U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen is expected to announce later this month whether or not she’ll seek a fourth six-year term representing New Hampshire in the Senate when she’s up for re-election next year.

That’s according to sources in New Hampshire, who confirmed to the Monitor news first reported by Punchbowl, a Washington DC-based reporting outfit that covers Congress.

There’s intense speculation on whether the 78-year-old Shaheen, a former governor who first won election to the Senate in 2008 and who this year became the first woman in history to hold one of the top two positions on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will seek another term in office.

Sources tell this reporter that Shaheen will hold a major fundraiser on March 20 at the Puritan in Manchester. It’s likely the senator will come to a decision regarding her political future and have some kind of announcement by the time of the fundraising event.

Shaheen raised a paltry $170,000 in the final fundraising quarter of last year, which sparked speculation that the senator may not be preparing for another likely competitive re-election campaign in New Hampshire, the only general election swing state in New England. But sources in Shaheen’s political orbit noted that the senator did not emphasize fundraising in the fourth quarter of last year, which included the final month of the 2024 presidential election.

Then there’s the timing – at this point six years ago, during the 2020 cycle, Shaheen had already announced her re-election.

Former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, the former senator from Massachusetts who later narrowly lost to Shaheen in New Hampshire in the 2014 election, is seriously considering a 2026 run, in a possible rematch against Shaheen.

Brown, who served four years as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand during President Donald Trump’s first administration, has been holding meetings with Republicans across New Hampshire for a couple of months and has also met with GOP officials in the nation’s capital.

National Republicans see opportunities to flip the Senate seat in New Hampshire from blue to red, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee has already run ads targeting Shaheen over her defense of USAID funding that the Trump administration is axing.

Shaheen is the last remaining Democrat up for re-election in 2026 in a competitive seat who has yet to publicly announce their intentions.

Her busy schedule may be one reason. The senator recently attended a major foreign policy summit in Munich, Germany and then visited Ukraine, in a show of support for the embattled nation, which for three years has been fending off an invasion by neighboring Russia.

Republicans flipped four Democrat-held Senate seats in last November’s elections to win back the chamber’s majority. They now control the chamber and are aiming to expand their majority in 2026.

Besides New Hampshire, the GOP is also targeting battleground Michigan, where Democratic Sen. Gary Peters announced in January that he wouldn’t seek re-election. Also on their 2026 radar is Georgia, another key battleground state where Republicans view first-term Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff as vulnerable.

And Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota announced last month that she wouldn’t bid for another term in next year’s midterms, giving the GOP hope it might be competitive in the blue-leaning state.

But Republicans are also playing defense in the 2026 cycle.

Democrats plan to go on offense in blue-leaning Maine, where moderate GOP Sen. Susan Collins is up for re-election, as well as in battleground North Carolina, where Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is also up in 2026. 

And Democrats are looking at red-leaning Ohio, where Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted was appointed in January to succeed Vice President JD Vance in the Senate. Husted will run next year to finish out Vance's term.

Were NH Democrats disrespectful to Trump?

There have been plenty of political fireworks in the wake of the president’s address this week to a joint session of Congress. The speech was Trump’s first major primetime address to federal lawmakers and the nation since taking over the White House six weeks ago.

Trump has been moving at warp speed since his Jan. 20 inauguration and he used his Tuesday speech to deliver a full-throated defense of his avalanche of activity, while repeatedly targeting former President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats.

Democrats pilloried the president’s speech over its partisan tone. But the White House and Republicans have returned fire, attacking the Democrats for their behavior during the address.

Rep. Al Green, a Democrat from Texas, was removed from the chamber after yelling at Trump, and on Thursday was censured by the House.

And Republicans have criticized Democrats over the heckling of the president by some lawmakers during his more than 90-minute speech, the longest address to a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address in 60 years.

Among the Democrats attending the address were all four members of New Hampshire’s all-Democratic congressional delegation: Shaheen, Sen. Maggie Hassan, and Reps. Chris Pappas and Maggie Goodlander.

New Hampshire Democrats note that Shaheen and Hassan stayed for the entire speech and did not wear any colors or hold signs in protest. And they add that Pappas and Goodlander also stayed for the entire address and did not hold any protest signs either.

Longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley, a vocal critic of Trump, argued that the president “used his address to double down on firing federal workers, including those at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard who protect Granite Staters. He backed tariffs that will raise costs for New Hampshire families and businesses.”