Exclusive: New Hampshire Republican Matt Mowers Aims to Take On ‘Entrenched Bureaucracy’ in Washington

BEDFORD, New Hampshire — Matt Mowers is running for Congress with plans to bring his Trump administration bona fides to Washington to take on the “entrenched bureaucracy” of the federal government.

Mowers, the frontrunner in New Hampshire’s First District Republican primary, spoke with Breitbart News during a wide-ranging interview this month about how his work as a senior White House adviser at the State Department under former President Donald Trump has conditioned him for Congress.

“I saw firsthand the difficulties of taking on the entrenched bureaucracy, the challenges of taking on, you know, the mainstream media, the challenges of representing our nation abroad when you’re sitting across the table from adversaries,” Mowers said.

Mowers worked with the State Department under Trump for more than two years, and contended that the experience now makes him the only adequately “tested” conservative in the First District’s packed GOP primary race.

“Someone who’s been in a secure room when North Korea’s setting off its first missiles over Japan and trying to test the new administration and actually knows how to respond and take on whether its adversaries abroad or entrenched bureaucracy at home,” Mowers said. “That’s what we really need right now.”

Mowers took a commanding lead in a pair of recent primary polls, but other viable candidates remain in the running, including former Trump assistant press secretary Karoline Leavitt, longtime television journalist Gail Huff Brown, and state Rep. Tim Baxter.

Whoever wins the New Hampshire primary, taking place September 13, will go on to face Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH), a congressman since 2019 who narrowly defeated Mowers when Mowers ran in his first bid for Congress in 2020.

The First District is expected to see an even more competitive race this year and is one of just five in the country that election analyst Cook Political Report rates as a dead even toss-up.

One top issue for Mowers is education reform, the same issue that proved to be a lightning rod in Virginia’s bellwether gubernatorial race last year.

“I’ve got a one-year-old at home, so I’m thinking a lot about what he’s going to be taught when he goes to school. I’m thinking about making sure he actually is taught how to think, not what to think, making sure he’s in a classroom where he’s not labeled a racist or anything just because, you know, of the way he was born,” Mowers said.

Like most Republicans, prioritizing scaling back government spending in the wake of crippling inflation rates is also at the top of Mowers’ radar.

“Doing things the New Hampshire way — we have no income tax, no sales tax, [we’re] fiscally responsible, and you look at what’s happening in D.C.,” Mowers said. “They have an addiction to spending. … They’re trying to create a cradle-to-grave socialist system so no one has to work. We need to get back to a system that we know made our country the leader that it is. … We believe in hard work. We believe in waking up in the morning and throwing your all into a job and trying to provide for your family, you know, making sure that you can achieve your piece of the American dream, right? That’s who we are.”

New England Republican candidates are seeing a rare abundance of opportunities in the midterms this year while Democrats work to defend their seats amid forty-year-high inflation rates and President Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings.

Mowers said he hears about inflation impacting New Hampshirites “every day,” adding that “gas prices are a huge issue for us, not just because you have to fill up your gas tank, but 40 percent of homes in New Hampshire run off home heating oil. That’s a lot of families.”

Mowers, who held a comfortable double-digit lead in two recent primary polls and leads the primary field in fundraising, has seemingly only hit one public hiccup on the campaign trail, a voting controversy that surfaced in April after the Associated Press put out a story that Mowers had voted in two state’s presidential primaries in 2016.

Mowers drew criticism from GOP opponents over the story, as well as from Democrat Hillary Clinton, who quickly took to Twitter to berate Mowers upon the story’s publication.

Mowers, who worked for Trump’s first presidential campaign, said that while he was working out of New Jersey in 2016, “the campaign asked if I would become a delegate to the convention, and so I said yes. I was trying to help where I could, and it was a totally separate election.” He also voted in New Hampshire’s primary that year.

The Associated Press later reported the New Hampshire attorney general had investigated the matter and exonerated Mowers, saying Mowers did not violate New Hampshire state law in 2016 by voting in the two primaries.

Mowers said of the voting story, “The only people talking about it are folks who are either down by 25 points in a primary or Hillary Clinton attacking me in a tweet.”