Brown wins primary in bid for US Senate return

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Scott Brown won New Hampshire's Republican U.S. Senate primary on Tuesday, moving forward in his attempt to get back to Washington from another state.

Even though Brown was from a neighboring state, Republican leaders viewed him as the strongest challenger to incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in a race that could be critical in the Republicans' drive to regain a Senate majority.

Brown shocked the nation in 2010 by winning a special election in Massachusetts for the Senate seat long held by the late Democratic stalwart Edward Kennedy. He then lost that seat in 2012 to a populist Democrat.

New Hampshire was one of five states holding primary votes Tuesday to nominate candidates for the November elections in which control of Congress will be at stake.

On his third campaign in five years, Brown received 50 percent of the vote as he faced nine primary opponents, though only two mounted serious campaigns.

Brown spent Tuesday reminding voters that Republicans need to gain six seats to win a majority in the Senate.

"After six years of missed opportunities at home and growing dangers around the world, we need change," Brown said in his victory speech. "And the problem is a vote for my opponent will change exactly nothing."

A Republican takeover of the Senate would likely crush any hopes President Barack Obama has of moving his legislative agenda through Congress in his final two years in the White House. The Republicans already hold an unassailable majority in the House of Representatives after a wave election in 2010 put them back in charge only two years after Obama's first election.

Political handicappers give the Republicans a better-than-even chance of snatching the Senate majority, given Obama's poor approval ratings.

Brown, the front-runner for the Republican nomination from the start, tailored his message toward a November showdown with Shaheen.

Just two years after his surprise victory in Massachusetts, Brown lost the seat to Democrat Elizabeth Warren in 2012. He subsequently moved to New Hampshire, where he had a vacation home and had lived as a toddler, seeking an alternate route to Washington.

If he's successful, Brown would become only the third U.S. senator to serve multiple states and the first since 1879.

Brown's two main challengers were hoping for comebacks of their own. Former U.S. Sen. Bob Smith held the seat for two terms but moved to Florida soon after losing the 2002 primary. Former state Sen. Jim Rubens has been out of office even longer — he served two terms in the state Legislature in the 1990s. Lagging far behind Brown in money, media attention and polls, they cast Brown as a liberal flip-flopper, arguing that he's shown more consistency voting with Democrats than he has sticking to his convictions.

Brown answered his rivals by casting himself an independent problem solver willing to work across the aisle with Democrats, and by reminding voters that unlike Smith and Rubens, he never left the Republican Party. But for the most part, he focused on Shaheen, attempting to tie her to the increasingly unpopular Obama, particularly in her support for Obama's health care overhaul law.

Shaheen has contrasted Brown's recent arrival in the state to her decades of public service as a state senator, the first woman elected governor of New Hampshire and the state's first female U.S. senator.

In Massachusetts, an Iraq war veteran, Seth Moulton, defeated U.S. Rep. John Tierney in a hard-fought Democratic House primary.

Moulton, a former Marine, ran a well-financed campaign in his bid to unseat Tierney, suggesting the incumbent had been ineffective in Congress. Moulton argued that he would have a stronger chance of holding off Richard Tisei, a former state senator and openly gay Republican, in the November election.

Other key primary elections Tuesday involved races for governor:

— In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo received slightly over 60 percent of the vote as he won the Democratic primary against Zephyr Teachout, a largely unknown law professor and liberal activist who faulted the incumbent for not doing enough to address government corruption and income inequality. The contest highlighted Cuomo's uneasy relationship with the party's liberal base. Cuomo moves on to face Republican Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive, and Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins in November.

— In Massachusetts, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, who lost the 2010 Senate race to Brown, won some measure of political redemption as she defeated state Treasurer Steven Grossman and Donald Berwick, a former federal health care administrator. She will face the Republican primary winner, health care executive Charlie Baker.

— In New Hampshire, retired defense industry executive Walt Havenstein beat ultraconservative tea party activist Andrew Hemingway and two others. He now faces first-term incumbent Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan.

— In Rhode Island, the state's general treasurer Gina Raimondo beat Providence Mayor Angel Taveras and Clay Pell, a member of a prominent political family in the state and the husband of Olympic figure skater Michelle Kwan, to win the Democratic nomination. Cranston Mayor Allan Fung won the Republican nomination.

Tuesday is the final primary election of the 2014 midterms until Election Day, for every state but Louisiana.