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The aim of this article is to reveal new trends in the pre-election strategies of American politicians related to changes in American society at the beginning of the 21st century. The article examines the election strategies of two real candidates for US Senators from the State of New Hampshire. The author analyses the factors that led to the victory of the democratic candidate. Special attention is paid to the place and role of advertising in the construction of the election campaigns in the United States.

In 1680–90s Puritan New England underwent political and cultural transformations that would eventually turn it from a Puritan «covenanted society», virtually independent of the mother country, into a much more open and secular royal province. The events that shaped the crisis and transformations alike were the establishment of a royal Dominion of New England in 1686 and its downfall in the bloodless Boston revolution of 1689, «King William’s War» with the French and their Algonquin allies and Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. The article touches upon some aspects of colonial culture crisis of the time, such as eschatology, religious intolerance, xenophobia, false witness and shame for the Puritan community, that manifested in the birth of the colonists’ new identity as members of a larger British Atlantic community. The sources are mostly socially significant texts (such as sermons or pamphlets), written by New England Puritan political and cultural elite of the period.