Sununu for Senate: An independent conservative for NH
Union Leader Editorial
October 24, 2026
Believe it or not, U.S. senators used to go to Washington to represent their state, not their political party. It’s true. And you don’t need to go back to the days when senators had names like Benning or Simeon for an example. The U.S. Senate seat up for grabs in this year’s election was held not so long ago by one of those independent-minded leaders. His name is John E. Sununu. Voters can—and should—choose him to represent New Hampshire in the Senate on Nov. 3.
Sununu, a Republican, represented New Hampshire in the U.S. House from 1997-2003 and the U.S. Senate from 2003-2009. His record is online for anyone to check. Yet his opponent, Democratic Congressman Chris Pappas, doesn’t like to talk about Sununu’s 12 years’ worth of votes. He’d rather run against an imaginary John Sununu than the real one. There’s a reason for that.
As a congressman and a senator, John Sununu supported low taxes, opposed bigger government, and defied his party not just on small issues, but on some of the biggest votes he faced.
When President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain pushed an immigration bill that would have granted amnesty to illegal aliens before securing the border, Sununu spoke forcefully in opposition and voted against it.
When the Bush administration pushed a $31 billion energy bill loaded with tax breaks for energy companies and liability protections for makers of the gasoline additive MTBE, Sununu helped to kill it.
Most famously, he led a Republican effort to filibuster the 2005 renewal of the Patriot Act. Against enormous pressure from his own party, Sununu held firm and secured several civil liberties protections.
Voteview, a congressional vote analysis project at UCLA, shows that in his final years in the Senate Sununu voted with his party 84% of the time, below the median Republican (88%) and the median senator (90%).
Facing an opponent with a record of thinking for himself, Chris Pappas has resorted to claiming that Sununu would be a rubber stamp for Trump. That’s an absurd claim to make against a guy who publicly supported Trump opponents in the 2016 and 2024 presidential primaries, has publicly opposed multiple Trump policies, and penned an op-ed in this very publication titled “Donald Trump is a loser” (Jan. 21, 2024).
Voteview shows that in Pappas’ first term he voted with his party 97% of the time and continues to vote the party line 93% of the time. The party loyalist here is not John Sununu.
We had high expectations for Chris Pappas. He’s a smart and decent man. On the Executive Council, he did the work and was a bit closer to center than other Democrats in recent memory. We thought he’d stand up to both the activist base and the progressive leadership of the national Democratic Party more often.
We thought he would because he said he would. When he first ran for Congress in 2018, he said often that he would be a bipartisan leader and problem solver. In the WMUR debate that year, he told voters he would “work across the aisle to bridge the divide to put people in New Hampshire first.”
It has been disappointing to watch him spend the next seven-plus years meekly following the progressive radicals who continue to drag his party to the far left. Campaigning this year, he often sounds like he studied at the Elizabeth Warren School of Radical Sloganeering, attacking billionaires and corporate “profiteering” while pledging to increase already unsustainable levels of federal entitlement spending.
John Sununu, on the other hand, is his own man and he has the record to prove it.
President Trump’s second term will end after the 2028 election, just two years away. The next U.S. senator from New Hampshire will serve until 2033, through the next administration. Making this election all about Trump is how Democrats avoid dealing with the fiscal reckoning looming on the horizon.
New Hampshire should have at least one fiscally conservative U.S. senator who will bring old-fashioned Yankee common sense to Washington. In this race, that choice is John Sununu. His strong, independent leadership is desperately needed.
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