‘That’s Absolutely Wrong!’ Failed Candidate Dan Bolduc Rejects Trump’s Claim He Should Have Embraced Election Denial More
Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images.
Trump-backed candidate for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, Don Bolduc, spoke at length with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner about his resounding defeat last Tuesday by incumbent Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) – despite polls showing a tight race.
Bolduc, apparently unaware of who Chotiner was as the interview began, was asked to comment on former President Donald Trump and the role election denial played in his defeat.
“Yeah, he said last week that if you had stayed “strong and true” about election denial, you would have won easily,” Chotiner told Bolduc at one point during the conversation, relaying Trump’s post-election attack on Bolduc.
“That’s absolutely wrong,” shot back the MAGA candidate.
“I would have lost by even more! My advice to him was that if you come up to New England to campaign, and you do it on election denial, you won’t get anywhere. It is not an issue you should be talking about. Joe Biden is the President, and that’s it,” Bolduc added.
Chotiner, who is often considered one of the toughest interviewers in journalism today, stuck with Trump and asked the Republican about Trump’s future:
January 6th, the claims of the stolen election, Trump going after you—it’s almost enough to make you think that your and the G.O.P.’s embrace of Trump over the past five or six years might’ve been a real mistake. Or is it too early to say that?
“It’s probably too early to say that. But at the end of the day there are going to be wonderful candidates,” Bolduc replied, adding:
Nikki Haley. Governor Ron DeSantis. Tom Cotton. Rick Scott. In 2024, there are going to be a lot of people who are going to run. They are just great people. Probably Vice-President Mike Pence. Great people that I had never met before and met in this cycle.
But up here in New Hampshire we are going to have a lot to say, and, I have to tell you, President Trump is going to have some very serious competition. If he doesn’t decide to take a different approach, I don’t think he is going to fare well against them.
Chotiner also asked Bolduc about the post-mortem on his own campaign, which he said is ongoing.
“I conceded, and I accepted the results of the election, as I said I would. I am in a period of reflection on the election, looking at what I think we did right and what I think we did wrong. So that’s been an extensive process,” Bolduc replied.
“We went into Election Day with national and state polls showing us one or two points ahead. We were in a dead heat. And we lost by nine points,” he added, before blasting the national Repubclian Party for offering him limited support.
“Hassan spent thirty-six million dollars. I spent less than two million dollars. She had the full support of the Democratic Party. I did not have the full support of the Republican Party. A little bit of a difference there,” he told Chotiner.
When asked by the GOP didn’t support him more, Bolduc replied he believes it’s because the party didn’t think he would go to Washington and “play ball.” He then offered denounced the lack of bipartisan in DC, saying, “I yearn for the days when Republicans and Democrats could come together on those main issues, regardless of how they stood on social issues.”
Bolduc, who ran a hard-right campaign and echoed culture war issues while questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, also told Chotiner his campaign focused on “kitchen-table issues.”
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski swatted down that claim on Twitter, writing, “Bolduc says here he was running on kitchen table issues but spent the last week of his campaign doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on claims that kids use litter boxes in schools.”
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