My take on last night’s New Hampshire senate debate

  Last night the five Republicans vying for the senate seat being vacated by the retiring Judd Gregg took the stage for the final debate just days before next Tuesday’s primary vote.

  As an Ovide Lamontagne voter, I am going to give you my take on how he performed last night. Ovide Lamontagne has been picking up momentum in the last two weeks–he has moved from single digits in fourth place, into second place and is now within 10 points of Kelly Ayotte–and he needed a great performance last night in order to keep the momentum in his favor.

  The negative campaigning between Kelly Ayotte and Bill Binnie had been taking its toll on their poll numbers and I think they realized this as there was no bickering or sniping at one another. For the most part the candidates stuck to the issues and there were no personal attacks. However when it came to directly answering the questions there were a few times where the candidates tried to sidestep the actual question, Ovide Lamontagne was the one person who did not try sidestep anything; when he heard the candidates steer away from the issues and his time to respond came up he would look at the questioner and state “I believe your question was…..” before answering the question directly. This man tells you what he thinks, there is no political rambling and I think that there will be some undecided voters who might be won over to Ovide because of his straightforwardness.

  Ovide Lamontagne certainly came off as the most conservative candidate on the stage when you look at all of the issues combined. In my opinion Bill Binnie came off as too well rehearsed–too polished off, almost slick–and I just do not trust this man.

  I thought that Kelly Ayotte came off well last night, I don’t think she did anything to lose voters. Jim Bender was a man that I was interested in hearing from and it turned out that he was not as conservative as I had thought he was. I am not even going to mention Dennis Lamare (why was he even on the stage last night?)

  In the end, there was no knockout blow by any of the candidates, people solidly behind either of the candidates will probably not change their vote at this time. But out of all the participants, I think that Ovide Lamontagne probably did the best to relate to the undecided voters who he is and what he stands for. I think there is a good chance that most undecided voters probably took a good hard look at Ovide Lamontagne as an alternative to the negativity that has been infiltrating the airwaves for what seems like forever now.

  Did Ovide Lamontagne do enough to continue to close the gap last night? I am not sure, only time will tell.