Karoline Leavitt sat frozen on the Fox News set Tuesday night as the network called the New Hampshire Senate race for Democrat Chris Pappas, delivering a humiliating live rejection of the Trump-aligned candidate she had just voted for hours earlier. The 29-year-old former White House press secretary, newly hired as a Fox commentator after leaving the Trump administration, watched her home state deliver a decisive blow to Republican John E. Sununu. Fox projected Pappas the winner with roughly 61 percent of the vote to Sununu’s 37 percent, while the Associated Press confirmed a similar margin of 58.6 percent to 39.6 percent with only a third of precincts reporting. The rout landed as a personal gut punch for Leavitt, who had cast her ballot for Sununu that same morning in Atkinson, New Hampshire.
Leavitt’s New Hampshire roots run deep. Born in Atkinson, she grew up in a rural, working-class family that owned a local ice cream shop and truck dealership. She later described the household to podcast host Kate Mackz as “very rural, working class, blue collar… a typical middle-class America upbringing.” She attended Saint Anselm College in Manchester on a softball scholarship, graduating in 2019 with degrees in politics and communication after volunteering at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics and interning at Fox News during the 2016 cycle. That same year she wrote a campus paper column attacking the “liberal media” as “unjust, unfair, and sometimes just plain old false.”
Dana Perino, one of the Fox panelists, immediately turned the camera on Leavitt as the numbers locked in. “I’m looking at Karoline Leavitt, who is from New Hampshire, ran a race in New Hampshire, knows all these people very well—I mean, is this a surprise?” Perino asked. Leavitt answered that she had woken up in New Hampshire, voted for Sununu, and was “sad to see not enough of my fellow Granite Staters did the same.” The exchange underscored how thoroughly the state’s voters had rejected the MAGA-aligned ticket despite her personal efforts.
The loss carried extra sting because Leavitt had already lost to the same Democrat once before. In 2022 she ran for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District and was defeated by Pappas. On air she tried to frame the Senate result as Pappas merely looking moderate while voting with the “far-left,” yet the scale of the margin made the spin difficult to sustain. She then pivoted to other races where Republicans might still pick up seats, insisting “we’re hopeful.” When colleagues noted the forced optimism, she offered a telling deflection: “It’s my first day at work!”
Leavitt’s rapid rise had been inseparable from Donald Trump. After serving as an assistant press secretary in his first term, she returned as the youngest White House press secretary in January 2025 following his reelection. She left the role in August 2025, citing a desire to spend more time with her two young children, then quickly transitioned into the Fox guest-commentator slot for midterm coverage. Her presence on the network’s election night panel was widely seen as a reward for loyalty to Trump, yet the New Hampshire result undercut the narrative that Trump’s brand remained dominant even in states with strong personal ties to his surrogates.
New Hampshire’s rejection of Sununu fits a broader midterm pattern of voters punishing Trump-aligned candidates in competitive races. While Leavitt and her Fox colleagues searched for silver linings, the raw numbers in her home state offered little comfort. Pappas’s comfortable margin, achieved early and with limited votes counted, suggested a clear preference for the Democrat over the Republican who had courted Trump’s orbit. Leavitt’s own 2022 congressional loss to the same opponent only reinforced the sense of recurring local repudiation.
Her attempt to cast the outcome as merely disappointing rather than decisive drew immediate pushback from the panel. The “first day at work” line, meant to lighten the mood, instead highlighted how quickly the Trump-to-Fox pipeline had placed her in an awkward position. Viewers saw a once-confident spokesperson reduced to defending a lopsided home-state defeat while the rest of the desk treated her reaction as the story. The moment encapsulated the tension between Leavitt’s personal New Hampshire identity and the national MAGA brand she had helped amplify from the White House podium.
Leavitt had posted on X earlier that day confirming her vote for Sununu, a public endorsement that made the later on-air disappointment even more stark. The contrast between her morning confidence and the evening result circulated quickly among political observers. For a commentator hired in part because of her Trump credentials, the live reaction served as an unplanned reminder that those credentials carried limited weight with voters in her own backyard.
The episode also raised questions about how effectively Fox’s new MAGA-aligned hires can navigate election nights when the numbers cut against them. Leavitt’s visible discomfort and strained optimism stood in contrast to the more detached analysis offered by veteran panelists. As midterm results continued to roll in, her segment became an early illustration of the political cost of close identification with Trump when local voters deliver a different verdict.
In the end, Karoline Leavitt’s first night as a Fox commentator produced a memorable television moment for all the wrong reasons. A young Trump loyalist who left the White House to prioritize family found herself explaining a home-state wipeout on live television, her earlier ballot for Sununu rendered irrelevant by a decisive Democratic win. The midterms delivered a clear message in New Hampshire: even personal roots and high-profile Trump connections could not overcome the electorate’s preference for the alternative. For Leavitt, the humiliation was both professional and personal—an on-air reminder that the MAGA wave she had once helped sell no longer commanded the loyalty of her fellow Granite Staters.
