Midterm election live updates: Trump to visit Iowa, Kansas; El-Sayed and Stevens Feud in Michigan

A funny thing happened, though, when Mr. Sununu fielded questions about health care, housing and transportation policy from Chamber of Commerce types as they chose caprese sandwiches. Ms. Smith was impressed when Mr. Sununu incorporated facts and experiences into his answers, increasing the energy in the room.

“He is very substantial,” she said.

But before Mr. Sununu left the reception room at the Atlantic Grill in Rye, N.H., Ms. Smith, an independent voter, told him she still could not vote for him.

“Because of Trump, I can’t,” she said. “I told him I couldn’t take the risk.”

Mr. Sununu, 62, has turned his Senate comeback campaign into a test of a tricky premise: that in 2026, it is possible to be both a Republican and independent of President Trump. Selling this idea is essential to any hope of success in a purple state that has never really liked the president. And while he trails Rep. Chris Pappas, a Democrat, in the polls, he’s running out of time to convince the Debra Smiths of the world to buy him, especially in a race seen as key to determining the balance of power in the Senate.

He tries. He once wrote an opinion essay titled “Trump is a Loser.” He insisted in a television ad that he had never met the president. He gives a long list of their political differences to anyone who will listen. And, perhaps more than any other Republican running for Senate right now, he asked voters to do something that strains the American political imagination: think about what happens after Mr. Trump.

“In two years, the president will leave office,” he said during a debate last month. “And my question is: where do we go next?”

What is left unsaid in his bet is that deep down, voters want a political future that resembles the past.

A New Hampshire dynasty

New Hampshire Republicans have lost every House and Senate race since the dawn of the Trump era, often by a wide margin, even as they have won state-level offices. But the party saw a glimmer of hope in the Sununu name, which is synonymous with the flinty establishment Republicanism that was once much more common in New England. Mr. Sununu’s father, John H. Sununu, served as governor for three two-year terms in the 1980s before becoming chief of staff to President George H. W. Bush.

National Republicans had tried unsuccessfully to convince Chris Sununu, Mr. Sununu’s charismatic younger brother and a former governor, to run for Senate in 2022 against Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan. In early 2025, they were looking to lure John E. Sununu into the 2026 race. But when Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the longtime Democratic incumbent, announced she would retire, Chris Sununu coyly hinted he might eventually run for Senate. A person familiar with the recruiting efforts said national Republicans had inquired about its seriousness — no one wanted two Sununus on the ballot, after all – but Chris ultimately hesitated.

Today, campaign signs dotting the state’s landscape simply read “Sununu Senator,” without specifying which one is actually running. Democrats conducted a private poll to see if voters know which family member is on the ballot. They say the confusion is great.

A reporter’s text message to John E. Sununu was recently sent to his father.

“You reached the old old governor of New Hampshire,” was the response, which concluded, “not the dynamic young senator.”

The current candidate says there is no confusion. “The voters absolutely know who I am,” he said.

Mr. Sununu first ran for Congress 30 years ago and held the seat currently held by Mr. Pappas for three terms. He won his Senate seat in 2002, in a strong year for Republicans following 9/11, and lost it to Ms. Shaheen in the surge that accompanied Barack Obama’s election in 2008. (He later pursued a lucrative career working at a lobbying firm and serving on corporate boards.)

During the election campaign, he tells war stories from another era. He can be trusted to stand up to Mr. Trump, he says, because he stood up to President George W. Bush, insisting that the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, included more protections for civil liberties. He can be trusted to be bipartisan, he says, because he co-sponsored legislation with Hillary Clinton. He was the first Republican to call for the dismissal of Alberto Gonzales, Mr. Bush’s attorney general. (Mr. Gonzales resigned in 2007 after a confrontation with congressional critics over the Justice Department’s handling of antiterrorism investigations and the firing of U.S. attorneys.)

“I think all of those things reinforce a reputation for independence and openness and honesty,” he said in an interview.

And did his last name help?

“Of course,” he said, quickly changing the subject to how, in 2024, he supported former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley for president over Mr. Trump.

Approved by the President

In February, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Sununu, saying he would work “tirelessly to advance our America First agenda.”

It was a signal for the party to ignore Mr. Sununu’s primary opponent, another former Republican senator named Scott Brown. But it gave Mr. Pappas his biggest line of attack: that, for all his pretensions to independence, Mr. Sununu is as beholden to Mr. Trump as any member of a Republican Party who has demonstrated complete loyalty to the president. Mr. Pappas also described him as being slimy toward Mr. Trump, saying that Mr. Sununu’s opposition to the war in Iran, for example, only flourished alongside his unpopularity.

Mr. Sununu tried to stay focused on his condition.

“I focused on New Hampshire, on the economy, on jobs, on affordability, and that message resonated, and that’s why this is a race that people didn’t think a year ago would be competitive,” Mr. Sununu said.

A New York Times/University of Siena poll released in late September gave Mr. Pappas a five-point lead — a sign that Mr. Sununu is running significantly more competitively than the last two Republican candidates for the state Senate. One of them, Corky Messner, lost to Ms. Shaheen by nearly 16 percentage points in 2020; the other, Don Bolduc, lost by 9 points against Senator Maggie Hassan. (Paradoxically, Mr. Bolduc supported Mr. Pappas.)

In that poll, Mr. Sununu’s approval rating was slightly higher than Mr. Pappas’s, between 45 and 43 percent. And 48 percent of voters said Mr. Sununu would better handle cost-of-living issues; 46 percent said this about Mr. Pappas.

But 60% of voters disapproved of Mr. Trump, and 54% said they wanted a candidate who would keep an eye on him.

“Existential threat”

As he spoke to the Seacoast Chamber Alliance late last month, Mr. Sununu seemed at times to inhabit a sort of Brigadoon where there was no President Trump.

He called for term limits in Congress, lamented the lopsided state of the federal budget, and carefully parried questions about Social Security, cutting to the chase.

Mr. Pappas addressed the group first. When he finished, Jimmy Dykes, an independent voter in the coastal town of Hampton, asked why the congressman had not been more visible in that community. But Mr. Dykes said he planned to vote for Mr. Pappas anyway.

He associated Mr. Sununu with the wars that began during his time in Congress, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said he simply could not trust him to deal with Mr. Trump, who he said posed an “existential threat.”

Mr. Dykes, however, was considering voting for Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican who has also stayed away from Mr. Trump. She once held Mr. Sununu’s desired job, but narrowly lost re-election to the Senate the night Mr. Trump was elected in 2016. Now she appears headed for re-election as governor, becoming one of her party’s strong points in a difficult year.

Mr. Sununu, for his part, declined to say what he thinks the Republican Party should look like after Mr. Trump leaves office. But does he want to help shape it?

“Absolutely.”

Bayliss Wagner reports contributed.