Will Trumpism Take Deeper Root in New Hampshire?

WINDHAM, N.H. — As he called into Joe Piscopo’s radio show from a diner last week, and then trash-talked both political parties over a bacon-and-egg-white omelet, Corey Lewandowski demonstrated why he’d be a fitting Republican Senate nominee on the 2020 ticket with President Trump — and why that prospect appalls New Hampshire’s more traditional G.O.P. leaders.

Mr. Lewandowski, the president’s former campaign manager, sounded every bit like his pugilistic political patron as he unleashed a blur of attacks and insinuations in a manner reminiscent of an out-of-control garden hose.

He called Senator Jeanne Shaheen, whom he is considering running against next year, “a partisan hack.” He accused Judd Gregg, a well-liked former Republican senator and governor, of taking “a military deferment for bed-wetting” to avoid serving in Vietnam. And he savaged New Hampshire’s mainstream conservative leaders, saying they “ran this state into the ground” and left the party with no congressional seats and out of power in the state legislature.

Welcome to the era of the would-be Trump Candidate.

One year after the president waded into Republican primaries from Florida to Kansas and propelled his favorites to win nomination contests for Senate and governor, Mr. Trump is now going even further in his attempt to reshape the G.O.P. in his image, nudging one of his most controversial lieutenants to run for the Senate in one of the few states where his party has a chance to pick up a seat in 2020. At an arena rally in Manchester, N.H., last month, Mr. Trump said Mr. Lewandowski was “fantastic” and would be “tough to beat,” stopping just short of endorsing him.

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Yet Mr. Lewandowski’s prospective bid has unsettled an array of powerful New Hampshire Republicans, including Gov. Christopher T. Sununu, who are not keen on elevating a political operative-turned-Washington consultant as their Senate standard-bearer.

The possibility of Trumpism taking even deeper root here, perhaps even changing the nature of the party, has now set off a broader conversation over Republican identity in a state that, as the home to the first presidential primary, carries great symbolic importance.

New Hampshire has long prided itself on its civic engagement and high level of discourse — there is even a historical marker in Claremont, N.H. marking the 1995 meeting and handshake between then-President Bill Clinton and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who agreed there to create a bipartisan commission on campaign finance reform.

In terms of elections, that has meant elevating Democratic figures like Ms. Shaheen, governor-turned-senator Maggie Hassan, former Gov. John Lynch and Republicans like the Sununu family, former Representative Charlie Bass and Mr. Gregg, all of whom are closer to the political center than the extreme.

Even the most stouthearted Republicans here, said Mr. Bass, “tended to be more libertarian.”

But in 2016, Mr. Trump brought his grievance-driven, anti-Washington message to this state, and trounced his opponents in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Mr. Trump narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton here, though, even as he flipped other states that voted Democratic in recent decades, like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The state’s top Republican, Mr. Sununu, is supportive of Mr. Trump and attended his recent rally in Manchester. But if Mr. Sununu and other Republican leaders here have made a tenuous peace with Mr. Trump’s divisive approach to politics, recognizing that he is the head of their party and a president running for re-election, some have recoiled at bringing Trumpism home in the form of Mr. Lewandowski.

There have long been tensions between conservatives and more independent-minded moderates in the G.O.P. here. Still, it “was more about how you’d handle the social issues,” as Mr. Gregg put it, not over topics of race and identity.

No figure here may better reflect the G.O.P.’s evolution than Mr. Gregg, the Yankee son of a governor, whose gubernatorial portrait features the younger Gregg in a barn coat and khaki slacks standing atop a famous peak in the White Mountains.

“The party has narrowed,” he said. “More and more of what you call the traditional, rational conservatives have moved over to identify themselves as independent.”

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Mr. Gregg declined to respond to Mr. Lewandowski’s broadsides, instead referring to what he called his earlier, “succinct” observation in a local publication, NH Journal: that he’s “a thug.”

Other Republican candidates have sought to curry favor with the president and his supporters by imitating Mr. Trump’s slashing style and adopting his hard-line brand of nationalism. But Mr. Lewandowski would be the first figure from the Trump inner circle to step forward for elected office.

And he has already become a polarizing figure in his own right. Mr. Lewandowski, who has become rich from his consulting work thanks to his relationship with Mr. Trump, had a slew of allies and enemies here well before he even began working for Mr. Trump. Since then he has been charged with assault for grabbing a reporter for Breitbart News in 2016 — the charges were later dropped — and the following year a pop singer accused Mr. Lewandowski of slapping her at a party in Washington.

Some Republicans, here and in Washington, are skeptical that Mr. Lewandowski will ultimately enter the race, in large part because he would have to file financial disclosure forms that could detail the extent of his work on behalf of a variety of corporate interests since Mr. Trump took office.

Mr. Lewandowski dismisses those predictions, responding with characteristic bravado that “there’s nothing to find” from his client roster and that he’s “never made one phone call to any government official asking them to do something for somebody.” (He has not registered as a lobbyist).

Yet when a Windham couple stopped by the diner booth to thank Mr. Lewandowski for his support of the president and to encourage him to run, he revealed another factor that may keep him out: his wife and four preadolescent children. “They like our life,” he said of his family.

Mr. Lewandowski said if he does decide to run he would likely do so in October, at the outset of a new fund-raising quarter. He left little doubt that he’d land the support of his former boss. “If I get in the race, based on the public statements the president has made, I will have his endorsement,” he said, adding with even more Trumpian hype that such backing “will help me raise money on a national scale that will draw massive attention to this race.”

That is precisely what worries so many traditional Republicans, who do not want to further energize Democrats in a year they were hoping to defeat Ms. Shaheen, re-elect Mr. Sununu and reclaim control of the state legislature as well as the Executive Council, the five-person executive branch governing body.

“Corey enjoys a national profile and following, and if he decides to run New Hampshire will effectively have two Donald Trumps on the ballot in 2020,” said Jim Merrill, a Republican strategist in the state, noting that the president is weighted down by “a significantly negative approval rating” in New Hampshire.

Perched in his statehouse office last week, Mr. Sununu was more diplomatic in his assessment.

The governor, whose father held the same office and whose brother served in the Senate until Ms. Shaheen defeated him in 2008, acknowledged placing multiple phone calls to high-ranking Republican officials to articulate the problems Mr. Lewandowski may bring to the ticket.

But Mr. Sununu was careful to avoid saying Mr. Lewandowski would adversely impact his own re-election, arguing that the optics of nominating a Washington wheeler-dealer for the Senate would instead be problematic for Mr. Trump’s image as a disrupter of the political status quo.

“I expressed to folks in Washington at a variety of levels that my concern is that the president, whoever is on the ticket with him from myself to a U.S. Senate candidate or congressional candidates, none of our races should impede or erode his brand,” said Mr. Sununu.

The governor said Mr. Lewandowski “could be a very good U.S. senator” but was just as quick to predict his party would have “a pretty robust primary.” (Senate Republicans all but wrote off the state after Mr. Sununu declined to get in the race, according to senior party officials).

Two Republicans are already in the Senate race, former state House Speaker William O’Brien and retired Army Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc.

“The idea of clearing the field is not the New Hampshire way,” said Mr. Bolduc, urging Mr. Trump to “let the people of New Hampshire make the decision.”

If the Republicans already in the race are nervous about Mr. Trump’s intervention — which most party officials agree would all but ensure Mr. Lewandowski’s nomination — Democrats are thrilled at the prospect of the president’s adviser as a foe. Ms. Shaheen has been raising money off the possibility and the state Democratic Party is already airing a digital ad attacking him.

“In this Republican primary, Lewandowski is distinguished only by his shadow lobbying, selling access to big oil, payday lenders, foreign interests, and every shady client he’s going to be forced to disclose,” said Josh Marcus-Blank, a spokesman for New Hampshire Democrats.

Mr. Lewandowski’s brand of slashing politics includes the claim that Ms. Shaheen has become rich in office thanks to what he characterized as influence-peddling by her attorney husband, William. Mr. Marcus-Blank responded: “He is recycling an old lie offered by other desperate Republicans and debunked in a past campaign.”

What is undeniable is that Mr. Lewandowski is representative of today’s Republican Party here, as demonstrated by Mr. Sununu’s delicate footwork. And the would-be Senate candidate is only the latest reminder of the state party’s changing nature.

After all, New Hampshire Republicans handed former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown the nomination to take on Ms. Shaheen in 2014, two years after he was defeated for re-election across the state line. Mr. Brown closed his New Hampshire campaign by claiming then-President Obama and Ms. Shaheen were leaving the country vulnerable to the Ebola virus and Islamic terrorists crossing over the Mexican border.

Two years after that, despite the it-will-never-happen predictions of the state’s old guard, Mr. Trump won the New Hampshire primary by nearly 20 points.

“The New Hampshire Republican Party is not unlike the parties in most other states at this point,” said Jennifer Horn, the former state G.O.P. chair and anti-Trump Republican. “They’ve gone all in for a president I find indecent, at times hateful and undeserving of the position that he has.

Or as Steve Duprey, a longtime fixture of the New Hampshire Republican Party put it, “Corey is the original lightning rod — some people love him, some people detest him. But he’s pretty mainstream now because it’s a different party.”