray Ayotte as “Craven Kelly,” as her press team puts it, a politician so calculating that she stuck with Trump through fights with beauty queens and federal judges only until the winds shifted the other way.

“The question becomes: Whether she was surprised by it, which really calls into question her judgment. Or whether for most of the last year when she supported Donald Trump she was doing that because she had to politically and now she realizes that for political purposes, that will cost her,” Hassan said after touring the W.H. Bagshaw pin-making plant in Nashua owned by Democratic supporters.

Republicans say that’s not the case. They don’t know yet whether Ayotte hurt or helped herself on Saturday with her Trump withdrawal — and they say Ayotte doesn’t know yet either.

“This is a personal decision for Ayotte, not a political decision,” said a GOP operative on the ground here. “The Democrats would love to make this a referendum on the top of the ticket.”

Neither Hassan or Ayotte said they knew what effect her decision to abandon Trump will have on this tightly locked Senate race, despite bullish projections from Washington Democrats. But as her colleagues John Thune of South Dakota and Deb Fischer of Nebraska said Wednesday they would vote for Trump even after calling on him to step down as the nominee, it was clear that the Republican has no second thoughts.

“I met a woman in the frozen food aisle in Market Basket and she gave gave me a big hug,” Ayotte said, recounting the days after she distanced herself from Trump. “She had that reaction. But people certainly have different perspectives on it.”

