Shaheen’s experience is closer to home. Her daughter has Type 1 diabetes, which meant years of dealing with insurers, prescription costs and a system that can make families repeatedly prove that an incurable disease hasn’t somehow gone away. Health care, she has said, became the cause of her life.² ³
She has also run a business and served on the Portsmouth City Council and Police Commission. Her political story comes out of insulin bills, insurance denials, contaminated water, utility costs and the increasingly difficult question of whether ordinary families can still afford to live here.² ⁴
That leads to the central contrast in the race. Sullivan has experience inside the institutions Congress oversees. Shaheen’s experience comes from dealing with what happens when those institutions, or the private systems around them, don’t work as promised.
The names they carry
Both candidates carry distinct political liabilities, and they’re almost exact opposites.
Stefany Shaheen’s family name invites questions about political inheritance. Maura Sullivan’s relatively recent arrival in New Hampshire invites questions about whether her connection to the state began with her political ambitions.
Stefany Shaheen is the daughter of Jeanne Shaheen, the former governor and longtime senator. The name brings instant recognition, political relationships and a network most candidates would need years to build. It also raises an obvious question: Is public office becoming a family business?
Stefany Shaheen has a record of her own. She served in local government, built a company and spent years advocating for medical research and people with chronic illness. But she still has to prove that she is running because of what she has done—not simply because of the name she inherited.² ⁴
Sullivan carries the opposite burden. She moved to New Hampshire in 2017 and ran for Congress the following year, which made her look, fairly or not, like a nationally connected candidate who had selected New Hampshire as the place to begin a political career.
That argument has weakened. She has now lived here for nearly a decade, raised her family here and built substantial support among local Democrats. But against Shaheen, she can’t win an argument about who has been here longer. She has to make a different case: that knowing Washington from the inside may be more useful than spending a lifetime outside it.¹ ⁵
The uncomfortable question hanging over the race is whether inherited political access is worse than imported political ambition.
What the economy looks like from here
Both candidates say the economy works better for corporations and wealthy people than it does for nearly everyone else. In New Hampshire, that means the rent increase that follows a building sale, the young couple who make decent money but still can’t buy a house, the family choosing between childcare and a second income, and the hospital bill that arrives after the insurer has already decided what it won’t pay.
Sullivan’s answer is more structural. She talks about stronger unions, a higher minimum wage, affordable childcare, vocational education, domestic manufacturing, Social Security and a public health-insurance option. Her argument is that wages, housing, health care and childcare aren’t separate problems. Together, they determine whether a family can build a stable life.⁶