Throughout this primary season, the contest among Democrats has been between the party’s establishment and its progressive wing. Tuesday’s primaries in New Hampshire marked a decisive win for the party’s centrists.
Read more Rubio Says He Will Seek $45 Million in Security Funding for Ecuador
In the evening’s most closely watched race, Rep. Chris Pappas soundly defeated Karishma Manzur, a medical research scientist with a long history of involvement with progressive causes.
Pappas will face former Sen. John Sununu. For Sununu, who beat another former senator, Scott Brown, on Tuesday to win the GOP nomination, the race offers an opportunity to bring his career full circle. Pappas and Sununu are competing for the seat being vacated by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who is retiring. Shaheen first arrived in the senate by defeating Sununu in 2008.
“The fight for a democracy that delivers and an economy that works enters a critical phase over the next eight weeks,” Pappas told supporters Tuesday night. “Because while Donald Trump and the D.C. special interests have handpicked John Sununu to be their candidate in this race, we know that Granite Staters deserve someone who works for New Hampshire.”
“Chris Pappas has three main qualities: ineffective, partisan and out of touch with New Hampshire,” Sununu said at his own victory rally.
What was striking, though, was the degree to which both candidates defined the fall race in broadly similar terms.
“The voters of New Hampshire have sent a clear message. They’re fed up with what’s happening in our politics and they’re ready for change,” Pappas said, while Sununu spoke of a “need to shake up Washington with real reform.”
Both also identified healthcare costs and the general cost of living as key issues headed into the fall.
Read more Trump Gave $45,000 Cash Gifts to Close Aide Natalie Harp and Others
The evening’s other closely watched race was in the state’s 1st District, the House seat Pappas is vacating to run for Senate – and which was also represented by Sununu for six years from 1997-2003.
On the Democratic side, Stefany Shaheen, daughter of the retiring senator, narrowly beat the more progressive Maura Sullivan, who served in both the Veterans Affairs and Defense departments during the Obama administration.
Sullivan had sought to make Shaheen’s ties to her mother an issue in the campaign, and the younger Shaheen responded in recent weeks by publicly distancing herself from some of her mother’s positions, notably her role in ending last autumn’s government shutdown.
Shaheen will face businessman Anthony DiLorenzo in November in a contest that is expected to be close. Former Vice President Kamala Harris carried the district, which includes the state’s largest city, Manchester, and most of its suburbs to the south and east, by just 2 points when she ran for president in 2024, though Pappas, the incumbent member of Congress, was reelected by a more comfortable margin.
“We all know the path to a Democratic Congress runs through New Hampshire and it runs through the 1st District,” Shaheen said Tuesday night as the votes were still being counted.
In his own victory speech, DiLorenzo sought to tie Shaheen to the left wing of the Democratic Party, accusing her of supporting open borders and the abolition of the senate, though Shaheen’s website does not list either of those among her policy priorities.
“I don’t know how any of these platforms resonate with anybody, and I certainly don’t know how they help the people of New Hampshire,” DiLorenzo said.
Read more Three Jurors in Lindsay Clancy’s US Murder Trial Point Fingers at Holdout After Mistrial
