Senate Republican candidate John Sununu, who lost in New Hampshire to Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH), blamed President Trump for the GOP losing the majority in the Senate and House of Representatives.

According to The Hill, Sununu said the defeat was caused by Trump’s inability to end the Iran conflict and to “drain the swamp.”

“Now it seems like he or his family is on every transaction and deal that goes on in Washington,” Sununu said, according to the outlet.

“Those two things, I think, caused people to say, ‘You know, I just can’t vote for a Republican while he’s still in office,’” he added.

The Hill shared further:

Sununu lost the New Hampshire Senate race to Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) by 13 percentage points despite Republican hopes that they had a good chance of stealing the Democratic-held seat.

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Sununu represented New Hampshire in the U.S. Senate from 2003 to 2009, when he was defeated by retiring Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.)

Trump, however, has blamed GOP candidates for not doing a good enough job of promoting themselves and has argued that he would have carried many of them to victory if he were on the ballot as he was two years ago.

“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday night as the election returns showed a blue wave sweeping across the country.

Vice President Vance on Wednesday cited the war with Iran as the biggest reason why Republicans fared so poorly in this year’s midterm election.

Sununu made the comments in an interview with SiriusXM’s “The John Kasich Show.”

“The real issue or the real sentiment I think that was out there, and it would come up on the campaign trail, but not in a way directed at me [or] anger at me,” Sununu said, according to Mediaite.

“People would just make the casual observation: Look, this president ran and won on a platform of no more needless, endless wars. And then he attacked Iran, and we’re still in it,” Sununu continued.

“This president ran on and won on a platform of drain the swamp, right? The institutional corruption, whatever you want to call it, drain the swamp,” he continued.

Despite having Trump’s endorsement heading into Tuesday’s election, Sununu attempted to distance himself from the president.

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Mediaite has more:

Turning to the Republican Party’s prospects in 2028, Sununu told Kasich: “So look, to be very blunt, the closer you are to the president, the worse a night it was for you as a potential presidential candidate.”

He named Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum as particularly affected.

Sununu also criticized Trump’s political priorities, arguing that the president should have talked “about affordability and the economy” rather than his other projects.

Asked how Republicans could recover, Sununu said: “We need leaders who are good leaders, problem solvers, but also who are good at connecting with the other parts of the country, the other parts of whether it’s conservative politics, Republican politics, grassroots organizations.”

“And that’s something the president’s never been able to do,” he added, in a final indictment of Trump

The interview is scheduled to air Saturday on SiriusXM’s The John Kasich Show.

 

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