10 Things You Didn't Know About Kelly Ayotte

1. Kelly Ayotte (pronounced ey-yaht) was born June 27, 1968, in Nashua, N.H.

2. She earned a B.A. in political science from Pennsylvania State University in 1990 and a J.D. from Villanova University School of Law in 1993.

3. After a year clerking for an associate justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, Ayotte practiced law at McLane, Graf, Raulerson & Middleton from 1994 to 1998.

4. She joined the New Hampshire attorney general's office in 1998 as a prosecutor and later worked as chief of the homicide unit and as associate attorney general.

5. In 2001, she married Joseph Daley, who is also from Nashua. He is an Iraq war veteran who now works for the Air National Guard. They have two children.

6. Ayotte helped her husband launch Daley's Outdoor Services, a landscape design and installation company, in 2003.

7. She became New Hampshire's first female attorney general in 2004.

8. In 2006 and 2007, Business NH Magazine named Ayotte one of the state's 10 most powerful people.

9. Gov. John Lynch re-nominated her for attorney general in March 2009. He accepted her resignation about four months later when she announced her bid to replace retiring three-term Republican Sen. Judd Gregg.

10. Endorsed by Sarah Palin, Ayotte defeated Tea Party-backed conservative lawyer Ovide Lamontagne by 1,667 votes out of more than 126,000 votes cast in the state's Republican Senate primary. Polls show her ahead of the Democratic candidate, Rep. Paul Hodes.

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