On the trail: Scott Brown sends 2026 campaign signal with trip to meet GOP leaders in DC
Published: 01-24-2025 11:16 AM |
Some high-profile meetings in the nation’s capital this week by former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown are fueling more speculation that the Republican from Rye will launch a 2026 run in New Hampshire for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by former governor and longtime Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.
Brown has been saying that he’s seriously mulling a Senate bid, so his trip to Washington D.C. on Tuesday didn’t come as a complete surprise. Yet his travels were the latest sign that he appears to be putting his political house in order before likely announcing his candidacy in the months ahead.
While in Washington, the former senator met with Senate Majority Leader Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the top Republican in the chamber, as well as Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the chair of the Senate GOP’s campaign committee.
In separate social media posts, Brown called Thune “my dear friend,” as he pointed to the two years they overlapped in the Senate. And he said Scott was “a good man” and “the right person” to chair the National Republican Senatorial Committee and “expand our majority in 2026.”
Arguably the most important meeting for Brown was his get-together with Turning Point USA founder and CEO Charlie Kirk, who’s a politically powerful and influential ally of President Donald Trump. Kirk’s group, along with its political wing, have become major players in conservative politics. In the 2024 election cycle, Kirk took a lead in helping Trump and Republicans get out the vote in key swing states.
Brown praised Kirk in a social media post, saying the Turning Point organizations have “delivered huge wins for President Trump and the #MAGA movement everywhere.”
The 65-year-old Brown has been meeting in recent months with various Republican and conservative groups in New Hampshire.
Brown said last month that 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.”
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If Brown moves ahead and launches a 2026 Senate run, having strong support from a major national player on the right of the party, such as Kirk, will be important.
The New Hampshire Democratic Party took aim at Brown, claiming in an email that the former senator traveled to Washington D.C. “to establish himself as the yes-man candidate of the far-right.”
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.
The Browns stayed politically active and once again hosted many of the Republican presidential candidates, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., at events during the 2024 presidential cycle.
Shaheen, who turns 78 next week, has yet to say if she intends to run for a fourth six-year term representing New Hampshire in the Senate. But Democratic sources in the senator’s political orbit say they assume she’ll run again. .
The Democrat from Madbury, who is now the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee – and the first female ever to serve in one of the two leadership positions on the committee – doesn’t sound like she’s getting ready to retire. This week she highlighted in an email to supporters that “I will fearlessly take on these fights head-on,” as she described the upcoming clashes with the new Trump administration.
Shaheen vowed to “never stop working as hard as I possibly can to create a better future for you and your family.”