Trump's team pushes back on assertions made in Boston Globe article about New Hampshire

They do say the third time’s the charm.

With just over 60 days left until the general election, former President Donald Trump’s campaign is full steam ahead and pushing back on reporting it has given up on winning New Hampshire in what will be his third general election cycle atop the statewide ballot.

According to Trump’s National Press Secretary, Granite State native Karoline Leavitt, a visit to the state by Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday demonstrates that at least the other side realizes that New Hampshire is Trump country, even if the rumors say otherwise.

Besides which, Leavitt told the Herald, Team Trump thinks they can win there this year. New Hampshire voters aren’t so shy on short-term memory that they fail to recall the bygone days of just this last January, when the Biden-Harris campaign chose to skip the first-in-the-nation primary tradition in favor of South Carolina, she said.

“No amount of campaigning in New Hampshire will make up for the fact that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris screwed over our state by abandoning our beloved first-in-the-nation primary tradition,” she said.

Assertions made in an email sent to Bay State volunteers and recently reported by the Boston Globe, in which a now-former Trump volunteer said that the Make America Great Again campaign had backed away from New Hampshire, are entirely inaccurate, Leavitt said.

The Globe’s reporting, a campaign official told the Herald, was based on the opinion of Tom Mountain, who had served as vice-chair of Trump’s previous elections efforts in Massachusetts.

Mountain, the official said, was nevertheless just a volunteer and not a staffer, and did not have the authority or even the information required to suggest the campaign is bailing on New Hampshire. Beyond that, they said, it’s simply not true.

The campaign has been active in the state for almost two years now, the official said, both before and after Trump won the primary there in January.

Their Manchester HQ, they said, remains open and operational, and campaign staff also work out of the NHGOP’s Concord offices. Trump’s team has several other paid staff members across the state, they said, as well as hundreds of grassroots volunteers.

About a thousand of those volunteers, according to the campaign, joined a zoom call billed as an “Election Integrity Training in New Hampshire” just last month, where they received training on how to be a poll observer.

Trump’s volunteers — hard to miss with all of the signs on their cars and hanging in front of their homes — are very active and engaged, the campaign official said, and have held self-organized car and boat parades throughout the state.

Those aren’t indicators of a campaign that’s given up on winning the state, they said, even if Trump previously lost New Hampshire in the general election.

In 2020, President Joe Biden took New Hampshire by a 7-point margin. However, the 45th President lost the Granite State to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by less than 3,000 votes in 2016.

That’s why Harris was there Wednesday, Leavitt said. The Harris-Walz campaign knows, she said, that the state is in play this time around.

“Granite Staters will not vote for dangerously liberal Kamala Harris, whose policies as vice president have worsened our fentanyl crisis, increased our energy bills, and created the most unaffordable housing market in New Hampshire’s history,” she said.

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