An environmentalist group funded and backed by a left-wing billionaire is attempting to link New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte to Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Ayotte shares Trump’s supposed affinity for dolling out tax cuts to “big oil,” which allows, “corporations to pump unlimited amounts of pollution in our air,” NextGen Climate said in a press release Thursday.
The group, which is founded and funded by environmentalist Tom Steyer, announced its plans to have someone dressed in a Trump outfit hound the Republican senator around the Granite State as Ayotte campaigns for re-election.
Ayotte is currently locked in a fierce battle with Democratic New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan to keep her Senate seat.
NextGen also created a website and Twitter handle allowing voters to keep tabs on the senator’s “loyalty to her party’s nominee.”
“NextGen Climate NH is not letting Senator Ayotte dodge her support (and shared policy priorities) to Donald Trump,” Kate Corriveau, a spokeswoman for the New Hampshire NextGen chapter, wrote in an email. “It’s no wonder her loyalty to him has never wavered.”
The group’s tactics should sound familiar – they are essentially replicating those by other environmentalist groups.
Anti-oil group 350.org, co-founded by environmentalist Bill McKibben, stirred up some muck in August after reporters knocked it for supposedly stalking Ayotte at a 5k rally wearing Trump masks.
The group posted a video on YouTube after the incident titled, “Kelly Ayotte Can’t Run From Her Trump Problem,” along with a description reading: “350 Action made clear that Kelly Ayotte can’t support for a climate denying racist while pretending to be a ‘green’ candidate.”
McKibben’s group’s guerrilla tactics are not being received well by those generally inclined to be sympathetic to 350.org’s mission to divest the world of oil.
The group’s decision to send Trump mask-wearing people to harass Ayotte, The Concorde Monitor’s editorial board wrote in August, only shows that 350.org has “a big problem communicating your core message.” Trolling the senator only eats into the efficacy of McKibben’s goal of divesting the Earth of fossil fuels, the paper added.
The attempt to link Ayotte to rump may backfire. The senator has issued searing criticism at Trump in the past.
“Kelly has never hesitated to speak out against ideas and policies — including those proposed by Republicans — that aren’t in New Hampshire’s best interest, and she’ll continue to work across the aisle to solve problems and deliver results,” Ayotte spokeswoman Liz Johnson told The Washington Examiner after Trump’s July run-in with the parents of fallen Muslim American soldier.
Ayotte told the Union Leader in August, for instance, that she was “glad to get [Trump’s] endorsement,” but continues to “disagree with him on a number of fronts.”
The New Hampshire Republican said she was “appalled that Donald Trump would disparage them and that he had the gall to compare his own sacrifices” to those of a Gold Star family.
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