Brown Hints at Another Senate Race â€" in New Hampshire

If the special Senate election in Massachusetts has put the political cognoscenti to sleep, a possible race in neighboring New Hampshire may wake them up.

“I don’t think I’m done with politics," Scott Brown said Thursday at an event in Nashau, N.H., commemorating the anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Scott Brown, who just turned down a chance to run again for the Senate in Massachusetts, is hinting that he might hop over the state line and challenge Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat who is up for re-election in 2014.

Asked Thursday if he might consider challenging Ms. Shaheen, Mr. Brown said, “I don’t think I’m done with politics, but I’m not going to rule out anything right now because I really haven’t thought a heck of a lot about it.” He spoke to reporters after delivering a speech in Nashua, N.H., on the anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.

“New Hampshire’s like a second home,” Mr. Brown added. “I was born at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. My mom and sister and family live here. Spent summers here growing up. Have a house here. Been a taxpayer for 20 years.”

While any politician who appears in New Hampshire, which traditionally holds the first presidential primary every four years, is presumed to be running for something, Mr. Brown may just have been having a little fun with reporters who wondered why they had traipsed to Nashua to hear him give a speech.

“I think it’s just as plausible to think that Mr. Brown is trying to scare up some publicity for himself than that this was the opening foray into running against Ms. Shaheen,” Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, said.

After all, Mr. Brown decided in February to opt out of the special election in Massachusetts to succeed John Kerry, now the secretary of state, saying he was exhausted from last year's Senate campaign, and he has just signed on with the law firm Nixon Peabody, in its Boston office. Mr. Brown is also a Fox News contributor.

But the Shaheen campaign is not waiting for any clarification of Mr. Brown’s intentions. On Friday morning, the campaign shot out a fund-raising letter warning supporters that Mr. Brown could try to run the kind of race he ran - and lost - last year against Elizabeth Warren in the most expensive Senate race in the country.

“This is serious,” the letter said. “Brown’s campaign spent $40 million in 2012. Most of it went to lie-filled attack ads.”

The campaign hopes that the mere threat of a Brown candidacy will prompt potential donors to open their wallets for Ms. Shaheen, who so far has no major Republican opponent. The fervent progressives nationwide who flocked to Ms. Warren have not been a natural base for Ms. Shaheen, but such activists might be persuaded to donate if it means stopping Mr. Brown from returning to the Senate.

And Mr. Brown may have concluded that it would be easier for a Republican to get elected in purple New Hampshire than in deep blue Massachusetts. He noted to reporters that he would be coming back to New Hampshire for several more speaking engagements over the next few weeks. The next is a luncheon on April 20 for the Grafton County Republican Committee, which is likely to draw an inordinate amount of news coverage.