On Apr. 23, Vice President Kamala Harris made her first official trip to New Hampshire, thirty days after being appointed by Biden to lead the administration's efforts to stem the flow of refugee border crossings, and three days before auditors were selected for the forensic audit in Windham, NH. Many questioned why Harris was in N.H. when she had neither visited nor held a press conference about the expanding border emergency.
Harris' journey to the Granite State was her first since 2019 when she was still a California U.S. Senator running for president. The trip extended visits to numerous places in the U.S., including California, Illinois, Connecticut, and North Carolina. The vice president's visit to the early-primary state sparked curiosity in some who questioned whether the visit was a political move in the race for the 2024 White House should Biden not run for a second term.
Still, others, including Republicans, were confused by the timing of Harris' trip to New Hampshire, especially considering the amount of criticism she has received for not addressing the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), said at a news conference before Harris' visit, "The top Democrat in charge of the border situation has spent a month avoiding the southern border."
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu (who signed SB43 on Apr. 12, approving Windham's audit), Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, and Rep. Chris Pappas welcomed Harris at Laconia Municipal Airport. In December, a frustrated Sununu urged fellow Trump voters to "move on for the sake of the country," rather than continuing to reject the results of the 2020 election. On the Jack Heath radio show in his state, Sununu called out the "Trump supporters still talking up election conspiracy theories," pleading,
“I understand emotions are raw right now. I don’t have the luxury of just sitting at home on social media and whining because my guy didn’t win—and my guy didn’t win. I supported President Trump and [Democrats] spent millions of dollars reminding people that I was a Trump supporter. But the election is going to be called for Joe Biden.
Sununu, whose father was the 75th Governor of NH and Chief of Staff for President George H. W. Bush, continued on Heath's radio show, praising New Hampshire's election process yet acknowledging the frustration of its constituents following the mixed election results. He even called out Granite Staters who refuse to accept Joe Biden as president, saying “Everyone should remember it was 180 degrees different last time. Some people thought Hillary Clinton got robbed and some of those people thought Hillary Clinton should have won,” adding:
"We do elections right. I've heard people say, 'How is it possible that the State House went Republican and the federal races went Democrat in the same state?' Well, if you asked any moderator when we did all the recounts here—and there were a lot of recounts—the answer is people jumped across the ballot. That's what we do in New Hampshire. We jump across the ballot all the time.
New Hampshire was one of the first states to cast its four Electoral College votes for Biden on Dec. 14. And, despite the fact Gov. Sununu and the Granite State's GOP won the governor's office and flipped the Executive Council and both chambers from Democrat to Republican control, Biden and the Democrats skillfully won at the federal level. Remarkably, Sununu received 151,000 more votes for governor than Donald Trump did for president in New Hampshire. The governor scolded those who refused to accept Joe Biden as president, declaring:
"I didn’t like it when people said ‘Donald Trump isn’t my president.’ It was very disrespectful. And nobody should be saying, ‘Joe Biden’s not my president,’ that’s not appropriate.”
“Everybody wants to react on their emotions and everyone thinks their emotions are the absolute end-all, be-all. It’s understandable. But we all have to just take a step back, take a breath. Joe Biden’s going to be sworn in as president.”
