Former senator and ambassador Scott Brown is bringing back his “No BS backyard BBQs.”
The former GOP senator from Massachusetts-turned-New Hampshire resident hosted 16 of the 18 Republican presidential candidates at informal gatherings at his home in Rye during the wide open and combustible 2016 GOP presidential nomination race.
And Brown’s bringing back the No BS backyard BBQs in the 2024 cycle, as the race for the GOP presidential nomination heats up across the country and especially in the early voting states, including New Hampshire, which holds the first primary and second overall contest following Iowa in the Republican schedule.
Up first on Wednesday evening is former ambassador to the United Nations and former two-term South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
At the informal gatherings, both the food and the candidates are grilled. But Brown says the Republican, independent, and even some Democratic voters who attend his events ask their questions to the candidates “respectfully.”
“It’s the New Hampshire way,” Brown emphasized, as he pointed to New Hampshire’s well-known tradition of retail politics and direct candidate-to-voter interactions.
After hosting nearly all the Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 cycle, Brown later endorsed Donald Trump in the weeks ahead of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. After Trump was elected president, he nominated Brown as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand, where the former senator served for four years.
But with Shaheen, a former governor turned three-term senator, up for re-election in 2026, would Brown consider another Senate run?
“Of course,” he told Fox News. “You see what’s happening in the country and the dysfunction in Washington.”
He touted that during his nearly three-year tenure in the Senate that he was one of “the most bipartisan problem solving” lawmakers in the chamber.