GOP's dirty secret: There's no such thing as a 'moderate' Republican anymore

In the middle of December, a “grateful” John Sununu shared a list of new endorsers for his U.S. Senate campaign, through which he plans to “bring New Hampshire common-sense” to Washington.

Among those new supporters, as the memo’s headline trumpets, is New Hampshire House Majority Leader Jason Osborne.

Despite the Sununu family’s persistent desire to be embraced as moderate conservatives in this immoderate age, and Osborne’s entrenched position in the far right of the state’s Republican Party, the two aren’t exactly strange bedfellows. With Osborne’s endorsement, Sununu will receive a necessary primary bump with New Hampshire right-wingers and, in return, Osborne gets to dip a toe in the mainstream and gain a direct line of communication to a potential U.S. senator. Maybe the fringe, anti-government, Free State Project philosophy of a transplant from Defiance, Ohio, is what passes as “New Hampshire common-sense” these days.

Ain’t politics grand?

A review of Osborne’s sponsored bills for 2026 sheds some light on his political commonality with former Gov. Chris Sununu’s big brother. The House majority leader would love to see, for example, another rate reduction for the business enterprise tax and the repeal of the communications services tax. I suspect Sununu would be on board with both bills if he had his sights set on the State House rather than the Capitol. And because of the overall Republican fervor for any and all methods of dismantling public education, it’s not hard to imagine Sununu nodding his approval of Osborne’s efforts to “establish a local education freedom account program,” launch a study committee for “transitioning all public schools to public charter schools,” and create a system of open enrollment that would almost certainly close countless community schools in property-poor districts.

But what about some of Osborne’s other pieces of proposed legislation, such as his jingoistic outline for how teachers should be directed to talk about inequality, race, and sexuality, or a bill to repeal the refugee resettlement program? Or how about Osborne’s use of racial slurs and his general callousness?

It almost certainly doesn’t matter to Republican voters. To be a modern Republican is to declare that there is very little you won’t endorse, whether through applause or silence, to accomplish whatever it was that made you a conservative to begin with.

What’s a little violent persecution of certain immigrant populations, based on skin color, if it means the furtherance of “school choice”?

What’s a bit of brazen profiteering by the nation’s First Family if it means tax breaks for corporations and the wealthiest Americans?

What does a clear violation of foreign sovereignty and another plunge into the morass of nation-building matter if it means cheaper fossil fuels in the short term for Americans?

Around the same time Sununu sent out his memo of new endorsements, I received an email from a reader who disagreed with something I had written about the state’s approach to taxation. It was a critical but cordial letter, but in a follow-up, the writer reprimanded me in a way that has been sloshing around in my brain ever since: “I would prefer that you refer to Republican Leadership rather than Republicans,” he wrote. “There is a difference. Not all Republicans agree with the Leadership.”

That Republican voters would consider politicians that they elected to serve and lead to be somehow disconnected from their own political desires is remarkable to me. It’s one thing if a politician pulled a 180 after an election, in which case the voter is a victim of fraud, with restitution to be paid in the form of an election defeat the next time around. But nothing that’s happening now at the hands of Republican majorities is a surprise, here in Concord or in Washington. The administrations in power never missed an opportunity on the trail to articulate just how black and white they viewed the world, nor did they underplay the inhuman lengths to which they would go to prosecute and punish the people they consider unworthy of an American existence.

The slowly unraveling narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man asks, amid his deep disillusionment in a postwar America incapable of bridging its violent divisions, whether politics could ever be “an expression of love.” I’m not sure how readers answered that question in 1952, but here in 2026, a “hell no” echoes through policy after policy drafted by a ruling party that is fully committed to broadly inflicting love’s opposite.

I get the sense from Republicans like Sununu and my letter writer that many in the party still see the president as some kind of an outlier, a useful but impermanent disfigurement of the party’s core principles. But this president’s role isn’t as some kind of singular architect but rather as a performer who effectively channels the many currents that electrify his party. That job is a walk in the park for a man who desires power above all else and pays no mind to the means by which that power is acquired, secured, and exercised. To believe that Republican leaders will return to some level of restraint once he’s gone is to disregard the historic allure of unfettered control of political levers.

Do the moderate Republicans and right-leaning independents who are quietly riding out the present darkness (while privately celebrating any ideological victories that darkness has delivered) really believe that things will eventually snap back to some kind of more palatable centrism? Do they think the president’s personal ambition is somehow unique, that others aren’t lined up to grasp the same reins in exactly the same manner the very second this president releases them, by fate or by force?

Or maybe I’m overthinking it and the key to living as a modern old-school Republican in these cold days is just to pocket what you can while disavowing the sins of the motley coalition it took to get it. And then maybe a small prayer, of fluctuating urgency, that the genie will put itself back in the bottle before things go too far.

If that’s the case, I’m afraid I have some bad news.

• Dana Wormald, a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, has been a newspaper editor for more than 25 years. He began his career on the Concord Monitor’s news desk in 1995 and later spent more than a decade at the New Hampshire Union Leader. In 2014, he returned to the Monitor to serve as opinion editor, a position he held until being named editor of New Hampshire Bulletin, part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.