Don Bolduc is a patrolman on the police force of Pittsfield, N.H., population 4,100. But this is not the job he had hoped to be doing in February 2024.<\/p>\n
In September 2022, he won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, earning the right to face off against Sen. Maggie Hassan (D) in November. He lost by a wider margin than polls had suggested, hence his unexpected new career in law enforcement.<\/p>\n
The Concord Monitor checked in on him last week. The conversation focused mostly on Bolduc\u2019s unusual employment trajectory but also explored a bit of his 2022 ambitions. And it was in that part of the conversation that Bolduc offered an important insight.<\/p>\n
When he was running in 2022, Bolduc gained national attention for his inconsistent approach to a key issue: whether Donald Trump legitimately won the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
In August, he told a cheering audience of Republican primary voters that \u201cTrump won the election.\u201d In September, after winning that primary, he went on cable news to say that \u201cPresident Biden is the legitimate president of this country\u201d and that \u201cthe election was not stolen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he flipped back the other way. In a general election debate in October, Bolduc suggested that there was, in fact, rampant fraud in his state.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to make sure that school buses loaded with people at the polls don\u2019t come in and vote,\u201d he said. Some in the audience chuckled. \u201cYou can laugh about it,\u201d he added, \u201cbut people in New Hampshire aren\u2019t laughing about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pressed on the claim by the moderator \u2014 since it\u2019s an old, unfounded assertion \u2014 Bolduc insisted that this is what he had been hearing and, therefore, needed to be addressed.<\/p>\n
That was Candidate Bolduc. Speaking to the Monitor this week, Officer Bolduc offered a slightly different perspective.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do believe there was fraud,\u201d Bolduc told the reporter. \u201cThat\u2019s something that can\u2019t be disputed, but at the end of the day, I played a political game, right? So then I decided no more political games. I\u2019m going to say what I honestly believe, and that is the election wasn\u2019t stolen.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, it cannot be disputed that there was fraud. There have been dozens of people arrested around the country for having violated voting laws. A handful were arrested in New Hampshire, too. But this in no way proves or even suggests that the election was \u201cstolen\u201d \u2014 as Trump has so often claimed and as any Republican seeking his party\u2019s nomination in 2022 might have been tempted to claim.<\/p>\n
As Bolduc was. He \u201cplayed a political game,\u201d elevating an assertion he didn\u2019t believe.<\/p>\n
We understand that such things happen with regularity. Candidates make claims that they believe will appeal to voters rather than ones they believe or are ready to defend. The divergence between assertion and belief can be wide or narrow, the presentation nuanced or reckless. But it\u2019s politics.<\/p>\n
The difference here is that the \u201cpolitical game\u201d Bolduc felt he should play was so dangerous. It was demonstrably dangerous by the point at which Bolduc was espousing it, having served as the basis for the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n
Polling has repeatedly shown that most Republicans think the results of the 2020 election weren\u2019t legitimate. In August, CNN-SSRS polling found that 4 in 10 Republicans believed there was solid evidence the election wasn\u2019t legitimate, which isn\u2019t the case.<\/p>\n
You can see how this is self-reinforcing. The Republican base believes fervently that something was amiss in 2020 because Republican politicians and officials repeat the claim that something was amiss. They repeat that claim because they are worried that the Republican base will punish them if they don\u2019t adhere to it. It\u2019s less a political game than a doom spiral.<\/p>\n
Bolduc had embraced other false right-wing rhetoric on the campaign trail, such as the idea that schoolchildren were \u201cidentifying\u201d as cats and demanding litter boxes. But none was as central to Republican politics as claims about the election being stolen.<\/p>\n
In the end, Bolduc only barely won the Senate primary, edging out state senate president Chuck Morse. Morse was endorsed by Gov. Chris Sununu and other established Republican figures, but in 2022 that was playing an older, less relevant type of political game. Bolduc got Trump\u2019s endorsement for November \u2014 and then he lost. Trump pinned his walk-back on the election fraud claims as the cause.<\/p>\n
Now he\u2019s just another Pittsfield cop, albeit probably the only one to have told the New Yorker in October 2022 that the rioters who beat police during the Capitol riot simply \u201cbelieved that their rights were violated. They believed that they lost their voice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because, you know, the election was stolen.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Don Bolduc is a patrolman on the police force of Pittsfield, N.H., population 4,100. But this is not the job he had hoped to be doing in February 2024. In September 2022, he won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, earning the right to face off against Sen. Maggie Hassan (D) in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1312,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}