In October 2016, Kelly Ayotte did something genuinely difficult.

      Donald Trump had just been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women. Republicans across the country were calculating — how much could they stomach, how much did they need him, where exactly was the line. Most of them found a way to stay.

      Ayotte drew a line.

      “I cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women.”

      She went further. In a radio interview days later, she said Trump’s comments were — in her own words — “fundamentally talking, unfortunately, about assault.” She wrote in Mike Pence. She told a host she “wouldn’t want my daughter in the room” with Trump. She said: “Character does matter when I think about my children.”

     She said it clearly. She said it publicly. And it cost her.

      She lost her Senate seat that November — in part because of the chaos of her Trump un-endorsement in the final weeks of the campaign. It was one of the more painful political defeats in recent New Hampshire history.

      Give her this: in 2016, Kelly Ayotte told New Hampshire voters exactly who she was. The problem is what happened next.

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She didn’t disappear after 2016. Within months, she agreed to serve as Donald Trump’s “sherpa” for his first Supreme Court nominee — Neil Gorsuch. The woman who said she could not support a man who bragged about assaulting women was now working to help him reshape the federal judiciary. That 

Supreme Court — with justices confirmed through that process — would later vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

      She moved into the private sector. Among her positions: a seat on the board of Blackstone — the nation’s largest corporate landlord — at $150,000 per year in cash compensation, plus stock. By the time she ran for governor, she

held over $2.2 million in Blackstone shares.

      None of that is disqualifying on its own. People rebuild careers after political defeats. People serve on corporate boards. But the context matters — because in 2024, Ayotte needed Republican primary voters. And Republican primary voters, in 2024, meant Trump voters.

      So she made a calculation.

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Then came 2024.

Ayotte, who unendorsed Trump in 2016, now says he's right choice for White House. [The] former senator says she no longer supports pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.  

      In April of that year, sitting across from WMUR’s Adam Sexton for a CloseUP interview, Kelly Ayotte reversed two of the most significant positions of her political career in a single conversation.

      On Trump: “As you know, we had our differences in 2016, but I think as we look at where we are as a country right now, there’s no question he’s the right choice for the White House.”

      On immigration: she reversed her 2013 support for a pathway to citizenship, which she had once called “tough but fair.”

      Then Sexton asked the question directly. Do you regret withdrawing your endorsement of Trump in 2016?

      She did not answer.

      He asked again.

      She did not answer.

      What she said instead: “You know, Adam, I certainly appreciate that where we are as a country right now, it’s important that we have new leadership… there’s no doubt for me that where we are, we need new leadership and the contrast between the two administrations, the choice is clear in this race.”

      She never said she was wrong in 2016. She never said she had changed her mind about his character. She simply moved on — because the political math had changed.

      That double dodge is worth sitting with. A politician who can say clearly, on the record, that a man’s words constitute “fundamentally assault” — and then cannot say, eight years later, whether she was right or wrong to say it — is telling you something. Not about Trump. About herself.

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Now she is governor. And the question of who Kelly Ayotte really is has a governing record to answer it.

      The House Majority Leader she works with — Jason Osborne — told a libertarian audience this year, at a Free State Project event: “Sometimes you have to go on the 6 o’clock news and have to say with a straight face something that you don’t actually believe.”

      Read that again. New Hampshire’s House Majority Leader, at a public event, telling an audience that saying things he doesn’t believe — on camera, to voters — is part of how he governs.

      Ayotte has not commented.

      That same event featured Jeremy Kauffman, whose organization posted that it is “perfectly permissible to kill” a New Hampshire politician who poses a credible threat of introducing an income tax. The Attorney General investigated. Before the 2024 election, a photo published in Bedford Patch shows Ayotte standing next to Kauffman, Osborne, and Rachel Goldsmith of Moms for Liberty — the organization that offered a $500 bounty on public school

teachers

      Ayotte has not commented on any of it.

      She has also been silent as a member of her own Senate caucus was removed from all committees by the Republican Senate President for harassing staff, and as a House member posted a reference to a “final solution” directed at a Jewish colleague.

      The silence is not incidental. It is a governing choice.

      Her predecessor, Chris Sununu, vetoed bills pushed by this same caucus and kept his distance from the Free State network. Ayotte posed for the photo.

      And then there is this. Osborne’s wife owns a private education business that receives money from the school voucher program Osborne voted to expand and Ayotte signed into law — a $51.6 million, rapidly growing, wholly unfunded 

​universal voucher program that, according to the state’s own data, sends 97 percent of its money to families who were already in private school. The legislative oversight committee required by law to monitor the program went over a year without meeting — and only convened after being publicly called out for the lapse. When auditors last looked closely, they found problems in nearly one of every four accounts reviewed. The families receiving that money were, in the legislature’s own words, “costing the state zero dollars” before the program paid them

      Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity — the Washington-funded conservative group that keeps a fully staffed presence at Free State Project events and grades every legislative vote — has praised Ayotte's first term in office. AFP is simultaneously running a petition campaign to kill a bipartisan road funding bill that road builders, engineers, and bus companies across New Hampshire support, and that would cost New Hampshire residents nothing. Not one person testified against the bill at its public hearing. Ayotte has said she will veto it anyway. She already vetoed a paint recycling bill that the Business and Industry Association, Waste Management, and every city and town in New Hampshire supported — after AFP called it a "hidden tax." AFP said no. Ayotte said no. Both times.

      This is what governing with that caucus looks like.

      At her State of the State address to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce on April 2, 2026, Ayotte told the room that New Hampshire had “passed Vermont as the best place to raise a family.”

      She did not mention that the median home in New Hampshire now costs $535,000, and that only 15 percent of residents can afford it. She did not mention that nearly half of renters are paying more than 30 percent of their income just to keep a roof over their heads. She did not mention that a childcare worker earns $33,900 a year while market rent for a two-bedroom apartment runs $1,833 a month — leaving her $848 short.

      She did not mention that New Hampshire’s property taxpayers bear the highest share of education costs in the country — 70 cents of every education dollar — or that she signed a law this session making that burden permanent while removing the ability to challenge it in court.

      She also did not mention that while New Hampshire families were being priced out of housing, she was collecting $150,000 a year serving on the board of Blackstone — the nation’s largest corporate landlord, known for aggressive rent increases across its 274,000 rental units — and had accumulated over $2.2 million in company stock.

      When asked directly about the minimum wage — New Hampshire is the only state in New England with sub-$10 wages — she said: “The market handles it.”

      She did not mention her promised veto of the road funding bill, or the paint recycling veto, or Jason Osborne, or Jeremy Kauffman, or Americans for Prosperity.

She asked the room to judge her on rankings.

      The Pew Charitable Trusts ranks New Hampshire 4th worst in the nation for revenue recovery after COVID. The state ran a $67.3 million deficit last year and tapped its rainy day fund. Vermont — which kept its tax base — ranks 3rd best.

      Judge her on results.   

      In 2016, Kelly Ayotte told New Hampshire she could not and would not support a candidate who bragged about degrading and assaulting women. She said character matters when she thinks about her children.

      In 2024, she said there was no question Trump was the right choice for the White House. When asked whether she regretted changing her mind, she changed the subject. Twice.

      In 2026, she is asking New Hampshire for another term.

      The question for voters is not what Kelly Ayotte said she believed in 2016. It is whether she still believes it — or whether the lesson of her career is that she believes whatever is most useful at the time.

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She told us who she was in 2016. Then she showed us.

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