Republican Gen. Bolduc Challenges 'Hiding' Hassan to Debate amid Tied Race

New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Gen. Don Bolduc spoke to Breitbart News Saturday and challenged “hiding” Democrat Sen. Maggie Hassan to debate him after polling shows the race is tied.

“She’s come down, I think 4 points now. I’ve gone up 11 points to tie her in the poll,” Bolduc said about recent polling. “This is 100 percent momentum that we have, and once you get that momentum, you can’t stop it.”

Friday polling showed Bolduc in a dead heat (45-45 percent) with 7 percent undecided. Bolduc was down 11 points to Hassan in September but has closed the gap in just 30 days.

“I just invited her to a Lincoln-Douglas debate next week,” Bolduc said. “She can pick the time and the day on the capital steps to talk about everything–shoulder to shoulder.”

“Let’s do this. Invite everybody to come, and let’s do it. Let’s get it on. Let’s stand up for what each other is going to do and what she has done. So I’m waiting for an answer,” he continued.

Hassan appears to be avoiding public events. She has not shown up for two scheduled debates and has tried to prevent the conservative news outlets from covering her events. During Thursday’s debate, she said she prefers to speak with voters at private businesses or when she stops in at Dunkin’ Donuts and the grocery.

“She has closed events for a reason. She communicates through newsletter and email for reasons,” Bolduc said. “She doesn’t do town halls for a reason, and when she does them, they are zoom town halls. So she’s just hiding. She does not want to be held accountable. She does not want to be responsible for her actions in any way. She’s not transparent because she can’t be.”

“Absolutely wrong,” Bolduc added about Hassan’s attempt to bar a conservative journalist from attending one of her press conferences this week. “It’s inconsistent with the First Amendment, right. He [journalist] is a registered press, an award-winning journalist, and the New Hampshire [newspaper] is an award-winning media organization, and she’s gonna kick them out.”

Hassan claimed during Thursday’s debate that her campaign has been transparent. “I run my campaign in a way that allows me to hear from Granite Staters and address their concerns in real time,” Hassan said, “both as a candidate and as a sitting U.S. senator.”

Bolduc disagreed with Hassan’s characterization by stating Hassan lied and deceived people during the debate.

“All those things that she lied about or tried to deceive people,” the general said, “it certainly wasn’t anything that was acknowledged by the moderators. They just let her get away with it. And when I say something, they always want to double down on it, right.”

Bolduc then described a trick that the debate hosts tried to play on his campaign. “We had 45 people in the audience that were forced to wear masks, forced to wear a mask, and I said, … ‘Listen, you want me to show up? I’m not wearing a mask. My staff is not wearing a mask. My wife is not wearing the mask. We’re all gonna come in there with no masks on. There’s no reason for this.’ I don’t even want the audience en masse, but that was theater because the very next day, they had the Congressional District Two debate, and nobody was wearing a mask, not even the audience.”

“So that was something … they were trying to get me to go off on. But I didn’t show up for their date because I knew exactly what they were trying to do,” Gen. Bolduc concluded.

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.