MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — Jeff Flake’s speech in New Hampshire wasn’t supposed to be such a thing. It was the Arizona senator’s second trip to the state this year, and whatever ambitions underlay those trips were likely pipe dreams for anyone, much less a man who had staked his political reputation on being out of sync with the rest of his party. The speech, which he had titled, “After the Deluge: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle,” was set to be just more of that, an impassioned plea for bipartisanship and less warfare-like politics, a nod to that pipe dream that drove home just how much he was a man on an island.

And then, after a tense hour on Friday that left an atypically large segment of the country glued to C-SPAN, Flake became the man of the moment. A speech earlier on Monday in Boston was relocated due to security concerns. Saint Anselm College shut down registration for his speech here at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics due to “increasing interest.” The heightened number of security personnel stationed at the entrances grumbled over where all the reporters — 60 were expected — would park. About 100 people gathered outside to protest Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court and urge Flake to vote him down in the Senate. Nearly 200 more people were inside to watch him.

“When I titled this speech 'After the Deluge,' I meant that metaphorically,” Flake cracked at the start of his New Hampshire speech. “I hadn’t counted on an actual deluge.”

On Friday afternoon, Flake cut a deal with Democratic Sen. Chris Coons to call for a one-week FBI investigation into Kavanaugh and the allegations of sexual assault brought against him, including those from Christine Blasey Ford, who had testified before Flake and the Judiciary Committee the day before. As the swing vote on the committee, and one of the swing votes in the entire Senate, Flake was in a unique position to delay a vote on Kavanaugh. He said in Boston that he did not want the FBI investigation he precipitated to be something that “gives us cover” and was working with the White House counsel and his colleagues to make sure it would not be.

“We’re wanting to make sure that that is a fulsome investigation and it’s not limited as some worried that it might be,” he told reporters after his speech in New Hampshire.

And so, the man who insisted repeatedly on his status as a “conservative Republican” on Monday became, for the moment, a hero on the left. The people who gathered outside Saint Anselm College before his speech were there to protest Kavanaugh, but they were also there to encourage Flake.

“He seems to be the only Republican asking, ‘Is there an elephant in the room?’ And it’s so obvious there’s an elephant in the room,” said John Seney, one of the 100 or so who gathered outside the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in the two hours before Flake spoke. That said, he added, “I don’t hold him in very high esteem yet.” It depended, he said, on what Flake did next.