Former Sen. Kelly Ayotte has won the New Hampshire governor’s race, NBC News projects, defeating Democrat Joyce Craig to keep the seat in Republican hands.
Ayotte will succeed Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who declined to run for a fifth two-year term.
She was New Hampshire’s first female attorney general before she went on to serve in the Senate for one term. Ayotte lost her re-election battle in 2016 to now-Sen. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, by only about a thousand votes.
Ayotte warned about the battleground state drifting too far to the left during her campaign, saying that “New Hampshire is one election away from turning into Massachusetts.”
Despite having withdrawn her endorsement of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, Ayotte supported his White House bid this year, though she also sought to keep him at arm’s length. Sununu, the outgoing GOP governor, is a vocal anti-Trump critic.
In 2017, Craig became the first woman elected mayor of Manchester, a position she held for six years. She got her start in politics by serving on the Board of School Committee in Manchester, before serving as an alderman for six years.
Craig sought to paint Ayotte as “extreme” and campaigned on codifying the protections of Roe v. Wade in the Granite State.
Ayotte has said she supports New Hampshire’s state abortion law allowing women to obtain abortions “for any reason up to six months of pregnancy,” and with exceptions during the final trimester for medical emergencies or fatal fetal anomalies.
Craig and Ayotte won their parties’ primaries in September, leaving them with only about eight weeks to campaign in the general election period.
Independents account for a large swath of New Hampshire’s electorate, with about 37% of voters registered as “undeclared” earlier this year.
