This year’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate features two candidates — John E. Sununu and Scott Brown — who’ve held the job before. Each brings a distinct political profile and record to the race, but both are pitching themselves to voters as “independent” and solely focused on delivering for New Hampshire.
Here are a few things to know about their stances on top issues on voters’ minds.
Iran
The Iran war is a key point of difference in this race. From the start, Brown has fully supported the war President Trump launched in February.
“I love what he’s doing with Iran,” Brown remarked during a candidate debate in Hampton last month. “He needs to finish the job.”
Sununu, on the other hand, has repeatedly expressed reservations about the conflict.
“If you're asking me if I would have done this, no, no," Sununu told WMUR last month.
Sununu has more recently stated his desire to see the war end quickly, while also citing what he sees as some strategic benefits from the conflict.
“Look, we've destroyed and degraded their nuclear program. We've degraded and almost completely eliminated most of their ballistic missiles, and we've even shut off their ability to really fund Hamas and Hezbollah,” Sununu told Binnie Media recently.
Expect Iran to remain a fraught issue in this race. A University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll released late last month found two-thirds of Granite Staters think Trump’s decision to attack Iran was wrong. But the president's endorsement of Sununu over Brown complicates things. While it almost certainly helps Sununu with the GOP primary voters he needs to win his party’s nomination, it also makes it harder for Sununu to distance himself from the administration's handling of the war.
And Sununu knows how an unpopular war in the Middle East can doom politicians who voters associate with it. His loss in 2008 to Jeanne Shaheen, his only electoral defeat, was powered by anti-war sentiment over the conflict in Iraq.
But navigating the politics of the Iran conflict could also challenge Brown. While the war gives him a way to highlight a part of his resume that Sununu can’t match — his 39 years in the National Guard, and service as the U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa during Trump’s first term — Brown also seems to understand that getting too close to a war that many voters disapprove of carries a degree of political risk, even when courting Republican primary voters.
“As I am out and about asking people what their thoughts are: It’s about 50/50,” Brown told WGIR radio this week. “But I have always said the difference between me and others is I believe if we're going to do another Afghanistan or Vietnam type of ‘being there, boots on the ground,’ they need a declaration of war, and Congress would need to vote.”
Affordability
The cost of living is a major concern for New Hampshire voters, and Sununu and Brown are both responding. Sununu, who earned a reputation as a fiscal hawk when he served in Washington nearly two decades ago, says if voters send him back, he would work to limit government spending and keep taxes low. Brown, meanwhile, is promising to oppose the imposition of new “unfunded mandates.”
Both men have expressed somewhat mixed views of the Trump administration’s tariff-driven trade policies. Sununu, before he got into the race, was a pointed critic of Trump’s tariffs. In a 2023 speech on free trade, Sununu went as far as to assert: “Good leadership matters, and bad leadership matters too — the effect that President Trump has had.”
As candidate, Sununu has struck a different tone: “What the President has done is recognize that many countries — China is a good example — they have non-tariff barriers, they have regulations, or mandates, or other government controls that effectively prevent American companies from selling their products,” Sununu told WMUR when he launched his campaign.
Since then, Sununu has called for exempting imported building materials from Trump’s tariffs as a way to lower housing costs. He’s also spoken of trying to find ways to make mortgages “portable,” to allow people who hold low-interest housing loans to keep those rates when they buy a new house.
Brown’s emphasis on affordability often hinges less on policy than on the argument that he understands pressures many families are facing due to his lived experience, including as a new grandfather.
“I know what our young people are going through. My daughter's going through those things right now, you know,” Brown said in Hampton. “Everybody is fighting to pay their bills, high insurance rates, the ability to basically pay for food.”
When it comes to Trump’s tariffs, Brown doesn’t emphasize them, but he has largely expressed support.
“Obviously there is going to be a little bit of pain,” Brown said last year, “but I think he’s right.”
Energy costs
Energy policy is a topic where both Brown and Sununu are calling for more production — at least of most kinds of energy.
“I will guarantee you that we will never have wind turbines in our beautiful ocean seacoast,” Brown declared to cheers when he and Sununu debated in Hampton.
Sununu, meanwhile, says it’s critical for the U.S. to expand what he and Trump have both termed the country’s “energy dominance.” For Sununu, that means more oil and gas production.
“We need to protect that dominance,” Sununu said in Hampton. “Second, we need permitting reform. It is too hard to build critical infrastructure in America, electric transmission, gas pipelines.”
Political trajectories and style
Sununu and Brown both live in Rye and both built their early political careers as New England-style Republicans, and they largely share the region’s traditional political emphasis on fiscal over social issues. But that is where their similarities as politicians largely end.
Sununu, 61, is the eldest son of a former governor who served as White House chief of staff under the first President Bush. During the younger Sununu’s years in Washington, where he served three terms in Congress and a single term as senator, he built a political profile based more on intellect than charm. After losing In 2008 to Shaheen in a wave election for Democrats, Sununu turned to the private sector where he earned millions of dollars from corporate board work and consulting gigs, and made time for hobbies like stamp collecting.
But despite Sununu’s low public profile since leaving the Senate, his name recognition in the state remains as high as ever, due in large part to his younger brother Chris’s eight years as New Hampshire governor. During the debate in Hampton last month, the moderator — a local GOP official — mistakenly referred to John E. Sununu by his brother’s name. Sununu was ready, with a canned and characteristic response.
“I'll go over it one more time,” Sununu told the crowd. “My father is the smart one. My brother is the funny one. I'm pretty smart, and I'm much funnier than he is.”
Brown, meanwhile, grew up in far different circumstances. His family was working class, and basketball got him into college. As a 22-year old law student, Brown’s good looks won him Cosmopolitan Magazine’s “Sexiest Man in America.” After modeling work, Brown got into local politics. And while serving as a backbench Massachusetts state senator, Brown’s longshot win in the 2010 election to fill the Senate seat left vacant by the death of Ted Kennedy made him something of a political folk hero to national Republicans.
But Brown’s success was short-lived: In 2012, Elizabeth Warren bested him in his reelection bid. Brown then moved to New Hampshire and launched another Senate run that failed to unseat Shaheen.
Even after those losses, Brown floated the idea of running for president, before ultimately endorsing Trump in 2016. Trump in turn tapped Brown for an ambassador’s job but later soured on him after Brown said Trump was responsible for the January 6th attacks on the U.S. Capitol.
Since then, Brown has worked to find his footing in a number of less political roles, including law school dean, high school basketball coach and frontman for an 80s-style rock band.
But to see Brown campaign these days is to witness a politician who still enjoys — or appears to enjoy — all the direct eye-contact, glad-handing and selfie-taking that being a good retail-style candidate in 2026 requires. The bigger question for Brown, is how much interest voters have in what he’s trying to sell.
