Pappas focused campaign against Republican John Sununu on serving as a bulwark against Trump administration

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Chris Pappas, the four-term Democratic congressman, has won New Hampshire’s US Senate race, making him the first out gay man to serve in the upper chamber.

Pappas, 46, is a centrist voice in the US House who has at times broken with his party on major legislation. He focused his Senate campaign on serving as a bulwark against the Trump administration, which is unpopular in the Granite State, and defeated the former senator John Sununu in a closely fought contest.

‘It’s the disregard for the rule of law. It just seems like they’re thumbing their nose at it’

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In the battleground state of Maine, Todd Cox, 63, has supported the state’s incumbent Republican senator Susan Collins not once, but twice, in previous elections. Not this time.

On Tuesday, Cox, a technology professional, cast his vote for Collins’s Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson – driven not by pressing local issues, but broader concern “for the direction the country is going in”, he said.