A national postmortem on the Democratic Party’s 2024 election losses has added a pointed chapter on New Hampshire, with findings that offer an unflattering assessment of Joyce Craig’s campaign for governor and carry implications for how Democrats approach the state in the cycle ahead.
The Democratic National Committee released its official post-election report in May, a wide-ranging analysis of why the party fell short in races up and down the ballot in 2024. As the New Hampshire Bulletin first reported, the New Hampshire section is not a gentle critique.
Among the report’s findings: Craig lost a higher share of the Kamala Harris vote than any Democratic gubernatorial candidate in a competitive race in 2024. That metric stands out because it measures not absolute vote totals but the degree to which Craig underperformed the top of her own ticket, a standard indicator of how well a candidate ran as an individual rather than riding partisan waves.
What the Autopsy Found
The DNC report found that Craig’s underperformance was not concentrated in any particular region of New Hampshire or any particular type of community. Urban voters, rural voters, and suburban voters all supported Craig at lower rates than they supported Harris. Democratic-leaning strongholds including Manchester, Nashua, the Portsmouth suburbs, and the Concord area all delivered less support to Craig than party strategists believed they should have given the composition of those communities.
That pattern across diverse geographies suggests the gap between Craig and Harris was a candidate-specific phenomenon rather than a regional quirk. In competitive gubernatorial races, candidates often run somewhat ahead of or behind the presidential candidate in specific areas for local reasons, but uniform underperformance across geographically and demographically distinct communities points to something more fundamental about how the campaign was perceived.
The report also identifies the central strategic problem the Craig campaign never resolved: she failed to establish a clear, affirmative identity for herself as a candidate. According to the analysis, Craig’s team never established what she stood for beyond “not Ayotte/Trump.” That framing, anchoring the campaign almost entirely in opposition to her Republican opponent’s perceived connections to the former president, did not give voters who were open to supporting a Democrat a positive reason to choose Craig.
The Ayotte Factor
The DNC autopsy does not spare criticism for the strategy of making Kelly Ayotte a proxy for Trump, and it offers a candid assessment of why that approach fell short: Ayotte is a strong candidate in her own right.
The report describes Ayotte as benefiting from her previous tenure in the United States Senate, where she built a reputation as an independent-minded moderate. Her record, including her eventual break with Trump over his conduct during the 2016 campaign, gave her credibility with precisely the voters Craig needed to peel away: New Hampshire independents and soft Republicans who had no enthusiasm for Trump but also no particular reason to punish Ayotte for his existence.
The proof is in the ballot data the autopsy cites. An estimated 8.5 percent of New Hampshire voters who chose Kamala Harris for president also voted for Ayotte for governor. That figure represents a substantial pool of voters who were willing to split their tickets, choosing a Democrat at the top and a Republican in the governor’s race. Those voters apparently evaluated Ayotte on her own merits and found her acceptable or preferable despite their preference for the Democratic presidential candidate.
That kind of ticket-splitting is the nightmare scenario for a strategy built on tying an opponent to an unpopular national figure. If the opponent has already done the work of separating herself from that figure in voters’ minds, the attack loses its premise.
Republican Strategists Take Note
New Hampshire Republican strategist Jim Merrill has been among those watching the DNC autopsy closely, and he described it as a preview of what Democrats face in the 2026 cycle. The dynamics that hurt Craig in 2024, he argues, have not fundamentally changed.
Ayotte remains in office, has not suffered any major political damage, and enters the 2026 cycle as an incumbent with all the structural advantages that entails. Her moderate positioning in a state where unaffiliated voters make up the largest share of the electorate continues to be an asset. And the template she used in 2024, running as her own candidate rather than as a Trump surrogate while the Democrat struggled to define herself, is available to her again.
For Democrats, the autopsy represents an uncomfortable reckoning. The party invested heavily in the Craig campaign in 2024, viewing New Hampshire as a pickup opportunity in a cycle when they hoped to expand their map. The result was not just a loss but a loss that, according to the party’s own internal analysis, was compounded by strategic choices that can be corrected.
What It Means Looking Ahead
The 2026 cycle is already beginning to take shape in New Hampshire, and early polling shows competitive Senate and statewide races are expected to define the political landscape. The governor’s race is expected to again be a focal point. Democrats hoping to build on the autopsy’s lessons face a concrete challenge: finding a candidate who can establish an independent identity, connect with voters across different types of communities, and not rely primarily on national partisan themes to drive turnout and persuasion.
That is easier to prescribe than to execute. The national Democratic Party has been going through its own version of this reckoning following 2024, debating whether the problem was the messenger, the message, the strategy, or some combination of all three. The DNC autopsy itself has generated controversy within the party, with some officials pushing back on its conclusions and others arguing it does not go far enough in acknowledging structural problems.
In New Hampshire specifically, the question of what a winning Democratic coalition looks like is complicated by the state’s unusual demographics. New Hampshire has a large and influential bloc of unaffiliated voters who participate in primaries only by choosing a party for that election and who have a history of making independent judgments in the general election. The state’s unique voting rules and election structure give those independents outsized influence in shaping outcomes. Those voters chose Ayotte over Craig by a significant margin in 2024, and any serious Democratic candidate in 2026 will need to think carefully about why.
The ballot-splitting data is particularly instructive. A voter who chose Harris for president and Ayotte for governor is not a reflexive partisan in either direction. They were evaluating candidates individually and making distinctions. The Craig campaign, according to the autopsy, never gave those voters a compelling reason to choose her over an opponent they had already decided was acceptable.
Democrats have roughly 18 months before the 2026 primary season begins in earnest to work through those lessons. Whether the party’s congressional and gubernatorial candidates in New Hampshire can apply the autopsy’s findings to their campaigns, or whether the institutional pressures of national partisan politics override more locally tailored strategies, will go a long way toward determining whether 2026 produces different results.
For now, the autopsy stands as a document that Republicans in Concord and Washington are happy to cite and Democrats are working to learn from, a candid accounting of what went wrong and a starting point for what might go differently.
