The first time he ran for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, former ambassador and former Sen. Scott Brown jumped in late.
Brown launched his Republican Senate campaign in April 2014, just a few months after formally changing his residency to New Hampshire.
But as he seriously mulls a second Senate bid in the Granite State, Brown says time is on his side.
“I have a long runway. I didn’t have that obviously the first time, and I’m going to do what I have been doing for almost a decade now, going around, meeting with people participating in the process,” Brown said this week in an interview.
If the former senator from Massachusetts and 2014 Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire who later served four years as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand in President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration moves ahead and launches a campaign in the months ahead, it would potentially set up a rematch with Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.
And the race would grab plenty of national attention, in what would likely be a competitive and expensive Senate clash in a key swing state.
The 65-year-old Brown, who competed in nine triathlons this year and who on average performs around 40–50 gigs a year as lead singer and guitarist with the rock band Scott Brown and the Diplomats, is doing more than just thinking about running to return to the Senate.
He’s been meeting in recent weeks with various Republican and conservative groups in New Hampshire.
Brown said he’s doing his “due diligence, meeting with anybody and everybody. So, you’ll be seeing me a lot around, whether it’s parades, triathlons, my rock band, meeting and getting out and really learning.”
And Brown is taking aim at New Hampshire’s all-Democratic congressional delegation.
“The thing that really ticks me off is how they’ve basically covered up for [President] Joe Biden for the last four years, what they’ve done or not done on the border, what they’ve done and not done in inflation, and they’re just completely out of touch with what we want here in New Hampshire. And the more I think about it, I think we can do better,” Brown argued.
Brown made headlines in 2010 as the then-state senator in blue-state Massachusetts won a special U.S. Senate election to serve the remainder of the term of the late longtime Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy.
After losing re-election in 2012 to now-Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Brown eventually moved to New Hampshire, where he had spent the first years of his childhood and where his family had roots dating back to the colonial era. He launched a Senate campaign months later and narrowly lost to Shaheen in the 2014 election.
After hosting nearly all the Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 cycle at speaking events he termed “No BS backyard BBQs,” Brown eventually endorsed Trump in the weeks ahead of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. After Trump was elected president, he nominated Brown as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand, where the former senator served for four years.
Returning to New Hampshire at the end of the first Trump administration, Brown supported his wife Gail, a former television news reporter and anchor, as she ran for Congress in 2022.
And the Browns stayed politically active and once again hosted many of the Republican presidential candidates, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., at his events during the 2024 presidential cycle.
During his first Senate run, Brown repeatedly faced carpetbagger accusations. Last week, a progressive group in New Hampshire took aim at Brown.
Amplify NH claimed in a release that “the gentleman from Massachusetts is clawing for another chance at power, framing himself once again as a Senate candidate for New Hampshire.”
Brown says he’s not concerned.
“We’ve had a house here for over three decades, and we’ve been fully engaged full-time here for over a decade. So now I think that’s old news.”
And he argued that New Hampshire’s congressional delegation “votes 100% with Massachusetts.”
While Shaheen cruised to re-election in 2020, winning by roughly 16 points, and Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan won re-election in 2022 by nearly nine points, Senate Republicans are eyeing New Hampshire in 2026 as they aim to expand their incoming 53-47 majority in the chamber. New Hampshire, along with Georgia and Michigan, will likely be heavily targeted by Senate Republicans.
Trump lost New Hampshire last month, but he cut his deficit to just three points in his face off with Vice President Kamala Harris, down from a seven-point loss to President Joe Biden in 2020.
And the GOP kept the state’s open gubernatorial seat in party hands while expanding their majorities in the New Hampshire state House and Senate.
Shaheen has yet to announce if she’ll seek another term in the Senate. That decision will likely come early in the new year.
But Shaheen, a former three-term New Hampshire governor, is taking over next month as the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Shaheen also turns 78 next month.
Asked if age would be a factor in a potential Shaheen-Brown rematch, Brown said he likes Shaheen and really appreciated her support during his confirmation as ambassador to New Zealand, but added that “that’s certainly up to her.”
“I’m 65. I can’t believe it. I feel like I’m 40. My wife says I act like I’m like 12,” he added.