Former Concord state representative Lynne Blankenbeker says she’s seriously considering a bid for the Republican nomination in New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District.
The former U.S. Navy captain told the Monitor that she’ll “absolutely” decide to join a growing field of Republicans in the next week or two.
If she launches a campaign, Blankenbeker would be the third Republican to enter the race to challenge three-term Democratic incumbent Rep. Annie Kuster.
Blankenbeker spoke with the Monitor on Saturday, the day after completing an active-duty military career that spanned more than three decades.
Blankenbeker was an active-duty Air Force nurse from 1986-91. She was deployed to Oman and Kuwait during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. After switching branches to the Navy, she treated those wounded in the Iraq War while stationed at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland. Later, she served as a combat nurse stationed in Afghanistan.
“I love being in the military. Every single day that I get to put a uniform on, I consider it a privilege,” she said. “Until they tell me to get out, I will probably stay in the military as a reservist.”
Blankenbeker added that going forward as a Navy reservist, she’ll commit to one weekend a month as a commanding officer of a 600-member medical unit in San Diego.
On her likely run for Congress, Blankenbeker said she’s been getting a lot of encouragement recently.
“Lots of people were interested in what they thought was a high-quality candidate who would represent the interests of the Granite State well in D.C.,” she said. “I’m flattered that folks thought I had the right combination of skills, knowledge, experience that would bring those New Hampshire values to D.C.”
Blankenbeker said she’s talked with Republican officials in Washington “to determine whether or not this was a good idea.”
“We’ll see what the support is from the community. I’m positioned well,” she said. “I’m very blessed and very fortunate that I’m in a position where I can dedicate the time, the effort, the energy, without financially bankrupting my household to be able to pursue this. It’s really going to come down to ‘What do the people want?’ ”
The two declared Republican candidates in the race are state Rep. Steve Negron, a U.S. Air Force veteran and businessman from Nashua, and Dr. Stewart Levenson of Hopkinton, a former U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs regional director, who in 2017 was one of the top whistleblowers at the Manchester VA Medical Center.
Former WMUR political director and anchor Josh McElveen has said he, too, is seriously considering a bid. He spent three days in Washington, D.C., last month meeting with GOP officials.
And former state representative Jim Lawrence, the 2016 GOP nominee who narrowly lost to Kuster, told the Monitor in November that he was still deciding on whether to run again.
Blankenbeker said she would stand out in a field of Republicans.
“I’m a proven candidate. I won a seat not once but twice in a very liberal district because I do the hard work,” she said. “I get out there. I meet the people. I’m genuine. My message is about the people.”
Blankenbeker said “politics was never on my radar screen” when she ran and won a New Hampshire House of Representatives special election in 2009 in heavily Democratic Concord.
“I was not a politically minded person,” she said. “Back in 2008, there was a bill before the state House of Representatives that I was interested in and I went and watched from up in the gallery, and literally three-quarters of the seats were empty.”
Blankenbeker described how many of the representatives ran into the House chamber for a roll call vote and then ran back out once the vote was over. She said the lawmakers representing her district “weren’t in their seats listening to the testimony, and I thought that’s not really representation. If you are representing my interests, you should be at least listening to the testimony.”
So she decided to put her name on the ballot “and give it a whirl, thinking at least I’ll listen on behalf of the people, because that’s what we’ve elected them to do.”
Blankenbeker said she campaigned in her first election as “just another citizen who cares about raising my kid in this community.”
She lost in her first bid in 2008, but she won a special election the next year.
“I ended up winning the election in a district I never should have won in,” she noted.
Winning in Concord was difficult because “Concord tends to be one of the most liberal pockets in New Hampshire.”
But, she added, “I hate to compartmentalize myself as too conservative or too this or too that. I’m Lynne. I care about the Granite State. I care about Granite Staters. I don’t want to say I’m too conservative. I don’t like that.”
Blankenbeker won re-election in 2010, but did not run for another term in 2012 after being recalled to the Pentagon in June of that year.
She said if she runs for Congress, she’ll highlight her military experience and peers in uniform.
“We come from every ethnic background, every race, every political viewpoint, every religious background that you could think of,” Blankenbeker said. “But at the end of the day, every single one of us put on our respective uniforms and we go over and work together as a team for the best interest of this country ... and we can take that to Congress.”
Blankenbeker said she if were serving in Congress right now, she would have supported the GOP tax bill that President Donald Trump signed into law.
As for Trump, she said, “I support the president’s agenda and I will promote whatever is good for the Granite State.”
But she shied away from questions about how the president is handling his duties in the White House, saying, “he’s my commander in chief, so I’ll just leave that alone.”
Blankenbeker is scheduled to speak on Wednesday to some of the Granite State’s top conservative leaders when she headlines the latest New Hampshire Center Right breakfast meeting. It will be the second time Blankenbeker hass talked to the group in the past three months. But this time, she’s no longer serving active duty in the military, and she’s now free to pursue politics again.