The tight N.H. governor's race isn't just a Trump proxy fight

With just days to go until Election Day, New Hampshire's gubernatorial race between Republican Kelly Ayotte and Democrat Joyce Craig is one of the most competitive in the country.

The candidates, who hope to succeed Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican who opted not to run for a sixth term, have argued over local issues, including taxes, the opioid crisis, housing and homelessness. But the race also reflects some big national themes playing out in the presidential election, including abortion.

Craig, the former mayor of Manchester, has put the issue front and center.

"As mayor, I supported the largest Planned Parenthood in New Hampshire; Kelly Ayotte spent her career attacking reproductive rights," Craig said in one of the many campaign ads blanketing the state's airwaves.

New Hampshire law allows the procedure up to the 24th week of a pregnancy, but it's the only state in New England where abortion rights are not guaranteed by a state constitution. Craig has accused Ayotte, a former U.S. senator, of voting against abortion rights and then changing her position to run for Governor.

"We cannot trust Kelly Ayotte because her actions speak much louder than her words, " Craig said in their final debate Thursday evening at WMUR in Manchester.

Ayotte shot back: "I have not changed my position."

While Ayotte never voted for a national abortion ban, as a senator she did vote to restrict abortion rights, including to de-fund Planned Parenthood, according to Politifact, a political fact-checking site run by the journalism nonprofit the Poynter Institute.

Ayotte now says that following the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, "this issue has been returned to the states," and as governor, she would support New Hampshire's law.

"I will fight with everything I have to defend New Hampshire's right to decide this issue and protect our law," she said.

Among Ayotte's biggest attacks on Craig: that the former mayor of Manchester wants to make New Hampshire too much like Massachusetts. She even adopted the slogan "Don’t Mass up New Hampshire."

“We are one election away from becoming Massachusetts and I'm not going to let that happen," Ayotte said on Fox News last year, after launching her bid for governor. Ever since, she's been hammering Massachusetts and its governor, Maura Healey, who has campaigned with Craig.

In this week's debate, Ayotte attacked Craig for embracing Massachusetts values, which she defined as "higher taxes, less freedom, and a billion dollars spent on housing illegal immigrants."

"Why is she spending so much time with the governor of Massachusetts when she wants to represent the people of New Hampshire?" Ayotte asked.

While Ayotte has the support of Sununu, the figure casting the biggest shadow over this race is Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Ayotte broke with Trump in 2016 after the release of the Access Hollywood tapes before narrowly losing her U.S. Senate race.

Now she supports Trump. But in this week's debate, she faced a difficult line of questioning from WMUR: As a former prosecutor and attorney general, how can she overlook Trump's record as a convicted felon who was also found responsible for sexual assault?

Ayotte avoided answering the question directly, but said the race comes down to a "comparison" between the Trump administration's record and that of President Biden and Vice President Harris, and that the country was better off under Trump, particularly with regard to the southern border and the economy.

When pressed two more times about Trump's criminal record, Ayotte continued to side-step the question.

"Where do you draw the line?" Craig asked. "You support a convicted criminal for president. He's unfit to be president."

Ayotte has "a tortured relationship" with Trump, according to Dante Scala, a professor of politics at UNH, who said the former president represents a difficult challenge for the Republican candidate: embrace Trump too closely and risk alienating moderates and independent voters, or reject him outright and risk losing pro-Trump Republicans.

"It's like walking a tightrope across the Merrimack River," Scala said. "She's being buffeted by two different groups of voters who want different sorts of things."

Polls have consistently shown Ayotte running slightly ahead of Craig. Scala says a strong vote for Harris, who leads Trump in New Hampshire, might nudge Craig toward victory. If not, Ayotte could walk that tightrope all the way to the governor's office.