MANCHESTER, N.H.—Around 30 Republicans from Harvard and other Massachusetts colleges traveled to New Hampshire Saturday to canvass for votes in the state’s crucial U.S. Senate race.

Members of the Harvard Republican Club (HRC) leafleted door-to-door and then gathered for a rally to support U.S. Rep. John E. Sununu’s Senate bid, as well as other Republican candidates for Congress and state office.

The Republicans are focusing on New Hampshire because it is one of a handful of close Senate races around the country that could change the majority in the Senate.

“I really wouldn’t want to see the Senate dominated by Democrats who are going to kill Bush’s foreign policy agenda by bringing in all sorts of economic issues that aren’t nearly as important right about now,” said HRC member Jeremy A. Lawrence ’06.

The students gathered at the Kennedy School and took a yellow school bus to Nashua, N.H.

From there, local volunteers drove them in small groups to do a “lit drop.”

For about three hours in the middle of a windy day, the students spread out through middle-class Nashua neighborhoods, wedging campaign literature in doors, under mats or wherever they could make it stay.

After a late lunch in Nashua, the group traveled to a “Youth for Sununu” rally in at the Black Brimmer restaurant in downtown Manchester.

About 30 minutes before the rally was scheduled to begin, supporters of Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic candidate for Senate, gathered in front of the restaurant. Some held signs, while others wore polar-bear costumes in protest of Sununu’s position favoring drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Not to be outdone, the Republicans emerged from the restaurant to wave Sununu signs and chant “Su-nu-nu.”

One GOP supporter walked around in a penguin costume as the two sides battled for street-corner superiority.

“We had a lot of people come by honking the horn—bus drivers and just regular citizens who are out heresupporting Sununu,” said Stephanie N. Kendall ’05.

At the rally, Sununu thanked the Republicans for their time.

“I know you’ve been out across the state today dropping literature, knocking on doors, making a difference—making a difference for my campaign, making a difference for the state and, frankly, making a difference for the country,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt (R.-Mo.), a top Republican leader in the House, also spoke about the importance of recapturing the Senate.

After the rally, the group spent a little over an hour at an Oktoberfest celebration in Manchester, on a windswept parking lot.

The Institute of Politics paid for the club’s trip to New Hampshire, as it has for the Harvard College Democrats trips to the Granite State.

While HRC President Brian C. Grech had planned for two bus loads of volunteers, he said he was pleased with the turnout.

“We recognize that it takes a sort of different breed to come out when it’s Head of the Charles weekend,” he said. “It’s very selfless.”

Grech said the HRC plans another trip to New Hampshire the weekend before the Nov. 5 general election.