I am a skeptic by nature, and campaign biographies are almost designed to bring that out in me. Everybody running for Congress seems to have spent a lifetime fighting for working families, creating jobs, fixing health care, defending democracy and occasionally saving the republic before breakfast. The photographs are flattering, the résumés polished, the endorsements impressive. The inconvenient parts tend to disappear somewhere between the biography and the donation button.
So I started looking closely at four candidates I consider the current front-runners in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District: Democrats Stefany Shaheen and Maura Sullivan and Republicans Anthony DiLorenzo and Hollie Noveletsky.
New Hampshire’s 1st is an odd congressional district, even by American standards. It combines Portsmouth and the Seacoast, with their universities, technology businesses and generally more liberal politics, with working-class Manchester and Rochester, prosperous suburbs, old mill towns, lake communities and a large stretch of rural New Hampshire reaching toward the White Mountains. Democrats can win it, Republicans can win it, and independents can decide it. Voters here have a long habit of splitting their tickets and judging candidates more personally than their party labels might suggest.
A Democrat who sounds too much like the national Democratic Party can have trouble in the northern and inland parts of the district; a Republican who sounds too much like MAGA can lose the Seacoast and suburban middle. It is less a single political community than several very different New Hampshires required to share one member of Congress.
I already had opinions. I thought DiLorenzo looked like a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. Noveletsky’s immigration positions struck me as unnecessarily hard-line. I liked Sullivan. Her résumé sounded remarkable: Marine officer, Iraq veteran, Harvard, Obama administration, Veterans Affairs, Pentagon.