Politics

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire Democrat, Won’t Run Again in 2026

Published

5 days ago

March 12, 2025

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire Democrat, Won’t Run Again in 2026

Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire will not run for re-election in 2026, bringing an end to a long and singular political career and further complicating Democrats’ efforts to regain a majority in the Senate.

Her decision not to seek a fourth term will immediately set off a high-stakes race in a state whose voters are famously fickle. Last fall, New Hampshire voters supported former Vice President Kamala Harris for president and elected Democrats to Congress, but they also voted for a Republican governor and expanded Republican majorities in the state legislature.

“It was a difficult decision, made more difficult by the current environment in the country — by President Trump and what he’s doing right now,” Ms. Shaheen, 78, said in an interview with The New York Times. She specifically criticized the president’s focus on political retribution, his drastic cuts to the federal budget and his antagonism toward Ukraine as it defends itself from Russia’s invasion.

Ms. Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was the first woman to be elected governor of New Hampshire and the first woman in the country to serve as both a governor and a U.S. senator. She noted in the interview that she will have served for 30 years in elected office and spent 50 years in politics.

“It’s important for New Hampshire and the country to have a new generation of leadership,” she said.

Among the Republicans already considering a run for Senate from New Hampshire next year is former Senator Scott Brown, who represented Massachusetts for one term and later relocated to New Hampshire. He came close to beating Ms. Shaheen in 2014 and went on to become ambassador to New Zealand in Mr. Trump’s first term.

The state’s popular former governor, Chris Sununu, a Republican, has said that he will not run.

In the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-to-47 majority, Ms. Shaheen is the third Democrat, after Senator Gary Peters of Michigan and Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, to announce plans to retire, making the party’s path to a majority even more difficult. Democrats have few pickup opportunities and must now defend several open seats, though they are hopeful of a friendlier political environment given that the party out of power usually has a strong midterm election.

Even before Ms. Shaheen’s decision, Republicans saw an opportunity to flip the New Hampshire Senate seat in 2026. The National Republican Senatorial Committee recently created an ad criticizing her defense of foreign aid programs.

Ms. Shaheen, who was first elected to the Senate in 2008, a few years after serving three terms as governor, has played a starring role in the political life of New Hampshire for decades.

She was a county organizer on Jimmy Carter’s first presidential campaign, helping to catapult him from obscurity to the White House and demonstrating the significance of her tiny state’s early presidential primary election. Four years later, she was Mr. Carter’s state director in New Hampshire as he fended off a primary challenge from Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. In 1984, she ran Gary Hart’s presidential campaign in the state, engineering a surprise victory there over former Vice President Walter Mondale.

Ms. Shaheen is also credited with helping revive the fortunes of the Democratic Party in a state that was once overwhelmingly Republican.

Her election to the Senate was the first for a New Hampshire Democrat since 1975. But even before that, her tenure as governor helped modernize the party’s election machinery and created a blueprint for a generation of moderate New Hampshire Democrats who followed her as governor and in Congress. In her first run for governor, she neutralized Republicans’ longtime characterization of Democrats as big taxers by taking the state’s pledge against broad-based sales or income taxes.

All of that experience has given her perspective on her party’s current state, as it searches for a sharper response to Mr. Trump.

“I think people thought they were voting for someone who would address inflation, lower grocery prices, energy costs, housing,” she said. “They haven’t gotten any of those things.”

Democrats, she said, need to promote specific policies to improve Americans’ daily lives, including in education and health care.

Ms. Shaheen’s brand of low-drama leadership has none of the bombast and swagger currently in vogue, and perhaps would not have succeeded in other corners of the country. Critics have sometimes derided her as “Betty Crocker,” and she never became a well-known presence on national political talk shows. But in New Hampshire, where registered Republicans and undeclared voters outnumber Democrats, her no-nonsense style and cautious, long-game politics won her far more elections than she lost.

In the Senate, she mastered the art of patience and persistence, working for instance with a Republican colleague on a measure to promote energy efficiency over many years before seeing it become law.

Ms. Shaheen has been part of the New Hampshire political scene for so long that it is difficult to remember how controversial some of her signature efforts were in their day. As governor, she expanded access to public kindergarten and made New Hampshire the final state to adopt the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a state holiday — ideas that the rest of the country had largely accepted years earlier but that New Hampshire lawmakers had long resisted.

In Washington, where she also sits on the Senate Armed Services, Small Business and Appropriations committees, she points to her recent work on infrastructure legislation and a program to help small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic as career highlights. Both were bipartisan partnerships, a strategy she says she learned from her early days in politics, when New Hampshire was “a one-party state, essentially.”

She worked with Senator John McCain of Arizona, who died in 2018, on a plan to provide visas for Afghans who helped the U.S. military during the war in their country.

And in both Washington and New Hampshire, she has worked on issues of reproductive rights. In 1997, she notably signed the repeal of a 19th-century state law that had made abortion a felony, decades before the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

Ms. Shaheen has also been a booster of New Hampshire’s “first-in-the-nation” presidential primary — a designation that has been under attack by national Democrats who argue that the state, less racially diverse than much of the country, does not deserve its spot at the front of the line. In 2024, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. did not officially participate in the New Hampshire contest, although his supporters there waged a successful write-in campaign on his behalf.

To Ms. Shaheen and other proponents of New Hampshire’s nominating contest, the state’s small size and engaged electorate make it a good stage for candidates to hone their messages and hear directly from voters. She remains optimistic about its staying power. Already, she said, potential Democratic presidential candidates for 2028 are talking about making trips to the state.

For her part, Ms. Shaheen is imagining a new life with a less challenging schedule. “It will be nice to have a little more time to engage in some other things,” she said.

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Politics

Trump Says He Will Call Putin to Discuss Ending Ukraine War

Published

8 hours ago

March 17, 2025

Press Room

Trump Says He Will Call Putin to Discuss Ending Ukraine War

President Trump said he would speak with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday, as he continued to express optimism that Russia would agree to a proposal to halt fighting in Ukraine for 30 days.

“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening. “Maybe we can. Maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”

Mr. Trump said that progress on negotiations had been made over the weekend, and there have been ongoing discussions about “dividing up certain assets,” specifically mentioning concessions over land and power plants.

“I think we’ll be talking about land, it’s a lot of land. It’s a lot different than it was before the war, as you know,” Mr. Trump said.

He added: “We’ll be talking about power plants. That’s a big question. But I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides — Ukraine and Russia.”

Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East who has been involved in the peace talks, said Sunday on CNN that he had a positive meeting with Mr. Putin last week that lasted three to four hours. He declined to share the specifics of their conversation, but he said the two sides had “narrowed the differences between them.”

Ukraine has already agreed to support the U.S.-backed cease-fire, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has accused Mr. Putin of purposely delaying negotiations while trying to trap Ukrainian forces to improve his position in the cease-fire talks.

Mr. Putin had demanded on Friday that Ukraine’s troops in the Kursk region of Russia surrender. But by the weekend, after fierce fighting, the Ukrainians had withdrawn from most of the region, leaving them controlling a sliver of land in Russia.

Politics

Minnesota Republicans to introduce bill defining 'Trump derangement syndrome' as mental illness

Published

9 hours ago

March 17, 2025

Press Room

Minnesota Republicans to introduce bill defining 'Trump derangement syndrome' as mental illness

A group of Minnesota Republican lawmakers plan to propose legislation requiring the state to include “Trump derangement syndrome” under its definition of mental illness.

Five GOP lawmakers are set to introduce the bill in the state’s Senate on Monday and refer it to the Health and Human Services committee, according to Fox 9. The bill aims to specifically add “Trump derangement syndrome” to the state’s definition of mental illness.

“Trump derangement syndrome” is defined as “acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump,” according to the bill.

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A group of Minnesota Republican senators plan to propose a bill to define “Trump derangement syndrome” as a mental illness. (Carl Court – Pool/Getty Images)

“Symptoms may include Trump-induced general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump’s behavior,” the proposal reads.

With a split state legislature, the bill is unlikely to be approved.

Mental illness is defined as a disorder or other issue that is included in a diagnostic codes list. “Trump derangement syndrome” is not recognized as a mental illness anywhere.

The bill is unlikely to be approved in a split legislature. (AP/Ben Curtis)

President Donald Trump and his supporters have used the term “Trump derangement syndrome” to criticize political opponents who they believe have a biased obsession against the president and his policies.

While the “derangement syndrome” as a political phrase has been made popular in recent years to mock critics of Trump, the term was actually coined in 2003 by the late political commentator Charles Krauthammer to describe critics of then-President George W. Bush.

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The bill defines “Trump derangement syndrome” as “acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump.” (Getty Images)

The Minnesota proposal features the same phrasing Krauthammer used to describe “Bush derangement syndrome,” which was defined as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.”

Politics

Trump and recent gains give the California Republican Party hope

Published

10 hours ago

March 17, 2025

Press Room

Trump and recent gains give the California Republican Party hope

SACRAMENTO — A caravan of pickup trucks waving large President Trump flags circled the California Republican Party’s convention this weekend, with drivers occasionally hopping out to dance to the Village People song “Y.M.C.A.,” a favorite tune at the president’s rallies.

Inside, delegates posed with giant cutouts of Trump, wore glittery gold-sequined jackets emblazoned with “Trump the Golden Era” and snapped up “MAGA” rhinestone jewelry.

Republicans attend the CAGOP spring organizing convention at the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in Sacramento on Sunday.

(Lezlie Sterling/TNS)

Once dominated by Reagan-era Republicans who favored traditional conservative policies including opposing the Russia-led Soviet Union and favoring free trade, the California GOP is being reshaped by Trump’s populism.

“Just like Reagan was transformational figure in the political world, Donald Trump is a transformational figure,” said former state GOP chairman Jim Brulte.

For a party that has long been largely irrelevant in California politics — having last elected a statewide candidate nearly two decades ago — there were some bright spots in the November election. Republicans increased their representation in both houses of the state Legislature, the first time the GOP has done so in a presidential election year since 1980.

Though Trump lost the state by 20 points to former Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee and Californian, the Republican received more votes in November here than he did in the last two presidential elections.

Trump also did better with Latinos across the nation, winning 43% of their votes, according to the Associated Press. In California, Republicans increased their support from this voting bloc as well, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report as well as GOP officials.

“Here’s the secret sauce. You ready for it?” Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-Texas) told California Republicans at the party’s Saturday luncheon. “You have to show up. Step one, show up. Show up early. Show up often. Don’t speak a little bit of broken Spanish. Don’t throw up an ad and then call it good two weeks at the tail end of election.”

Gonzalez, whose district has the most border miles of any congressional district in the nation, said Latino voters care about the same issues as most voters — the economy, safety and the education of their children.

“Be genuine,” he added. “You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to tell them what you think they want to hear.”

Assemblywoman Leticia Castillo, a Republican elected in November to represent a Democratic district with that includes swaths of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, said in addition to constant door-knocking, she reached out to Latinos in unconventional ways. She advertised about her parents’ immigrant roots and her priorities in popular local Spanish-language magazines that focus on soccer and quinceañeras.

“We’re talking about values, and we’re talking about what your beliefs are. And it was not that difficult to get people on board. They want the message, but they don’t know there’s a message that they need until you bring it to them,” she said.

State GOP leaders said such legislative gains were prompted by structural changes, including registering 1 million additional Republican voters over the last six years and focusing on early voting, ballot harvesting and other election day tactics long embraced by Democrats. The party also launched a concerted effort to appeal to Latino voters more consistently and aggressively than prior decades.

“I don’t think it happened overnight,” state Republican Party chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson, whose tenure just ended, told reporters Saturday.

Describing Latinos as a community that had been previously “neglected” by the party, she added: “In 2019 we started going to farms and talking to farm workers, and we were talking about the things that were important to my community, and that was making sure you have a good job. It was making sure your kids got a great education so they could have a better life than you. It was making sure that you had safe streets.”

Though she argued that Democrats had failed on such issues, she acknowledged that they had long been a presence in Latino communities. “Democrats showed up, and Democrats made them feel like they cared about their problems,” Millan Patterson said.

Trump also did better among Latino and Black voters than other recent Republican presidential nominees, so it’s unclear whether California Republicans’ improved performance is part of a fundamental realignment of the base of the political parties or whether it’s specific to Trump and evaporates once he leaves office.

Getting Trump voters to turn out in elections when he is not on the ballot can be challenging, Millan Patterson added. That became evident during the failed recall election against Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, she said. Over a million more Californians voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election than voted to recall Newsom in 2021.

Trump’s influence, and imprint, on the current California Republican Party was clear throughout the three-day convention in Sacramento.

Panels at the Hyatt Regency and the convention center in Sacramento focused on issues such as “lawfare,” a practice Trump supporters argue weaponized the legal system against him and his goals. Republicans also touted a potential 2026 California ballot measure to require voter ID and proof of citizenship for anyone casting ballots, which Trump demanded the state adopt in exchange for federal disaster relief in the aftermath of the deadly Los Angeles-area wildfires this year.

The most prominent speaker was Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer who has railed against transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, a focus during Trump’s second election campaign.

“I do believe the issue of allowing men into women’s sports, it was the sleeper issue of the election,” she told the Republican crowd. “I believe, of course, that people turned up to the polls to embrace Donald Trump, to embrace the America first agenda … but more so, I believe that people turned up to the polls to reject absurdity, and that is what the Democratic Party has become.”

Republicans Robin Ellis, left, Sharie Abajian, center, and Barbara Moore take selfies.

The shifting voting dynamics in the state could have ramifications in next year’s midterm elections, where Californians are expected to play a major role in deciding which party wins control of the House.

The midterm elections are likely to be rocky for Republicans because the party that wins the White House frequently takes a beating in congressional elections two years later. And in 2024, congressional races were a weak point for the GOP even as the party was victorious in House races across much of the country.

Millan Patterson said the loss of three Republican congressional incumbents in 2024 was prompted by the competitiveness of their districts and a lack of resources. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), who was one of the most prodigious fundraisers in Congress and lavished money on California Republicans, left office in 2023.

This speaks to a broader fundraising problem facing the party. Millan Patterson was a McCarthy protege. The last party chairman, former legislative leader Brulte, had an Rolodex teeming with donors. The party’s future fundraising prospects are uncertain.

But the face of the party is clearly changing, as evidenced at a celebration of party leaders Friday evening. Eight former chairs, all older white men, took the stage to Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town.” They saluted Millan Patterson, the party’s first Latina, female and millennial leader, who left the stage to Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl.”

On Sunday, the party elected its new chair, Corrin Rankin. She’s the state party’s first Black leader.

“Change is coming to California. It’s time to end the Democrats’ one-party rule and make California great again,” she told delegates after winning the leadership post. “We’re going on the offense. We need to expand the battlefield and to take the fight to every corner of our state.”