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Trump campaign ousts volunteer over his warning about New Hampshire: Report

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Trump campaign ousts volunteer over his warning about New Hampshire: Report


A Donald Trump campaign volunteer in Massachusetts “will no longer have any involvement” in the campaign after he warned in an email that New Hampshire was “no longer a battleground state,” according to the Boston Globe on Monday.

In an email, which was obtained by the Globe, Tom Mountain, a Massachusetts volunteer for the Trump campaign, wrote to other Trump volunteers in the state that “the campaign has determined that New Hampshire is no longer a battleground state,” and instead directed supporters to focus on Pennsylvania, another battleground state.

Mountain continued in his email by stating that Trump was “sure to lose by an even higher margin” in New Hampshire than in 2016 and 2020, citing “campaign data/research.”

In 2020, Joe Biden won the state with 52 percent of the vote to Trump’s 45 percent, while in 2016, Hillary Clinton was able to carry the state by around 2,700 votes.

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In addition, Mountain claimed resources would be suspended and the campaign would not send Trump or high-profile figures central to the campaign to the state.

However, in an emailed response to Newsweek, Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied Mountain’s claims and reiterated the campaign’s efforts in New Hampshire stating it “maintains an on-the-ground presence” in the state.

“This isn’t true: President Trump’s campaign maintains an on-the-ground presence in New Hampshire, including staff and offices, while Kamala Harris is parachuting in because she knows that the Granite State is in play. We look forward to building on the momentum that we have grown since the primary and sending New Hampshire’s four electoral votes to President Trump’s column on November 5,” Leavitt said.

In addition, the Trump campaign clarified Mountain is a volunteer and does not hold a “formal role” in the campaign, adding that he is not privy to internal deliberations about campaign strategy or plans for other states.

“It appears this was just an independent attempt to generate enthusiasm for volunteer deployments to a nearby major swing state,” the Trump campaign said in an emailed statement.

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Mountain, who had served as one of several vice chairs for the former president’s effort in Massachusetts, is also a former official with the Massachusetts GOP.

Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a town hall meeting at La Crosse Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin, on August 29, 2024. A Trump campaign volunteer in Massachusetts “will no…


KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images

This comes as New Hampshire has voted Democratic in all but one election since 1992, but it is considered a battleground state in most election cycles because control of its state legislature and congressional seats have switched back and forth between Republicans and Democrats.

Meanwhile, battleground states, including New Hampshire, will play a key role in determining the result of this year’s election due to the Electoral College, which awards each state a certain number of electoral votes based on population. A presidential candidate needs to secure 270 electoral votes for victory, and winning the national popular vote does not guarantee success. Surveys from battleground states may be more telling than those of national polls.

In July, in the first public survey of New Hampshire voters since President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Harris had a lead of 6 points over the former president.

The poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire between July 23 and 25, shows Harris with a 49 to 43 percent lead over Trump. The poll surveyed 3,016 people and had a margin of error of 1.8 percent.

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In a Saint Anselm College Survey Center (SASC) poll of 2,083 New Hampshire registered voters conducted between July 24 and 25, Harris had a 50-44 percent margin over Trump. The poll had a 2.1 percent margin of error.

However, Harris was not previously leading in the state. In a poll conducted by the New Hampshire Journal and Praecones Analytica after the Republican convention but before Biden announced his withdrawal from the 2024 campaign when Harris was matched up against Trump in a head-to-head, her Republican rival was leading her by one point, on 40 percent to her 39 percent.

This comes as the Democratic presidential ticket has seen a dramatic reversal in the polls since Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Harris. She has surged in the polls—leading Trump in national and swing state polling averages whereas Biden was generally behind.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average on Monday, the vice president is 7 points ahead of Trump in the state, with 50.3 percent to his 43.2 percent.

Although Harris is leading in the polling averages, recent polls in Pennsylvania have also shown the pair tied, including the latest surveys conducted by Wick and Emerson College between August 25 and 29.

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Meanwhile, other polls have shown Trump in the lead, including a Trafalgar Group poll from August 30, which put the former president 2 points ahead of Harris among likely voters. A SoCal Strategies poll from August 23 put the former president 1 point ahead, while a Fabrizio Ward poll from August 21 also put the Republican 1 point ahead in a head-to-head matchup.



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New Hampshire

Top Trump volunteer in Mass. no longer with campaign after warning New Hampshire is ‘no longer a battleground state’ – The Boston Globe

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Top Trump volunteer in Mass. no longer with campaign after warning New Hampshire is ‘no longer a battleground state’ – The Boston Globe


A top Trump volunteer in Massachusetts “will no longer have any involvement” in the campaign after he sent an email Sunday evening raising alarm about the Republican ticket’s chances in neighboring New Hampshire.

Tom Mountain, who had served as one of several vice chairs for the former president’s effort in Massachusetts, wrote in an email to Trump volunteers in the state that “the campaign has determined that New Hampshire is no longer a battleground state,” and advised supporters to instead direct their attention to Pennsylvania. The GOP had been bullish about winning New Hampshire before President Biden dropped out of the race.

In the email, Mountain, a former official with the Massachusetts GOP, said Trump was “sure to lose by an even higher margin” in New Hampshire than in 2016 and 2020, citing “campaign data/research.” He claimed resources would be suspended and the campaign would not send Trump or high-profile surrogates such as his sons. The email was obtained by the Globe and confirmed with multiple recipients.

Republicans in New England and the Trump campaign were quick to rebut Mountain’s email and dismiss him as a mere volunteer not privy to internal deliberations about campaign strategy or plans for a state that is not his own.

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Brian Hughes, senior advisor to the Trump campaign, said to call Mountain a “leading volunteer” would be a “massive overstatement of his involvement” and added that “due to this ridiculous misrepresentation of our ongoing operation in New Hampshire, he will no longer have any involvement going forward.”

“This isn’t true,” Hughes said of Mountain’s email. “President Trump’s campaign maintains an on-the-ground presence in New Hampshire, including staff and offices, while Kamala Harris is parachuting in because she knows that the Granite State is in play. We look forward to building on the momentum that we have grown since the primary and sending New Hampshire’s four electoral votes to President Trump’s column on November 5.”

The Republican National Committee did not answer questions, however, about what resources it is sending to New Hampshire, or any plans for campaign events there. Trump has not appeared in New Hampshire since he won its first-in-the-nation primary in January, and it has been months since the state has had a visit from a top surrogate, such as North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum in April.

Steve Stepanek, who leads Trump’s campaign in New Hampshire, said Mountain “obviously has no idea what is going on in NH because he is from Massachusetts” but did not respond to further questions.

Even as Mountain’s message rankled many of his fellow Republicans, who complained he was uninformed or speaking out of turn, it underscored deep concerns among some in the GOP that having Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket makes Democrats more competitive in swing states such as New Hampshire. Mountain declined an interview request.

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New Hampshire is a purple state, with a Democratic congressional delegation and a Republican governor, but it has not voted for a Republican for president in more than 20 years. This year, with Biden at the top of the ticket, the GOP there was optimistic about taking the state back for Trump.

But since Harris ascended to the top of the ticket and built new momentum on the Democratic side, the race in Republican reach states such as New Hampshire has appeared to tighten. A recent poll found Harris leading Trump in the state, and she is expected to appear in New Hampshire this week. The Cook Political Report recently moved the state from “lean” to “likely” Democratic, another indication of Harris’s strength there. Given that challenge, as well as how few electoral votes New Hampshire carries — just four — it may not be worth investing in, some New England Republicans quietly acknowledge.

Two leading Massachusetts Republicans told the Globe they were not aware of any shift in the Trump campaign’s strategy for New England.

Janet Fogarty, the Republican National Committeewoman for Massachusetts, said in an interview Sunday that New Hampshire is “an important state.”

She said Republican volunteers from reliably blue Massachusetts flock north to campaign in New Hampshire every four years, and she did not expect 2024 to be any different. Of Mountain’s email, she said, “there’s no there there.”

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For his part, Mountain wrote in his email that “the Dems’ campaign shakeup from Biden to Harris led our campaign to shift strategy to other winnable battleground states.”

“So for those who were active in the NH ground campaign in 2016 and 2020, and expected to do the same after Labor Day, the simple question is… what are we to do?” Mountain wrote. “GO TO PENNSYLVANIA. The nearest battleground state. This is a must-win state. If we lose Pennsylvania we lose the election.”

A former vice chairman of the Massachusetts GOP, Mountain stepped down from the role in 2021 in the wake of what he called a “scurrilous and demeaning” blog post about his personal life.


Emma Platoff can be reached at emma.platoff@globe.com. Follow her @emmaplatoff.





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New Hampshire

From the Garden State to the Granite State – The Boston Globe

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From the Garden State to the Granite State – The Boston Globe


“It feels kind of weird,” I said, barely one month into living in the Granite State. “It’s been me. It’s been who I am.”

She looked me in the eye and said, “You’re very brave.”

She was not the first to call me brave. She was not the last to say it, to write it in a card. But I was on autopilot since I received an inviting job offer a few days before Christmas. There was much to do.

The pandemic, I quickly learned, transformed an affordable real estate market in the Granite State to the Wild West of home buying or renting an apartment — the same story as the rest of the country: no inventory and skyrocketing prices. Still, no match for Ginger, my high school friend who was like an English pointer, doggedly scouring housing websites for me for weeks, until she reached a breakthrough and found a new listing. I needed a decent place to land. Check. Pet-friendly. Check.

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Over text, I was introduced to a future colleague who FaceTimed me during a walk-through so I could see the apartment. By Jan. 8, I was setting up the electric utility account for my apartment, situated between the Lakes Region and the gateway to the White Mountains.

It took awhile before I understood what that meant, the beauty, the majesty, the isolation.

Dodging New Hampshire snowstorms, I moved in on Jan.12, with a job-start date of the 15th.

I left the Garden State with a friend who lovingly packed a 12-foot trailer with several pieces of furniture that would make this one-bedroom galley apartment home. I left my childhood home in the hands of friends who would caretake the last place where my family had been a family and help offset the cost of expenses. I left my neighborhood with the tears and hugs of neighbors. I knew this house. I knew this town, this state, these roads. Eventually, living in the day-to-day of New Hampshire, when the boxes were unpacked and the furniture shaped a home, I came to realize that I left familiarity, and recognizing that held its own kind of emptiness.

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A driver approached a tree that had fallen in Chesterfield, N.H., after a snowstorm in January 2023.Kristopher Radder/The Brattleboro Reformer via AP

There are things that my small and unpretentious wardrobe never imagined, like fleece-lined pants or NASA-technology down jackets. Their warmth and comfort do not eclipse my sense of what it must feel like to be an astronaut wearing a diaper. And the boots. Oh, the many boots.

Adjusting to winter seemed frivolous compared to driving an hour to shop at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. Two hours to Costco was like Christmas. I was shopping for familiar comforts. Some days, just deciding which boots to wear and leaving the apartment and getting on roads without cell service seemed brave. For this suburban kid who has always lived a stone’s throw away from Manhattan, driving on dirt and densely wooded roads is not natural.

And when mud season arrived, like the day I found myself unintentionally off-roading — seriously, some people do this for recreation? — it was nothing short of terrifying. I have never seen mud tracks that were somewhere between six inches and “We’re sinking.”

Two bull moose faced off over rights to a patch of mud where they were feeding at Umbagog Wildlife Refuge in Wentworth Location, N.H., in May 2018.Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

Would the SOS button in my Subaru work? Would anyone find me if something happened? There was no place to turn. I understood one thing: Keep the car moving forward. It was time for X-mode, a feature that I had never before used but was willing to trust. It felt at once like I was an action figure clawing the earth and Captain Kirk commanding the Starship Enterprise. Oddly exhilarated and terrified, I steered the Subaru up over the mountain. Not bad for a flatlander. I felt something akin to courage.

As my days and months in New Hampshire pass — now just shy of eight months — there have been other mettle detectors, like the nine-hour drive home from what now plays like an adventure movie: Escape from the Eclipse. On the winding, wooded roads where I have learned to trust my companion, the British GPS man, my once-sheer panic is mostly a diluted nervousness. It lasts for a moment, while I mentally review whether I have water, coffee, or food in the car. But then I hear myself: We’re OK. Everything is OK. And I go back to listening to my book on tape. Or I see the sun filtering through the richly forested areas, the elegant, feathery ferns, the impressive rock walls, and I see the elements as the forces they are: self-assured, nonthreatening.

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Through snow or mist, the mountains — set against the greening of the trees, the painted clouds, and big sky — carry a nobility. Breathing in the expansive landscapes that brim with possibilities, I cannot help but feel that too. And the move that brought me, a writer, to live and work in this rural, sometimes remote area of New Hampshire has shown me that courage comes in bits and opportunities.

“You’re very brave,” she said.

Yes. I now know what she means.

Mary Ann D’Urso is a freelance writer.





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New Hampshire

N.H. man sentenced for conspiracy to harass and intimidate two NHPR journalists – The Boston Globe

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N.H. man sentenced for conspiracy to harass and intimidate two NHPR journalists – The Boston Globe


A New Hampshire man was sentenced to more than two years in federal prison last week for his involvement in the harassment and intimidation of two New Hampshire Public Radio journalists, officials said.

Tucker Cockerline, 33, of Salem, N.H., was sentenced Tuesday to 27 months in prison and three years of supervised release for his role in the 2022 conspiracy, which included the vandalism of the homes of the reporters and one reporter’s parents with bricks, large rocks, and red spray paint on five separate occasions, the US attorney’s office said in a statement Thursday.

Cockerline was arrested and charged by criminal complaint in June 2023, and he pleaded guilty last December in federal court in Boston to conspiracy to commit stalking through interstate travel and using a facility of interstate commerce, prosecutors said.

He was one of four men indicted in connection with the conspiracy, alongside Eric Labarge, Michael Waselchuck, and Keenan Saniatan, prosecutors said.

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Labarge and Waselchuck have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing. Saniatan is expected to plead guilty this month, prosecutors said.

The harassment and vandalism began after one of the journalists published an article in March 2022 detailing allegations against a former New Hampshire businessperson, prosecutors said. A second NHPR journalist contributed to the article.

Though prosecutors didn’t identify the reporters or the businessperson, the case involves NHPR’s reporting on allegations of sexual misconduct against Eric Spofford, founder of Granite Recovery Centers, a network of addiction rehabilitation centers in New Hampshire, the Globe reported.

Spofford has denied the allegations and has not been charged with any crimes related to NHPR’s reporting or the harassment campaign, the Globe reported.

In 2022, after the article was published, Labarge, who officials called “a close personal associate of” the businessperson, along with Cockerline, Waselchuck, and allegedly Saniatan, “agreed to harass and intimidate” the two journalists and their immediate family members, prosecutors said.

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Cockerline and Saniatan were allegedly “solicited” to commit the vandalism and harassment by Labarge, prosecutors said.

On the night of April 24, 2022, Cockerline spray-painted a vulgar term related to female anatomy in large red letters on the front door of the first journalist’s former home in Hanover, N.H., and threw a brick through a window, the statement said.

Also that night, Saniatan allegedly spray-painted the same vulgar term on the front door of the second journalist’s home in Concord, N.H., and threw a large rock at the home, prosecutors said. He then “allegedly threw a softball-sized rock” through a window and spray-painted the same word on the first journalist’s parents’ home in Hampstead, N.H., according to prosecutors.

On May 20, 2022, Cockerline spray-painted the same word on the first journalist’s parents’ home and left a brick on the ground near the front door, prosecutors said.

Several hours later, Waselchuck, who Cockerline recruited, threw a brick through a window of the first journalist’s Melrose home and left a warning reading, “JUST THE BEGINNING!” in large red letters, prosecutors said.

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Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report.


Ava Berger can be reached at ava.berger@globe.com. Follow her @Ava_Berger_.

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