Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire will not run for re-election in 2026, bringing an end to a long and singular political career and further complicating Democrats’ efforts to regain a majority in the Senate.
Her decision not to seek a fourth term will immediately set off a high-stakes race in a state whose voters are famously fickle. Last fall, New Hampshire voters supported former Vice President Kamala Harris for president and elected Democrats to Congress, but they also voted for a Republican governor and expanded Republican majorities in the state legislature.
“It was a difficult decision, made more difficult by the current environment in the country — by President Trump and what he’s doing right now,” Ms. Shaheen, 78, said in an interview with The New York Times. She specifically criticized the president’s focus on political retribution, his drastic cuts to the federal budget and his antagonism toward Ukraine as it defends itself from Russia’s invasion.
Ms. Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was the first woman to be elected governor of New Hampshire and the first woman in the country to serve as both a governor and a U.S. senator. She noted in the interview that she will have served for 30 years in elected office and spent 50 years in politics.
“It’s important for New Hampshire and the country to have a new generation of leadership,” she said.
Among the Republicans already considering a run for Senate from New Hampshire next year is former Senator Scott Brown, who represented Massachusetts for one term and later relocated to New Hampshire. He came close to beating Ms. Shaheen in 2014 and went on to become ambassador to New Zealand in Mr. Trump’s first term.
The state’s popular former governor, Chris Sununu, a Republican, has said that he will not run.
In the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-to-47 majority, Ms. Shaheen is the third Democrat, after Senator Gary Peters of Michigan and Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, to announce plans to retire, making the party’s path to a majority even more difficult. Democrats have few pickup opportunities and must now defend several open seats, though they are hopeful of a friendlier political environment given that the party out of power usually has a strong midterm election.
Even before Ms. Shaheen’s decision, Republicans saw an opportunity to flip the New Hampshire Senate seat in 2026. The National Republican Senatorial Committee recently created an ad criticizing her defense of foreign aid programs.
Ms. Shaheen, who was first elected to the Senate in 2008, a few years after serving three terms as governor, has played a starring role in the political life of New Hampshire for decades.
She was a county organizer on Jimmy Carter’s first presidential campaign, helping to catapult him from obscurity to the White House and demonstrating the significance of her tiny state’s early presidential primary election. Four years later, she was Mr. Carter’s state director in New Hampshire as he fended off a primary challenge from Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. In 1984, she ran Gary Hart’s presidential campaign in the state, engineering a surprise victory there over former Vice President Walter Mondale.
Ms. Shaheen is also credited with helping revive the fortunes of the Democratic Party in a state that was once overwhelmingly Republican.
Her election to the Senate was the first for a New Hampshire Democrat since 1975. But even before that, her tenure as governor helped modernize the party’s election machinery and created a blueprint for a generation of moderate New Hampshire Democrats who followed her as governor and in Congress. In her first run for governor, she neutralized Republicans’ longtime characterization of Democrats as big taxers by taking the state’s pledge against broad-based sales or income taxes.
All of that experience has given her perspective on her party’s current state, as it searches for a sharper response to Mr. Trump.
“I think people thought they were voting for someone who would address inflation, lower grocery prices, energy costs, housing,” she said. “They haven’t gotten any of those things.”
Democrats, she said, need to promote specific policies to improve Americans’ daily lives, including in education and health care.
Ms. Shaheen’s brand of low-drama leadership has none of the bombast and swagger currently in vogue, and perhaps would not have succeeded in other corners of the country. Critics have sometimes derided her as “Betty Crocker,” and she never became a well-known presence on national political talk shows. But in New Hampshire, where registered Republicans and undeclared voters outnumber Democrats, her no-nonsense style and cautious, long-game politics won her far more elections than she lost.
In the Senate, she mastered the art of patience and persistence, working for instance with a Republican colleague on a measure to promote energy efficiency over many years before seeing it become law.
Ms. Shaheen has been part of the New Hampshire political scene for so long that it is difficult to remember how controversial some of her signature efforts were in their day. As governor, she expanded access to public kindergarten and made New Hampshire the final state to adopt the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a state holiday — ideas that the rest of the country had largely accepted years earlier but that New Hampshire lawmakers had long resisted.
In Washington, where she also sits on the Senate Armed Services, Small Business and Appropriations committees, she points to her recent work on infrastructure legislation and a program to help small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic as career highlights. Both were bipartisan partnerships, a strategy she says she learned from her early days in politics, when New Hampshire was “a one-party state, essentially.”
She worked with Senator John McCain of Arizona, who died in 2018, on a plan to provide visas for Afghans who helped the U.S. military during the war in their country.
And in both Washington and New Hampshire, she has worked on issues of reproductive rights. In 1997, she notably signed the repeal of a 19th-century state law that had made abortion a felony, decades before the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Ms. Shaheen has also been a booster of New Hampshire’s “first-in-the-nation” presidential primary — a designation that has been under attack by national Democrats who argue that the state, less racially diverse than much of the country, does not deserve its spot at the front of the line. In 2024, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. did not officially participate in the New Hampshire contest, although his supporters there waged a successful write-in campaign on his behalf.
To Ms. Shaheen and other proponents of New Hampshire’s nominating contest, the state’s small size and engaged electorate make it a good stage for candidates to hone their messages and hear directly from voters. She remains optimistic about its staying power. Already, she said, potential Democratic presidential candidates for 2028 are talking about making trips to the state.
For her part, Ms. Shaheen is imagining a new life with a less challenging schedule. “It will be nice to have a little more time to engage in some other things,” she said.
