Something odd is happening in the crowded Democratic primary race for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, the seat held by retiring Rep. Carol Shea-Porter covering the eastern half of the state.
The oddness is Maura Sullivan, outwardly one of the most appealing of the district’s 11 Democratic contestants heading toward primary day on Sept. 11.
A Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq; Harvard master’s degrees in business and public administration; former assistant secretary at Veterans Affairs; former public affairs adviser to Barack Obama’s Defense Secretary Ashton Carter; former special adviser to the secretary of the Navy – at 38, Sullivan has what a New Hampshire Public Radio profile last March called a resume “right out of central casting.”
More than $1.5 million has already poured into Sullivan’s campaign, eclipsing the combined total of the other 10 candidates.
Emily’s List, which promotes women candidates, endorsed Sullivan while ignoring two other women in the running, Naomi Andrews, Shea-Porter’s long-serving chief of staff with years of congressional experience, and Mindi Messmer, an environmental scientist and state representative.
The oddness begins with Sullivan’s money, 96.7 percent of which has flowed in from out of state, according to OpenSecrets.org.
A close look at her service in the Obama administration raises more questions: After serving in Iraq (“I fought in the Marines,” her website says) as a Marine logistician, and five years as an executive in PepsiCo’s Boston regional office, Sullivan wangled an appointment in October 2014 as assistant secretary for public affairs at the VA – the federal government’s largest civilian agency with 325,000 employees – with no prior experience in public affairs.
She held this job for only nine months, the next one at Defense for four months and the third one at Navy for seven months before leaving the government in June 2016.
Sullivan revealed her political ambitions in early 2017 by exploring primary runs for the 3rd Congressional District in Illinois and also, according to a report by Crain’s Chicago Business on April 12, 2017, the 6th District, outside Chicago.
Noting that she didn’t live in the district, the report observed that moving there to run for office “likely would become an issue.”
In political parlance this is known as “district shopping” and is closely linked to the practice of carpetbagging. (See Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts Republican senator who lost in 2012 to Elizabeth Warren, then moved to New Hampshire to lose to now-Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in 2014.)
Sullivan’s shopping spree appears to have had the backing of the national Democratic Party. She is among more than a dozen congressional candidates recruited or promoted across the country by the rising Massachusetts Democratic star, Rep. Seth Moulton, a decorated Marine Corps Iraq veteran who shocked the state’s party establishment by unseating long-serving Democrat John Tierney in the 2014 primary.
Moulton has focused on recruiting veterans and women, in alliance with Emily’s List and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as the Democratic Party aims to win at least the 23 additional seats it needs to capture control of the House of Representatives.
Sullivan and Moulton, who campaigned for her in New Hampshire in July, found a natural affinity. They both left the Marines after Iraq service with the rank of captain, they were classmates at Harvard and Sullivan’s campaign affirms they’ve been friends ever since.
In media comments in February, Sullivan insisted that while unnamed Democrats importuned her to run in Illinois, “My heart was not in that place. My heart was here in New Hampshire.”
Settling in Portsmouth last year with her fiancé Marc Sorel, she told NHPR, “The first opportunity I had to put down roots anywhere, we chose here.” (Despite living in the Boston area at Harvard and PepsiCo for eight years.)
In an email, Sullivan’s campaign manager Whitney Larsen denied that Sullivan moved to New Hampshire with the intention of unseating Carol Shea-Porter, but a close Harvard friend, Joseph J. McCarthy, a former senior associate dean and director of degree programs at the Kennedy School, disputes that.
“We knew that Maura had political ambitions, and my wife and I encouraged her to run in her native Illinois, or in Virginia, in a district held by a Republican,” McCarthy said in a telephone conversation.
When Sullivan moved instead to New Hampshire, “her intention was to primary Carol Shea-Porter, who she believed was vulnerable,” he said. “We strongly discouraged her from doing so because Carol had worked so hard to win and hold this seat.”
“We thought very highly of Maura, and this was a very disappointing thing to do,” McCarthy said. “I felt this was not consistent with how Kennedy School graduates should conduct themselves.”
Upon moving to Portsmouth, Sullivan quickly began meeting with civic, veterans and law-enforcement groups in the Portsmouth area, leaving the clear impression that she planned to challenge Shea-Porter in the Seth Moulton mold, according to former Congressional staffers who caught wind of her apparent intentions. “I knew by August (2017) that she was going to run,” said one.
Shea-Porter’s retirement announcement in October relieved Sullivan of a nasty primary contest. She immediately signaled her intention to run, according to a knowledgeable former congressional staffer, by purchasing her campaign website domain within hours after Shea-Porter’s announcement. She has since lavished praise on Shea-Porter.
Sullivan’s flurry of expensive television ads have set her apart from the other Democratic candidates. Her moneyed presence has stirred resentment among her long-term and lifelong resident competitors who mostly operate on a customary primary shoestring – not so much at her personally as at the national Democratic Party’s meddling in a New Hampshire district balanced on a knife-edge between Republican- and Democratic-leaning voters. They worry that she carries huge vulnerability.
“The Republicans know how to run against her,” a former Democratic congressional staffer said. “They have a playbook. Democrats wrote it, for Scott Brown.”
(Robert Gillette is a former “Los Angeles Times” reporter who lives in Ossipee.)