Northeast
Longtime Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen not seeking re-election in 2026 in key northeastern swing state
Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire is the latest Democrat in the Senate to announce her retirement rather than seek re-election in the 2026 midterms.
The Wednesday announcement by the former governor and three-term senator in a key New England swing state will further complicate the Democrats’ efforts to regain control of the Senate from the Republicans in next year’s elections.
The news also marks the beginning of the end of a long and successful career of the first woman in American politics to win election both as a governor and as a U.S. senator.
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Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., speaks before President Joe Biden arrives to deliver remarks on lowering the cost of prescription drugs, at NHTI Concord Community College, Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024, in Concord, N.H. (AP Photo/Steven Senne) (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
“I ran for public office to make a difference for the people of New Hampshire,” Shaheen said. “That purpose has never and will never change. But today, after careful consideration, I am announcing that I have made the difficult decision not to seek re-election to the Senate in 2026.”
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Shaheen, who turned 78 earlier this year, added that “it’s just time.”
The senator emphasized that “while I am not seeking re-election, believe me I am not retiring. I am determined to work every day over the next two years and beyond, to continue to try to make a difference for the people of New Hampshire and this country.”
There was intense speculation for months regarding whether Shaheen, who first won election to the Senate in 2008 and who this year became the first woman in history to hold one of the top two positions on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would seek another term in office.
Shaheen raised a paltry $170,000 in the final fundraising quarter of 2024, which sparked buzz that the senator might not be preparing for another re-election campaign. But sources in Shaheen’s political orbit noted that the senator did not emphasize fundraising in the fourth quarter of last year, which included the final month of the 2024 presidential election.
Fox News confirmed last week that Shaheen had a major fundraiser scheduled for March 20 in Manchester, New Hampshire. There’s no word yet on whether that event has now been canceled.
It has been 15 years since Republicans last won a Senate election in New Hampshire, with Democrats victorious in the past four elections.
“No Republican has won a Senate race in over a decade in New Hampshire, and that trend will continue in 2026. This is exactly the kind of state where the building midterm backlash against Republicans will hit their candidates especially hard,” Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesperson David Bergstein told Fox News in a statement.
But national Republicans see opportunities to flip the Senate seat in New Hampshire from blue to red, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) had already run ads targeting Shaheen over her defense of USAID funding that the Trump administration is axing.
“Another one! Shaheen’s retirement is welcome news for Granite Staters eager for new leadership. New Hampshire has a proud tradition of electing common-sense Republicans – and will do so again in 2026,!” Sen. Tim Scott, the NRSC chair, said in a statement to Fox News.
Former Sen. Scott Brown is interviewed by Fox News Digital, on Dec. 24, 2024 in Rye, New Hampshire (Fox News – Paul Steinhauser)
Former Sen. Scott Brown, the former senator from Massachusetts who later narrowly lost to Shaheen in New Hampshire in the 2014 election, is seriously considering a 2026 run.
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Brown, who served four years as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand during President Donald Trump’s first administration, has been holding meetings with Republicans across New Hampshire for a couple of months and has met multiple times with GOP officials in the nation’s capital.
“I appreciate @jeanneshaheen’s service to our state and for her support and vote for me as NH’s Ambassador to NZ and Samoa. Now it’s time for New Hampshire to have someone in the delegation who fights for our priorities and stands with, not against, the Trump agenda,” Brown said in a social media post.
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire is interviewed by Fox News Digital, on July 11, 2024 in Newfields, N.H. (Fox News – Paul Steinhauser)
New Hampshire’s popular former Republican governor, Chris Sununu, has said repeatedly in interviews with Fox News and other news organizations over the past year that he had no interest in running for the Senate in 2026.
Sununu was heavily courted to run for the Senate in the 2022 cycle against Democrat incumbent Sen. Maggie Hassan, another former governor, but decided against making a run.
Among Democrats, all eyes will now be on four-term Rep. Chris Pappas to see if he launches a Senate campaign. Pappas, whose family owns and operates an iconic restaurant and conference center in Manchester – the state’s largest city- was first elected to Congress in 2018.
Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) greets supporters after his midterm victory during an election night watch party at the Puritan Conference Center on November 8, 2022 in Manchester, New Hampshire. (Photo by Sophie Park/Getty Images)
A person with knowledge of Pappas thinking confirmed to Fox News that the congressman is seriously considering a Senate run to succeed Shaheen.
Pappas, in a social media post, praised Shaheen as a “trailblazer who has worked every day to put New Hampshire first and make a difference for our families, community, and economy. Thank you for always leading with integrity, determination, and effectiveness for our state and nation.”
Former Democratic Rep. Ann Kuster, who retired from the House at the beginning of this year after a dozen years representing New Hampshire’s other congressional district, told Fox News that she would “take a serious look” at running for the Senate if Pappas decides against launching a campaign.
Also considering a Senate run, according to a source familiar, is Democratic Rep. Maggie Goodlander, who won election to Congress last November and succeeded Kuster.
Republicans flipped four Democrat-held Senate seats in last November’s elections to win back control of the chamber. They now control the chamber and are aiming to expand their majority in 2026.
Besides New Hampshire, the GOP is targeting battleground Michigan, where Democratic Sen. Gary Peters announced in January that he would not seek re-election. Also on their 2026 radar is Georgia, another key battleground state where Republicans view first-term Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff as vulnerable.
Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota announced last month that she would not bid for another term in next year’s midterms, giving the GOP hope that it might be competitive in the blue-leaning state.
But Republicans are also playing defense in the 2026 cycle.
Democrats plan to go on offense in blue-leaning Maine, where moderate GOP Sen. Susan Collins is up for re-election, as well as in battleground North Carolina, where Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is also up in 2026.
And Democrats are looking at red-leaning Ohio, where Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted was appointed in January to succeed now-Vice President JD Vance in the Senate. Husted will run next year to finish out Vance’s term.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire raises her arms after claiming a re-election victory, at a gathering with supporters on Nov. 3, 2020, in Manchester, N.H.. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Shaheen’s career in politics began long before she ran for elective office.
She served as a county organizer on former President Jimmy Carter’s historic first White House campaign, as part of the team that boosted the little-known former Georgia governor to the presidency.
Four years later she ran Carter’s re-election campaign in the first-in-the-nation presidential primary state as the White House incumbent fought off a serious primary challenge from the late Sen.Ted Kennedy of neighboring Massachusetts.
In 1984, Shaheen ran Gary Hart’s presidential campaign in New Hampshire, helping Hart to a surprise victory over former Vice President Walter Mondale in New Hampshire.
Shaheen went on to win election as a state senator, and in 1996 won the first of three straight two-year terms as New Hampshire governor. And her 2008 Senate victory was the first by a Democrat in New Hampshire in more than three decades.
Shaheen is credited with boosting the Democratic Party in New Hampshire and helping turn a red state purple.
Longtime state party chair Ray Buckley called Shaheen “an iconic New Hampshire trailblazer.”
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Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll meet a first-time rider in the Five Boro Bike Tour who learned the hard way that wearing a helmet matters. And on this, the 95th anniversary of the day the Empire State Building opened, we’ll find out about some of the workers who built it.
As a first-timer in the Five Boro Bike Tour on Sunday, Patricia Hochhauser will wear a helmet. It’s a must for the 32,000 entrants.
But Hochhauser has special reason to. She wasn’t wearing one a couple of years ago, when she tried out a gas-powered scooter. Her husband, Harold Hochhauser, said it had bucked and thrown her off. She sustained a traumatic brain injury.
“I live every day with the consequences of not wearing that helmet,” she said. She was checking out the scooter in a parking lot. “I was so excited about it, thinking I was going to do errands in the neighborhood — put on a backpack and throw my groceries in there,” she said. “I had all these big hopes and dreams.” She said she did not remember anything about the accident “until they were putting staples in my head” — 15 in all, she said.
The accident cost her a job opportunity, she said: She had been scheduled to start training a week later as a bus driver with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She had been a school bus driver and was looking forward to getting behind the wheel of one of the 1,300 buses in the M.T.A.’s fleet.
On Sunday she is looking forward to riding over the 2.6-mile-long Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The lower level will be closed to cars and trucks to accommodate the cyclists, who will start out at Franklin Street and Church Street in TriBeCa in Manhattan. Some avenues and major highways will also be off limits to cars and trucks at times during the tour. The City Department of Transportation’s traffic advisory is here. And the Five Boro Bike Tour does not permit scooters like the one she was riding when she had the accident. Some e-bikes are allowed. She plans to ride her regular road bike.
‘We are Gen X’
When the accident happened, Hochhauser and her husband were already practiced cyclists and owned helmets. But they never bothered with them, she said.
Why not?
“Because we are Gen X, and I grew up not having to wear a helmet,” she said. “Half the time growing up, I didn’t even have to wear a seatbelt in the car. It wasn’t like, Oh, get in the back seat and buckle up, you know?”
After the accident, she was determined to ride again. Harold Hochhauser said that their first outings were difficult. To help her maintain balance, he put training wheels on her bike — since removed, he said.
Last year they rode in the Tour de Yonkers, picking the 50-mile route, the longest of three that participants could follow. She said there were hills that she could not conquer — she had to get off and walk up.
“I’m doing it all myself this time,” she said. “I am, you know, stronger than I was then.”
Weather
Today will be bright and sunny with a high near 65. Expect increasing clouds and a chance of rain tonight, as temperatures fall near 51.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.” — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on what he would have said to King Charles III if they had met privately during the royal visit on Wednesday. The priceless jewel is a symbol of colonial plunder.
The workers who built the Empire State Building
On another May 1 — in 1931, by coincidence also a Friday — the Empire State Building opened, and on that morning, everyone’s perspective changed. People were awed by the view of the building and the view from the building, “a new view” of New York, as The New York Times described it from 85 stories up. The ships in the Hudson River were “little more than rowboats,” the paper reported. Fifth Avenue and Broadway were “slender black ribbons.”
The Times said that 3,400 workers had “coordinated tasks to finish ahead of schedule.” Glenn Kurtz, whose father’s office was in the building, wondered who they were.
“When you look at the standard histories, the answer is always the architects, the owners and the contractors,” Kurtz told me. He wanted to know about the “people who had tools in their hands.”
“I very quickly discovered there was almost no information about them,” he said. There was no list of their names; the men in famous photographs taken by Lewis W. Hine “have invariably been referred to as ‘anonymous workers,’” Kurtz said. He spent a decade doing research for the book “Men at Work: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen Who Built It” and put names to some of the faces in Hine’s photos.
He spotted 32 names on a plaque in the lobby — for workers who were given “certificates of superior craftsmanship” — and realized that many were the men in Hine’s photographs.
But the images themselves were why the workers’ identities had been overlooked. “The photographs are iconic, they represent a generalized ideal, and we love generalized ideals,” Kurtz said. To say, ‘Oh, that’s not this magnificent, iconic image of a worker, it’s Victor Gosselin, who lived in Canada and died in a car crash’ — many people would feel it diminishes the image to know who the actual person was.”
Or, as he said a moment later, “the actual lives of these men often undermine the mythology.”
Gosselin was almost certainly a Mohawk from the Kahnawake reservation, whose territory once reached what is now upstate New York. Another, George Adams, was apparently distantly related to the second president of the United States, John Adams. Others were recent immigrants from Ireland and Italy, as well as Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Some were sons or grandsons of German or Scottish immigrants.
In “Men at Work,” Kurtz described Neil Doherty, an ironworker Hine photographed, as one of the few “allowed to have his own voice” in newspaper articles about the construction of the huge skyscraper.
“It’s just like anything else,” Doherty was quoted as saying in one article. “A person on solid ground never has any fear of falling. That’s just the way you become, up on the girders after a while, and you have to watch yourself taking that attitude. Usually the two days off at the end of the week are enough to take away this carelessness.”
Gosselin was “the single best-known worker on the building” because he was photogenic and charismatic, Kurtz said. “And in every portrayal of him, he epitomizes the cultural ideal that has so powerfully shaped our image of the workmen who built the Empire State.“
“My real question was, What does the building stand for?” Kurtz told me. “One way to think of it is as a central symbol of America in the 20th century. If we imagine it in those terms, do we think of the five rich men who were funding it, or do we think in terms of the 10,000 mostly immigrant men who built it? The story of the five is told over and over again. I thought it would be interesting to tell the other story.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Covered up
Dear Diary:
I was walking down Clinton Street on the Lower East Side when I passed a couple of guys sitting on a bench.
“You look like you’re in a witness protection program,” one said.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“You look like you’re in a witness protection program, for sure,” he repeated.
With Jayson Tatum unavailable, Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla threw his starting lineup into a blender for Game 7 against the Philadelphia 76ers.
Boston opened Saturday’s win-or-go-home game at TD Garden with a five-man unit of Derrick White, Ron Harper Jr., Baylor Scheierman, Jaylen Brown and Luka Garza.
White and Brown are longtime starting-lineup staples, and Scheierman, Harper and Garza all started games at different points this season. But this was that quintet’s first time sharing the floor. They’d played zero minutes together during the regular season or postseason.
Harper, Scheierman and Garza were part of Boston’s top-performing lineup in Game 6. Those three, along with Payton Pritchard and Jordan Walsh, staged a late-game rally, cutting a 23-point deficit to 12 before losing steam in the final minutes of Philadelphia’s series-extending 106-93 win.
The trio of new additions also played key roles in one of the Celtics’ most memorable wins of the season: the Game 82 matchup with the Orlando Magic that Boston won despite sitting their top seven rotation players. Harper, Scheierman and Garza combined for 84 points in that win, with Garza hitting the decisive 3-pointer late in the fourth quarter.
Scheierman and Garza have seen sporadic playing time in Boston’s first-round playoff series, but Harper — who only had his two-way contract converted to a standard deal last month — had only played in blowouts before his surprise start on Saturday.
The radical lineup change pushed usual starters Neemias Queta and Sam Hauser to the bench. Queta had started 81 of the 82 games he’d played this season, including each of the first six playoff games, but he’s struggled to stay out of foul trouble against the Sixers. The Celtics were outscored with Hauser on the floor in four of the first six postseason contests.
Mazzulla opted for Garza over veteran center Nikola Vucevic, who has been Queta’s primary backup when healthy.
Tatum was ruled out for Game 7 with left knee tightness.
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