HUDSON, N.H. — At a campaign rally for Senate hopeful Scott Brown on Wednesday, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney took dead aim at President Obama's record, said incumbent Senator Jeanne Shaheen was a lockstep vote with Obama, and told a cheering crowd of supporters a vote for Brown is a vote against the president's priorities.
Obama's "policies are on the ballot, and the name of those policies are Jeanne Shaheen, and that's why she's got to go!" Romney said to applause, with Brown near his side at Gilchrist Metal Fabricating Co.
Romney, who formally endorsed Brown at another rally earlier this year, criticized the president's efforts on issues from the economy to education to reducing poverty. And he worked to tie Shaheen to the president, who polls have found is quite unpopular in New Hampshire.
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Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, argued that Shaheen talks like an independent in the Granite State but is a partisan when she gets to the US Capitol.
"There's a big ravine between" Shaheen in New Hampshire and Shaheen in Washington, he said.
"She goes there and votes for President Obama 99 percent of the time," Romney told the crowd, echoing Brown's most frequent line of attack against his opponent.
The former governor lauded Brown as someone who would be an independent voice.
Brown made the case that the best way to move the country forward was to elect a Republican majority in the US Senate, including voting him into office. The New Hampshire contest is among those that will determine whether the GOP takes over the chamber.
At the rally, Brown made the case a vote for him is a vote against the status quo.
"Let's send a very powerful message to Washington, D.C.," Brown said, "that we're tired of the business as usual, we're tired of them chipping away at our rights and freedoms, we're tired and we want change."
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In response to the Romney-Brown event, the New Hampshire Democratic Party released statements from organized labor leaders rehashing a familiar attack against Romney and applying it Brown, too: That both are supporters of outsourcing American jobs.
Shaheen and her campaign have attacked Brown repeatedly in recent weeks over his position on the board of a company that, the Democrat says, "has as part of its business model shipping jobs overseas."
Brown has dismissed those attacks, insisting that he has a much stronger record than Shaheen of supporting small businesses.
Romney, who won the 2012 GOP New Hampshire presidential primary but lost the state in the general election, made only a passing reference to his campaign, which took him to the same company that he appeared at with Brown on Wednesday.
"Two-and-half years ago I was in this place," Romney said after he took the microphone. "This time, it's going to work out better, I can tell ya'. We're going to get Scott elected, that's for sure."
The crowd cheered.
Joshua Miller can be reached at joshua.miller@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jm_bos.