CONCORD – The women who made history in New Hampshire becoming the nation’s first all-female congressional delegation insist the issues, and not their gender, made all the difference in the election on Tuesday.
But scientific and anecdotal evidence reveal that those divisive social issues – abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception, guns and Planned Parenthood – helped create a cavernous gender gap that Republican male candidates couldn’t overcome.
In the race for governor, Democrat Maggie Hassan, of Exeter, received about 60 percent of the votes among women, according to exit polls.
Both women elected to Congress – Annie Kuster, of Hopkinton, in the 2nd District and Carol Shea-Porter, of Rochester, in the 1st District – enjoyed double-digit leads among females in unseating Congressmen Charles Bass and Frank Guinta respectively.
Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, said President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign helped women win here with an aggressive attack ad campaign against Republican nominee Mitt Romney that began six months ago.
The commercials featured women talking about Romney’s opposition to legal abortions and his support for denying financing for Planned Parenthood.
This attack resonated here, since New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien, R-Mont Vernon, had pursued the same socially conservative causes over the last two years and galvanized women to oppose GOP candidates up and down the ballot.
“Women were clearly a very motivated voter group in this election,” Smith said. “New Hampshire is very libertarian, ‘live and let live,’ when it comes to social issues, and this strident anti-abortion posture in Concord and in Washington backfired on Republicans.”
But for a few hundred votes in the state Senate, women could have been in line for all seven power positions in New Hampshire government – governor, the four members of Congress, speaker of the House and Senate president.
This week, election officials will recount ballots in the District 9 Senate race where New Boston Democrat Lee Nyquist lost to Bedford Republican Andy Sanborn by 253 votes.
If Nyquist were to pull it out, the Senate would be 12-12 and Democratic Leader Sylvia Larsen would have an even shot at becoming leader of the Senate.
“That sounds like a lot of votes, but stranger things have happened,” Larsen said Friday. “You never know what you are going to find with a recount until you pull all the ballots up to Concord and open them up.”
House Democratic Leader Terie Norelli, D-Portsmouth, said she’s well-positioned to return as speaker, a post she lost when Democrats were swept out of office in 2010.
She will need to defeat six-term Nashua Democratic Rep. David Campbell when House Democrats meet Saturday.
Norelli said a woman’s style of governing isn’t necessarily unique compared with how men run things, but she vowed that if she gets the gavel, she’d be “more conversational and less confrontational” than O’Brien has been.
“I think being transparent and sharing as much information as possible with the government is really what members of the public and the media want most from their elected leaders,” Norelli said.
“Over the last two years, we have seen very little of that.”
What’s as noteworthy about the historic gains for women on the ballot last week was that it merely completes what has been a long run of first-time successes.
In 2006, Shea-Porter became the first New Hampshire woman elected to Congress.
Two years later, Jeanne Shaheen, the first woman chosen to be governor, in 1996, became the first woman elected to represent the state in the U.S.![]()
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