Keller @ Large: Kelly Ayotte’s Massachusetts bashing is a tired political play

BOSTON – “We are one election away from becoming Massachusetts in New Hampshire, and I’m not gonna let that happen,” said former Sen. Kelly Ayotte as she kicked off her run to succeed Chris Sununu as governor.

It was a throwback name in New Hampshire politics leading off her comeback attempt with an old political tactic – Massachusetts bashing.

“Here in New Hampshire, we take our state motto very seriously, ‘Live Free or Die.’ It’s just a very different perspective from our neighbors,” Ayotte said in a Fox News interview.

To University of New Hampshire political science professor, Dante Scala, it was an understandable opening gambit. “Saying that you’re not Massachusetts, the great thing about that is that different types of Republicans can read into that different types of things,” he says.

For instance, Ayotte invoked a racially-tinged trope by blaming New Hampshire’s drug problems on two Massachusetts border cities. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen drugs, fentanyl being trafficked off our southern border from Lowell and Lawrence, Mass., into our cities, and it’s killing our citizens,” she said. Actually, a National Drug Intelligence Center threat assessment found that New Hampshire drug dealers and users are “crossing the border into Massachusetts to obtain drugs.”

“A lot of New Hampshire voters see Lowell and Lawrence as a place where the racial composition is much different, and that is kind of alien,” notes Scala.

If that dog whistle sounds familiar, it’s because then-candidate Donald Trump used it often back in 2016. Ayotte’s break with Trump cost her in her failed run for re-election to the U.S. Senate that year, so perhaps this is her attempt to appeal to potentially skeptical Trump fans in this race.

Will this line of attack work for Ayotte when Republicans chose a nominee for governor in September of next year?

Don’t bet on it. Plenty of other Republicans will be using the same tactics. And even if she makes it to the final, it’s doubtful the Democratic nominee will be running on a platform of turning New hampshire into Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, you can be sure any Trump-aligned competitors in the primary will remind voters of Ayotte’s past differences with Trump early and often.