Shortly after the 2020 election when the GOP regained its majority in the Legislature, Jason Osborne, vice chair of the Committee to Elect House Republicans, was already looking a year ahead. He told the NH Journal, “It will again be my great pleasure to show what can be achieved by Republicans who stand united and to break even more records in the 2022 campaign season.”

As House majority leader, Osborne leads the faction of the GOP whose values and votes closely align with those of the NH Liberty Alliance, the political arm of the Free State Project founded in 2003.

In 2020, the alliance endorsed 143 House candidates, 86 of whom were elected, among them 27 freshmen whose number nearly equaled the margin of the GOP’s 213-187 majority. Osborne’s teammates took four of six top leadership positions in the House as well as the chairs of 10 and vice-chairs of nine of its 22 standing committees.

With the GOP holding a relatively narrow majority, the liberty faction wielded sufficient leverage in the most recent legislative session to drive the agenda. And it placed its stamp on what House Speaker Sherman Packard called “the most conservative budget we’ve produced in 50 years,” with Osborne extolling the session as “a transformational symphony of reforms.”

The day before the vote, Osborne remarked, “We need more Republicans.”

And a new breed of Republicans as well, bent on shrinking the authority and functions of state and local government while expanding the scope of individual freedom, loosening the bonds of social responsibility and freeing the hands of the private sector.

Redistricting offers Republicans an opportunity to increase their numbers in the Legislature. As the majority party, the GOP has the upper hand in redrawing electoral districts for the 24 Senate districts, 400 House districts, five Executive Council districts and county commissioner districts as well as the two congressional districts.

The House Special Committee on Redistricting consists of 15 members, eight Republicans, including the chair and vice chair, and seven Democrats. The committee will hold public hearings in all 10 counties and, unless granted more time by the Legislature, present its plan by Nov. 18.

Some suspect the GOP may seek to redraw House districts to its advantage by combining Democratic wards in cities — particularly Manchester, Nashua and Concord — with adjacent Republican towns, a ploy known as “spoking.”

Top of the ticket

Meanwhile, the top of the GOP ticket hangs in limbo on the intentions of Gov. Sununu.

Pressed by GOP leaders to chase the Senate seat held by freshman Democrat Maggie Hassan, who is widely considered the senator at greatest risk, the governor is biding his time.

“I won’t make a decision for a very long time,” he said recently. Hassan herself waited until Oct. 15, 2015, to announce her 2016 candidacy.

Amid the swirling speculation, Sununu and former U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte are rumored to have an understanding to split the candidacies for governor and senator, with Sununu choosing which race to run. Other reports have Ayotte open to running for governor but not the Senate.

Ayotte currently serves on a handful of corporate boards — Caterpillar Inc., BAE Systems, Boston Properties, the Blackstone Group and News Corp., owner of Fox News — as well as a number of nonprofits.

First appointed New Hampshire attorney general by Republican Gov. Craig Benson, she was twice reappointed by Democratic Gov. John Lynch.

Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, Ayotte lost the seat to Hassan by 1,017 votes in 2016. In that election, a tea party and a libertarian candidate, forerunners of the faction driving the GOP today, polled 30,339 votes between the two of them, costing her the election.

Senate President Chuck Morse of Salem, a longtime lawmaker, is also said to be eyeing a run for governor. Morse has served 10 terms in the Legislature, two in the House and eight in the Senate, four of his last five as Senate president. A conventional fiscal conservative, Morse is known for his command of the state budget, but has never shown a strong appetite for the ideological and cultural issues roiling contemporary politics.

Unlike Ayotte and Education Commissioner Edelblut — another potential GOP gubernatorial candidate — he has never run a statewide race, and when he ran for the Executive Council in 2006 lost to Democrat Beverly Hollingsworth by 14 points.

While Ayotte would be returning to a changing GOP and Morse would be swept along with it, Edelblut would be at the front of it.

An accountant turned investor, he served one term in the House, then entered the 2016 GOP primary for governor. His campaign drew support from the Liberty Alliance, Americans for Prosperity-New Hampshire, the 603 Alliance, and other libertarian and conservative groups that would contribute to the GOP’s success in 2020. Edelblut finished just 988 votes shy of Sununu in the primary, and was education commissioner by the new Republican governor.

Edelblut has said he is not ruling out a second bid for governor. As commissioner, Edelblut has aggressively pursued and established alternatives to traditional public education, including promoting charter schools, introducing the Learn Everywhere program, patronizing home schoolers and, above all, expanding “school choice” by supporting private and parochial schools. This year, the Legislature crowned these efforts by enacting the most expansive voucher program in the country. Edelblut indicated that more similar initiatives are forthcoming.

As the favorite of what has become the dominant element of the GOP, Edelblut would likely enjoy financial support from the national political committees that backed his primary campaign in 2016 and bankrolled House candidates in 2020.

Americans for Prosperity-NH, an offspring of the Koch brothers, has operated in the state since 1999. In 2020, AFP endorsed 22 House candidates, all endorsed by the NH Liberty Alliance, and 19 of them were elected. AFP reported independent expenditures of $847,217 on robo calls, direct mail, digital advertising and door-todoor campaigning.

In 2020, AFP was joined by Make Liberty Win, a PAC based in Alexandria, Va., to which Osborne contributed $50,000 last year. The committee endorsed 79 candidates, including some also backed by the NH Liberty Alliance and AFP. Make Liberty Win distributed between $4,933 and $10,403 to 30 New Hampshire candidates and spent a total of more than $632,300 in contributions as well as independent expenditures, much of it for digital advertising, on their behalf.

Altogether Make Liberty Win and Americans for Prosperity, together, pumped some $1.4 million into legislative races in New Hampshire. After the election, Greg Moore, veteran state director of AFP, told WMUR- TV, “At the state level, this was our biggest year, and we expect it to go up from here.”

Democratic candidates

As yet, no Democrat has committed to joining the race for governor. Names have been bandied about to little effect — Sens. Donna Soucy of Manchester and Tom Sherman of Rye, and Andru Volinsky of Concord, who lost the 2020 primary to Dan Feltes of Concord, who was handily beaten by Sununu.

But perhaps the strongest candidate could only be had at the price of the 1st Congressional District seat, which promises to be the prime target of the redistricting effort.

In January, when the state Republican committee marked its success at the polls, Stephen Stepanek, the chair, declared, “Because of this we control redistricting. I can stand here today and guarantee you that we will send a conservative Republican to Washington, D.C, as a congressperson in 2022.”

The 1st C.D. seat has changed hands in five of the last seven elections, and since 2018 has been held by Democrat Chris Pappas. In May, when Politico highlighted his vulnerability, Pappas responded that he had not ruled out running for governor.

“I already serve in a Republican district, and they’re already talking about making it even more Republican,” he explained. With his foothold in the 1st C.D. and the Democratic vote in the 2nd, Pappas would be the Democrat best positioned to run a statewide race for governor.

However, a month after the Politico interview, he told the Concord Monitor, “I fully expect to be seeking reelection to this (congressional) seat in 2022.”

That leaves Democrats still looking for someone out of the blue.

The party’s liberty faction drove the agenda in the last legislative session