James Pindell is a reporter and analyst for WMUR-TV and a columnist for New Hampshire Magazine.

Scott Brown was headed in the wrong direction. It was a Saturday morning in March, the day after he told hundreds at a Republican conference in Nashua that he had inched toward running for office by filing preliminary paperwork to challenge Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire’s first-term Democratic senator. He was driving the signature green GMC pickup truck that became a symbol in 2010 of his Everyman status in Massachusetts when, as a Republican, he won a special election for the seat held for nearly 50 years by the Democratic Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy.

And here he was again, an improbable candidate in another seemingly long-shot candidacy. Same truck, different state.


As he left a lunch at the Pink Cadillac Diner in Rochester, the second stop of the day on his “meet and greet” tour, Brown took a right, when he should’ve turned left to make it to his next destination. It was a mistake, but what else to expect from a man who’d only recently swapped out his “Spirit of America” Massachusetts license plates for New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die.”

Brown is a newcomer—a carpetbagger, Shaheen says. Yet he is having the same effect in New Hampshire that he’d had in Massachusetts, forcing a reevaluation of the state’s political identity or, some argue, capitalizing on popular anxieties such as Ebola, ISIL and a sluggish economy to pitch himself as the Republican savior.

There was a time when that would’ve been an easy sell. New Hampshire had been one of the most Republican states in the country, beginning in 1896 when William Jennings Bryan ran for president and wiped out the urban Democratic coalition. That Republican reign ended officially in 1996, when Shaheen won her first election as governor.

Shaheen is the only woman in the nation’s history to serve both as a governor and senator. During 40 years as a campaign operative and a candidate and aided by demographic shifts and national political realignment, Shaheen essentially built New Hampshire’s Democratic Party and in so doing, made New Hampshire a swing state.

Heading into Thursday’s final debate and just days away from the election, she remains popular with voters, with her approval ratings well over 50 percent. But that likeability hasn’t completely translated into the most recent polls, which show Shaheen up a point or two, well within the margin of error. This is explained, in part, because she is seen by many here as too close to Obama, whose 40 percent approval rating locally is dragging Shaheen and other Democrats down.

The bigger problem is Scott Brown. Out in the diners and country stores that serve as informal salons in this most retail of states few ever want to talk about Shaheen. This is what makes her supporters nervous. Her latest ad declares that “Scott Brown is NOT for New Hampshire. Never has been. Never will be.” But many of the good people of the Granite State, it seems, are intrigued. They want to know if you’ve met Scott Brown, they want to know what he’s like in person, they want to talk about his positions on national security and the economy and Obamacare and guns and abortion. And, oh yeah: What about that truck?

***

Brown has been meandering for quite some time. After losing his 2012 Senate re-election in Massachusetts to progressive favorite Elizabeth Warren, Brown spent 2013 exploring a run for that state’s other Senate seat. He considered a run for governor. He visited Iowa, twice, where he even hinted at a presidential run.

He officially became a resident of New Hampshire in December, announcing his interest in challenging Shaheen just three months later. Looking back, that day in March, the day when he aired his intentions at the Republican conference, was perhaps the most important of this nationally followed race that will have a role in deciding which party controls the U.S. Senate next year. On that day we learned basically everything we needed to know about a race that would become the most expensive in state history and, arguably, the most interesting Senate election here in 40 years.

We learned that Shaheen would ignore all of Brown’s Republican primary rivals, but not Brown, not for a second. Shaheen’s campaign sent a press release that day challenging Brown to sign a “people’s pledge” to limit third-party groups from spending on the contest. The pledge made sense for Shaheen: Over the course of the previous five years in the Senate, she had raised $6.8 million; Brown was basically starting from scratch, with only eight months until Election Day. Brown had taken the pledge in his re-election campaign in 2012 for Massachusetts senator, but we saw how that turned out. This time he said no.

At the latest tally $36 million has been spent on the race—this in a state of just 1.3 million people and one network television station. Roughly $24 million of that amount has come from the very outside groups Shaheen said she wanted to keep out. (The outside spending is basically evenly split between the two.)

We also learned that day that the Republican establishment would openly embrace Brown as its best chance to oust Shaheen. Brown recruited the best Republican operatives in the state; in one case, his finance director took the highly unusual step of quitting a similar job with a congressional campaign to work for Brown.

Brown also demonstrated that he had the skill to leave aside the media-driven, Massachusetts-style of politics and fully embrace New Hampshire’s retail style, where voters demand to meet candidates face-to-face. In Wakefield, shortly after his declaration, Brown encountered three opposition trackers, none of whom were assigned to New Hampshire the week before. They were waiting for him with video cameras at Lino’s Restaurant, hoping to catch a gaffe. Once inside, diners wanted to have their picture taken with Brown, as though he were another potential presidential candidate testing the waters. He went from table to table introducing himself and spent 10 minutes explaining to an 11-year-old basketball player how to improve his game by performing the Mikan drill, something he and his daughter practiced on their way to becoming college basketball standouts.

This is not to suggest it has been smooth sailing for Brown. While the establishment embraced him, those in the grassroots had questions. At Lino’s, a few prospective voters pulled Brown inside the kitchen to wag their fingers over his support for some gun control measures, including a ban on assault weapons. Three months earlier, hundreds of gun rights activists showed up to protest Brown’s appearance at a state Republican Party fundraiser. Guns weren’t the only sticking point; his stance on abortion also rankled some party faithful. Brown is the first statewide Republican nominee since former Sen. Warren Rudman in 1986 to be pro-choice. In frustration, days after the Brown won the September Republican primary, pro-life activists took over the state Republican Party convention and inserted a personhood amendment into the party’s platform, a provision that not only outlaws abortion, but could make some forms of contraception off-limits.

Brown may be neck-and-neck with Shaheen, but with a week to go before ballots are case, he is still trying to appeal to his base.

***

In the spring, the talk of the town was whether Brown was really going to run. Today, the question is, “Can he actually win?” Only the most partisan of Democrats flip the question around and ask if “Jeanne can hold on.”

Democrats have prevailed here in four of the last five presidential elections and have won eight of the last nine contests for governor. Roughly 43 percent of voters are now registered as independents. In 2006, caught up in the national mood, Democrats had their biggest year here since the 1870s. Then in 2010, Republicans picked up more congressional seats than they ever had in state history. The state chose Obama over Romney by 5.5 percentage points in 2012, but two years later Democrats have all but locked him out of the state.

Shaheen still clings to a narrow lead heading into the campaign’s final days and she’s been able to ward off some of Brown’s momentum. But Shaheen camp is nervous, while Brown’s operation still sizzles with energy. In the end, this election, in one of the most swing of swing states, may come down to whether voters think that Brown and that green truck of his are headed in the right direction.