She served one term on the City Council, where campaign biographies can make individual councilors sound as though they personally solved problems actually handled by nine councilors, a city manager and a lot of staff. Her later service chairing the Portsmouth Police Commission strikes me as more substantial because it involved civilian oversight, budgets, contracts and actual institutional responsibility.
Then I found something I didn’t like.
Shaheen worked for the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute in Manchester, known as ARMI, while her mother strongly advocated for federal support for the organization. ARMI has received very large federal awards.
I found no evidence that Senator Shaheen improperly steered federal money to ARMI to benefit her daughter, and the major awards went through competitive processes. The issue for me is appearance rather than proof of wrongdoing: a senator advocating for federal support for an organization paying her daughter creates overlapping family and political interests that deserve scrutiny.
If I’m going to examine Sullivan’s national network or DiLorenzo’s relationship with Trump, I can’t wave that away because I happen to like Shaheen better.
Anthony DiLorenzo surprised me too. Trump endorsed him. Turning Point backed him. Jim Jordan backed him. National Republican organizations have embraced him. I expected MAGA boilerplate all the way down.
I didn’t find it.
On immigration, DiLorenzo has said that people who have been here for years, work, pay taxes and haven’t committed crimes should not necessarily be rounded up and deported. That is considerably more moderate than Trump’s mass-deportation rhetoric. He has also defended the independence of the Federal Reserve and says abortion should be left to New Hampshire rather than Congress.
None of that makes him a Trump critic. His candidacy is clearly benefiting from Trump and the political apparatus around him. But I can no longer fairly call him a rubber stamp.
Trump has stamped his approval on DiLorenzo. What I still don’t know is whether DiLorenzo would return the favor every time his vote came up.
Hollie Noveletsky may be the easiest of the four to place ideologically because she is unusually willing to take specific positions. She supports tougher immigration enforcement and restrictions on birthright citizenship, opposes a Medicare public option and major gun-control proposals, wants a smaller federal government and favors protectionist trade policies aimed at strengthening American manufacturing.
That willingness to be specific matters. On questions such as birthright citizenship and a Medicare public option, Noveletsky has taken clear positions while some of her opponents have left similar issue questionnaires unanswered or offered broader campaign language instead.
I disagree with much of what she proposes, but I give her credit for telling voters where she stands. And when Trump endorsed DiLorenzo instead of her, she didn’t salute, pack up and go home. She said Trump was wrong and stayed in the race. That is worth something.
There are real strengths among all four. Shaheen has the strongest health-care background. Sullivan has the most developed understanding of defense and national security. DiLorenzo brings substantial real-world business experience. Noveletsky brings manufacturing and health-care experience and is unusually explicit about what she believes.
None can be dismissed as unserious, and none is unqualified.
The harder question for me is what should matter most in choosing among them.