A Republican governor The New Hampshire candidate is running away from her longtime abortion opponent, demonstrating Republicans’ ability to distance themselves from unpopular policies in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the constitutional right to abortion.

As a U.S. Senator and in the years after she left office, Kelly Ayotte consistently supported efforts to restrict reproductive autonomy. But in her race against Democrat Joyce Craig, the former mayor of Manchester, Ayotte has sought to reassure voters that she would not impose additional abortion restrictions in the Granite State, although she has stopped short of disavowing her previous positions. The state currently bans abortions after 24 weeks, with a few exceptions.

Craig and her supporters have made abortion a central issue in the campaign, while Ayotte has criticized Democrats for “politicizing abortion to win votes.” The two face off in a tight race that the Cook Political Report calls the only gubernatorial race to be a “tie” this year. Neither Ayotte’s campaign nor Craig’s campaign responded to a request for comment.

Ayotte is far from the only Republican candidate who has tried to distance herself from the anti-abortion movement. Vice presidential candidate and Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance was caught deleting anti-abortion messages from his website earlier this year. And in several congressional elections this cycle, Republicans have tried to label themselves as pro-choice, despite a record to the contrary. GOP candidates appear to want to avoid a repeat of the 2022 midterm elections, in which Democrats managed to tie their Republican opponents to the deeply unpopular Dobbs decision made in June of this year.

“New Hampshire voters overwhelmingly support abortion access,” said Kayla Montgomery, vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood New Hampshire Action Fund, which has endorsed Craig. “So Kelly is trying to rebuild her record in that regard. And at the end of the day, I don’t think voters will be fooled because she has been anti-abortion for a long time.”

No abortion opposition constituency

A year before Dobbs, Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu signed a 24-week abortion ban — which includes exceptions for fatal fetal diagnoses and to save the pregnant person’s life — as well as additional restrictions, including a mandatory ultrasound for anyone seeking an abortion . The measures “backfired tremendously” for Republicans, said Linda Fowler, a government professor at Dartmouth University. Last year, the legislature lifted the ultrasound requirement.

Although New Hampshire’s abortion law is far less restrictive than those of many Southern states, Democrats have noted that it is out of step with the rest of New England. All neighboring states have codified a guaranteed right to abortion and have proactively expanded access to abortion care.

Anti-abortion policies have never been particularly popular in the Granite State, Fowler said. “There’s not a lot of constituency for it,” she said.

Craig has vowed to codify the right to abortion and remove existing restrictions on the final 24 weeks. Meanwhile, in a platform pledge to “stand up for women’s health,” Ayotte said she supports the state’s current law and will not change it.

She has highlighted that message in a series of campaign ads. In one ad, Ayotte, who was endorsed by the current Republican governor, argues that Democrats are lying about the state’s abortion ban and that women in New Hampshire have the right to choose. In the same ad, she says she would “veto” any law that was “more restrictive” than the current abortion ban. However, in a later debate, she refused to answer whether she would support criminal or civil penalties for abortion providers after 24 weeks.

Ayotte, who as a senator supported a measure that state Democrats said would have allowed employers and insurers to deny coverage for in vitro fertilization, has been proactive in voicing her support for the treatment. In another ad, the former senator talks about how she found out during one of her pregnancies that her fetus was not viable and argues that she would never ban treatments like IVF because she had suffered a loss.

A clear balance sheet

Democrats and their allies, meanwhile, have encouraged voters to look at Ayotte’s relatively recent record on reproductive rights.

“Ayotte intentionally rewrites her record on abortion and sometimes outright lies to Granite Staters about what she would do as governor of New Hampshire. The reality is that she cannot be trusted to protect reproductive rights in New Hampshire,” the state Democratic Party wrote in a memo outlining Ayotte’s abortion history.

As a senator, Ayotte received a 100 percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee, the largest and oldest anti-abortion organization in the United States, and an A+ rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a major anti-abortion lobbying group.

In 2014, Ayotte was one of four senators who supported implementing a national abortion ban. Ayotte also voted for the controversial Blunt Amendment, which would have weakened the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate. And she repeatedly voted to stop funding Planned Parenthood. Ayotte was also one of the senators who accompanied Neil Gorsuch through his Supreme Court confirmation process, a crucial vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

Ayotte lost her re-election in 2016 and continued to campaign against abortion outside the Senate.

In 2017, Ayotte reportedly helped found Winning for Women, a political action committee formed as a counterpart to EMILY’s List, a liberal group that supports “pro-choice” Democrats. She served on the board of Winning for Women and was not listed on its website until 2023, but her name was removed in February 2024, according to an Internet Archives review.

According to local reports, Winning for Women poured over $8.3 million into supporting dozens of anti-abortion candidates during Ayotte’s tenure. And on the same day the Supreme Court released its Dobbs decision, the organization reportedly formed a joint fundraising committee for six candidates who had previously supported overturning Roe v. Wade. The group has endorsed a number of hardline anti-abortion candidates, including Reps. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and former Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Georgia.

Ayotte has not explicitly changed her position on abortion — and that could prove to be a political liability, said Fowler, the Dartmouth professor. “She didn’t say I changed my mind about choice. She didn’t have a Liz Cheney moment, you know, ‘The anti-abortion movement has gone too far’ moment,” Fowler said. “She basically tried to say she’s not going to change the law and she’s going to leave it behind. And so it becomes a basis for the Craig campaign to say, ‘You can’t trust her on this,’ and anecdotally, when you talk to women about it, that resonates with them.”