Shaheen Defeats Scott Brown, Keeps US Senate Seat
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Democratic U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen defeated Republican challenger Scott Brown on Tuesday, winning a second term and blocking his return to Washington from a second state.
For Shaheen, a former state senator and governor, it was her eighth win in the state, which she has called home for four decades. Brown, who won a special election in Massachusetts in 2010 to replace the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy but lost that seat in 2012, moved to New Hampshire last year. Their race was one of several close contests expected to determine whether Republicans win a Senate majority.
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Throughout the campaign, Shaheen, 67, cast Brown as an outsider who doesn't understand New Hampshire and emphasized her longtime service to constituents. After three terms each as a state lawmaker and governor, Shaheen lost her first U.S. Senate race to Republican John E. Sununu in 2002 but ousted him in 2008, in part by portraying him as a lackey of President George W. Bush's administration.
This time, however, it was Shaheen who was blasted as a blind follower of the president as Brown, 55, took every opportunity to say Shaheen voted 99 percent of the time with President Barack Obama. He called her "confused" on foreign policy, criticized her for missing committee hearings and said the health care overhaul law she supported was a disaster for people and businesses.
Shaheen took Brown to task for missing Senate hearings on border security even though he made the issue one of the hallmarks of his campaign. She also criticized his vote to continue oil industry subsidies, saying he supported big corporations instead of the state's small businesses, and she warned women not to trust him on issues of equal pay, access to contraceptives and abortion rights.
Watch: Scott Brown Concedes To Shaheen
One of the campaign's sharpest exchanges came when Shaheen highlighted Brown's sponsorship in 2003 and 2005 of bills in the Massachusetts Senate that would have required women to wait 24 hours before having abortions and to be provided with a variety of information, including images showing fetal development.
Shaheen's campaign ran an ad saying women would have been "forced" to view the images, which Brown called a "shameful" lie because the information could have been thrown away. Brown, calling himself a "pro-choice, independent Republican," said he had been protecting women since he was a child and his mother was beaten by his abusive stepfather.
Shaheen was the first woman elected governor of New Hampshire and is the only woman who has been governor and U.S. senator. Before her 2008 win, New Hampshire hadn't elected a Democratic senator in 33 years.
Brown, one of the original tea party favorites, rose to national prominence in 2010 when he was elected to serve the rest of Kennedy's term. After getting soundly defeated by Democrat Elizabeth Warren in 2012, he moved to New Hampshire, where he had a vacation home and had lived as a toddler.
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