The junior senator from New Hampshire is Republican Kelly Ayotte, the former state attorney general who defeated Democrat Paul Hodes in 2010 in an open-seat contest to replace retiring Republican Sen. Judd Gregg. Read More
The junior senator from New Hampshire is Republican Kelly Ayotte, the former state attorney general who defeated Democrat Paul Hodes in 2010 in an open-seat contest to replace retiring Republican Sen. Judd Gregg.
Ayotte (AY-aht) grew up in Nashua, N.H., and studied political science at Pennsylvania State University. She was active in her sorority, Delta Gamma, and skied competitively. She earned a law degree from Villanova, where she was the editor of the Environmental Law Journal. One of her first jobs was a clerkship for state Supreme Court Justice Sherman Horton. In an early legal case, Ayotte was the court-appointed counsel for defendants in a highly publicized murder of two guards in an armored-car robbery in 1994. The experience gave her a taste of trial work, and she sought a job as a prosecutor with the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office. She eventually rose to become head of the homicide division; she says her most challenging case was securing the convictions of two Vermont teenagers in the 2001 murders of Dartmouth College professors Half and Susanne Zantop. Also that year, she married Joseph Daley, of Nashua, a fighter pilot who flew combat missions in Iraq and later opened a landscape design business. They have two young children.
In 2004, Republican Gov. Craig Benson named Ayotte New Hampshire’s first female attorney general. In one of her most celebrated cases, she defended the state against numerous court challenges of a law requiring parental notification for minors seeking abortions. In 2005, newly elected Democratic Gov. John Lynch asked her to drop the case and file a brief opposing the law. Ayotte opted instead to defend the law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court ruled unanimously that states may require parental notification as long as an exception is allowed for medical emergencies. The state, however, repealed the law in 2007.
Despite Ayotte’s differences with the Democratic governor over abortion rights, he nominated her for a second term as attorney general in 2009. Four months later, she resigned to make her first bid for elected office in the Senate race to succeed Gregg.
In a crowded primary field, Ayotte campaigned as a fiscal and social conservative. But tea party activists and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., a far-right conservative who injected himself into several GOP primaries that year, supported 1996 gubernatorial nominee Ovide Lamontagne. Ayotte also had primary competition from wealthy businessmen Bill Binnie and Jim Bender. But she got a boost from tea party favorite Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor of Alaska, who called her “one tough Granite Grizzly.” Lamontagne enjoyed a late surge in the race, but Ayotte beat him, just barely, 38% to 37%, a margin of 1,660 votes out of 139,000 cast.
Meanwhile, Hodes, the U.S. House member from New Hampshire’s 2nd District, had the Democratic field pretty much to himself, allowing him to spend his resources getting acquainted with potential general election voters. In his first television ad, he accused Ayotte of failing to investigate a mortgage Ponzi scheme by a firm called Financial Resources Mortgage that cost New Hampshire investors $80 million. Hodes used footage of Ayotte testifying before a state legislative panel that she didn’t know about the scheme when she was attorney general. Ayotte countered with ads that portrayed her as a tough prosecutor and highlighted her decision to seek the death penalty for a man who killed a police officer. She also hammered Hodes for his support of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul and said she would vote to repeal it.
In the end, Hodes didn’t even keep it close. Ayotte won with 60% of the vote to 37% for Hodes. She carried all 10 counties in the state, and beat Hodes by nearly 2-to-1 in the most populous county of Hillsborough, where Manchester is located. The retiring Gregg, who endorsed Ayotte in the contest, told The Telegraph in Nashua that she connected well with voters. Hodes was probably hurt, too, by his association with unpopular items in the Democratic agenda. “Ninety percent of the fight is people liking you and agreeing with your philosophy, and she nailed that from the beginning,” Gregg told the newspaper.
Ayotte won a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, where she pushed for a strong national defense while keeping an eye on Pentagon waste. In October 2011, Ayotte co-sponsored a bill with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. aimed at controlling costs in major defense acquisition programs. Drawing on her experience as a former prosecutor, she fought efforts by the Obama Administration to try terrorism suspects in civilian courts. In July 2011, Ayotte and Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. argued in a Washington Post op-ed that suspected terrorists should be kept at U.S. detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “When an enemy combatant is captured, the primary focus should be intelligence-gathering, not criminal prosecution,” they wrote. In October 2011, Ayotte introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have prohibited Justice Department funding for civilian trials of enemy combatants. Her bill was defeated, 52-47. Locally, Ayotte has pushed for modernization projects at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which she said will save money in the long run.
As a Senate Budget Committee member, Ayotte advocated for a constitutional amendment requiring the federal government to balance the budget each year. During the standoff over raising the debt ceiling, Ayotte held out for more radical cuts in government spending. When President Obama and the Republican leadership finally reached a compromise in August 2011, she was one of 19 Senate Republicans who voted against the deal and the only member of the New Hampshire delegation to oppose it. A Manchester Union Leader editorial criticized Ayotte for “holding out for a perfect option that didn’t exist.” Ayotte has supported some environmental regulation. She was one of six Republicans to vote against a proposal by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. in November 2011 that would have blocked new controls on power plant pollution.
Ayotte has already expressed frustration with the sometimes moribund legislative chamber. In a July 2011 Los Angeles Times story, Ayotte explained what has surprised her most about serving in the Senate: “I thought that we would vote on a lot more bills,” she told the paper.
As the GOP’s top elected official in the state with the nation’s first presidential primary, Ayotte is in a powerful position politically. Though Texas Gov. Rick Perry reportedly reached out to Ayotte, she endorsed Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner and former governor of neighboring Massachusetts.
