A military veteran with a previous unsuccessful bid for Congress, the daughter of a household name in New Hampshire politics, and a Harvard University professor — all Democrats — are the first to jump in the 2026 race for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District.

Maura Sullivan, a Marine Corps veteran and former Obama administration staffer, became the first candidate to join the race in April. Former Portsmouth City Councilor Stefany Shaheen, who is the daughter of U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, followed late last month. On June 4, Carleigh Beriont, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and serves on Hampton’s select board, announced her campaign. No Republican has officially entered the race yet.

The district, which has been in Democratic hands for nearly a decade, is being closely watched to see whether a Republican can flip it or whether it’s become a Democratic stronghold. 

Sullivan, Shaheen, and Beriont are vying to represent the eastern half of New Hampshire, including Manchester, the state’s largest city; the Seacoast cities of Portsmouth, Dover, and Exeter; and parts of the Lakes Region, including Laconia. Chris Pappas has represented the 1st District since 2018, but it became an open contest in April when Pappas announced a run for the Senate seat being vacated by Jeanne Shaheen.

Both Sullivan and Shaheen targeted President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk in their opening pitches to voters. Sullivan put particular emphasis on her military service in Iraq and Southeast Asia.

“I saw too many of my fellow Marines give their lives for this country to just sit by and watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk tear it down,” Sullivan said in her announcement video. “They’re driving up costs for New Hampshire families, making it even more difficult to own a home and pay the bills, and that’s why I’m running for Congress.”

Born in the Chicago area, Sullivan holds degrees from Northwestern University and Harvard. After serving in the Marine Corps, Sullivan worked in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense under former President Barack Obama. In 2017, she moved to New Hampshire and within three months announced she was running for Congress, a move widely criticized by people who pointed out how few ties she had to the state. She finished runner-up to Pappas among 11 candidates in the primary.

In her campaign announcement, Shaheen focused on health care-related issues, saying her experience raising a daughter with type 1 diabetes inspired her to fight for medical research.

“When I see Donald Trump crushing medical research in our country,” Shaheen said in her video, “when I see Elon Musk with a chainsaw chasing out our best scientists and doctors, when I see Bobby Kennedy Jr. allowing measles to run rampant because he believes in conspiracy theories instead of proven vaccines, and when I see congressional Republicans slashing Medicaid, children’s health care, veterans’ health care, all to fund massive tax breaks for billionaires and corporations, well, I’m going to fight.”

Shaheen’s mother, a mainstay of New Hampshire politics for decades, served as governor from 1997 to 2003 and has represented the state in the U.S. Senate since 2009 (she announced her upcoming retirement in March). In addition to formerly serving on the Portsmouth City Council, the younger Shaheen was chairwoman of the Portsmouth Police Commission. She works as chief strategy officer for the Manchester-based biomanufacturer ARMI and founded Good Measures, a company that seeks to connect people with chronic illnesses to proper supports.

In announcing her candidacy, Beriont characterized herself as an outsider rather than an establishment candidate.

“I’m not a career politician — I’m a mom, an educator, a neighbor,” she said in a press release. “I’ve spent my life standing up for people who don’t always have a voice in the room. Now, I’m ready to bring that same fight to Washington — not for the powerful, but for the rest of us.”

Beriont teaches religion, government, and U.S. history at Harvard. She previously worked as an organizer with Democratic campaigns. She said she hopes to build a grassroots campaign.

A swing district or one that’s become safely Democratic?

New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District has historically been a challenging swing district. From 2006 to 2018, it switched hands four times between Republican Frank Guinta and Democrat Carol Shea-Porter. However, after Pappas took the seat in 2018 and won reelection three consecutive times, the seat has sat squarely in Democratic hands. 

“It’ll be interesting to see once Pappas is not on the ballot — at least not for CD1 (Pappas is running for Senate) — whether the district reverts back to being more swingy than it otherwise has been during the Pappas years,” Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, said. “And that raises the second question, which is … how much of that can you attribute to Pappas’ strengths as an incumbent and how much should we chalk up to the trend that, during the Trump era since 2016, New Hampshire Democrats have been unbeaten in terms of federal elections?”

Scala said if it turns out Pappas’ success was driven by his strength as a candidate, a Democratic nominee could have more difficulty. But if it turns out President Donald Trump’s dominance over the Republican Party has turned off many New Hampshire voters and made the state more liberal, they won’t have too much trouble replicating Pappas’ success. In a similar vein, he argued that during the Guinta/Shea-Porter decade, the race became dependent on “outside factors.”

“Like who was in power in the White House, for example,” he said. “I think it was those sorts of extra or outside-New Hampshire national factors — which way the national breeze is blowing — that was affecting the results.”

Scala said Pappas was able to “defy the national wind” multiple times. 2022’s elections, when then-President Joe Biden had low approval ratings, was a difficult moment for Democrats nationwide.

“There was all sorts of talk about a red wave in ‘22,” he said. “And I thought it was quite possible at the time that Pappas would be upset by that wave. But then it turned out that New Hampshire Democrats, (Sen. Maggie) Hassan and Pappas, held steady, despite the fact that we saw the wave happen elsewhere.”

Scala pointed to Pappas’ centrism and the fact that he’d been on a ballot in so many races as possible drivers of success.

“He quietly goes about the business of being an incumbent,” he said. “In some ways, it’s a throwback to an earlier era of representation, where you’re just looking out for your district. You’re not looking to make waves. You’re not trying to be a polarizing figure. You’re low-profile. But that allows people who voted for (former Republican Gov.) Chris Sununu to feel comfortable turning around and voting for Chris Pappas.”

Scala believes Trump will have an outsized influence in 2026. A Trump endorsement could play a big part in the Republican primary. Looking toward the general election, Scala pointed to a recent UNH poll that found 45% of Granite Staters approve of Trump’s job performance, which is “not terrible, but what does that look like in a year’s time?”

“Trump’s not on the ballot and on the ballot,” he said. “Trump just takes up so much oxygen politically. Once it gets past the primaries, I really think it’s a referendum on Trump. I think you have to assume that’s going to benefit the Democratic candidate, whoever that may be, and I think it’s increasingly difficult now for a Republican in particular to try, especially for the House, to develop any sort of identity that’s distinctive enough to separate himself or herself from Trump.”

On Sullivan, Shaheen, and Beriont’s side of the race, Scala said “there’s a lot of discontent with the Democratic Party in general.”

“There’s a lot of unhappiness and finger-pointing among Democrats about how they should be facing off against Trump,” he said. “Is there lightning out there that could be harnessed in a Democratic primary? You know, the way that Shea-Porter was able to do?”

Scala said it was Shea-Porter’s ardent opposition to the Iraq War in 2006 that won her the seat originally.

“She went from nobody, but was really very much a grassroots activist on an issue, the Iraq War, that split the party, and she just went like gangbusters and rode that to Congress,” he said. “You look at Shaheen, Maura Sullivan (Scala spoke with the Bulletin before Beriont’s announcement), nothing strikes me about either of those candidates as insurgent, for lack of a better word. I mean, they’re pretty much standard issue Democratic candidates. Is there someone out there who, you know, would have the wherewithal to stir the pot?”

Advice from a previously successful candidate

Where Scala thinks it’s an open question as to whether the district solidly leans democratic, Shea-Porter has no doubts.

“I wouldn’t have retired in January 2019 if I thought we hadn’t flipped it blue,” Shea-Porter told the Bulletin. “But I knew that we had.”

She argued that the Republican Party nationally has moved too far right for New Hampshire voters while Democrats from New Hampshire have stayed moderate. 

“They don’t want the ugliness that we’re seeing from the MAGA party,” she said. “And they didn’t want it then either. They don’t want extremists in either camp. And we have not had a Democratic extremist.”

Shea-Porter argued that the state “is not an extremist state,” and that it typically votes “center, center-left, sometimes center-right, but never far left or far right.”

She’s been paying attention to the current political landscape.

“As I have watched this unfold, I’ve thought, ‘My gosh, this just feels in so many ways like 2006,’” she said.

Shea-Porter said when she criticized the Iraq War and other actions taken by then-President George W. Bush people accused her of not supporting the troops. Today, she said when people criticize Trump and conservative policies, they’re accused of “not thinking about America first.”

She also argued the MAGA movement is an extension of the Tea Party of the early 2010s. She, and many spectators at the time, credit backlash to the Affordable Care Act (colloquially known as Obamacare) for her two electoral defeats to Guinta. (Guinta did not respond to the Bulletin’s requests for interviews.) She notes that today, the ACA, and the Medicaid expansion it brought, have returned to the forefront of political discussions as Republicans debate cutting it. Finally, she said both eras see Republicans trying to push tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes.

“Echoes of today, right?’” she said. “I mean they’re the same problems that we have — that people were struggling economically and that they didn’t have champions there for them and people were passing legislation that was only helping the rich — and I was talking about anybody who was supporting the wealthy over the middle class. And I used to say the middle class is stumbling and the poor have fallen. And that was always my line, and sadly, here we are again. Today, it’s the same thing.”

Shea-Porter said, in retirement, she’s still in touch with former colleagues and she’s “not quiet on what’s happening.”

“If I were any of these candidates right now,” she said, “I would ask constitutional scholars to go to town halls with me and talk about how endangered we are right now with a very authoritarian president and a MAGA party in Washington who’s really threatening so many groups of people and ignoring our Constitution.”

“I think these candidates need to not be afraid to go out and say, ‘Look, I plan to do everything I can to produce legislation to vote to stop this,’” she said. “But then they have to have the facts. … I would keep a list like I used to keep on George Bush and his administration, so that people would understand, here’s the list of what is wrong.”

Shea-Porter said she’s spoken to candidates in the race, offering advice, though she wouldn’t say who. For now, she said she plans not to publicly take sides in the primary, but will strongly support the Democratic nominee in the general election. She anticipates the primary being friendly without personal attacks.

Her advice for the candidates: “to not be afraid to lead on these issues. People are looking for people who will not lead from behind, but lead up front.”

This story was originally published by New Hampshire Bulletin.