Editorial: The Progressive Wave Won’t Reach New Hampshire
By James Kelly
Published September 7, 2026
The New Hampshire state primary is tomorrow, but you’d hardly know it if not for the unrelenting and painful TV ads from the Pappas and Sununu campaigns. Compared to the dramatic primaries across the country that have amounted to a leftward shift within the Democratic party, the Democratic ballot in New Hampshire is pretty dull. Cinde Warmington is running unopposed for Governor, and the races that do have progressive challengers have seen those candidates merely pull themselves from obscurity into a slightly-better-than-fringe candidate status.
I try to avoid political prediction-making in my writing. I am often wrong, and I believe that horse race journalism tends to degrade elections by prioritizing celebrity and sensationalism over political substance. At the same time, as somebody who generally subscribes to the brand of Democratic Socialists of America-aligned politics that has dominated the headlines this midterm season, I cannot help but hope that the progressive wave might reach New Hampshire, too.
Indeed, Karishma Manzur, a scientist and DSA member who is running against Congressman Chris Pappas to be the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, has recently surged in the polls. She now finds herself 13 points behind Pappas, compared to a 51-point deficit in September, according to a poll from the UNH Survey Center. And in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, Hampton Selectwoman Carleigh Beriont will ostensibly benefit from progressive consolidation after state Rep. Heath Howard dropped out of the race and endorsed Beriont two weeks ago.
The point is, aspiring political soothsayers would be rational to see success by the likes of Zohran Mamdani in New York, William Lawrence and Donavan McKinney and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Angie Nixon in Florida, Ed Markey in Massachusetts, Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, and Graham Platner in Maine (an ephemeral success in retrospect, but Platner nonetheless defeated Governor Janet Mills in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate), and assume that progressive victories are imminent in New Hampshire, too. After all, Senator Bernie Sanders won the state’s presidential primary in both 2016 and 2020.
Still, Sanders was just one guy from Vermont, with just the right kind of crotchety yankee everyman charisma to win over New Hampshire’s peculiar electorate. My high school history teacher once described the situation as such: New Hampshire is not a purple state because it has an equal proportion of red voters and blue voters. New Hampshire is a purple state because the voters are purple.
New Hampshire is represented simultaneously by a Republican governor, a Republican legislature, and an entirely Democratic federal delegation. It was one of only three states in 2024 to vote for a presidential candidate from one party and a gubernatorial candidate from another (Harris and Ayotte). New Hampshire’s propensity for split-ticket voting represents its large proportion of “moderate” voters. New Hampshire does not host the kind of deep blue electorate that tends to support progressive candidates, like that of New York or Massachusets. But then, neither does Michigan or Florida or Maine (Joe Biden won the 2020 primary in all three).
This new progressive wave is surely a response to the second Trump administration and everything associated with it. Progressives have capitalized off of low and falling sentiment about Israel, ICE, and the economy. But to define this progressive surge purely in terms of geography or the political moment is to regard their victories as something of a fluke – unsustainable, inimitable.
Instead, I believe the progressive movement has found a strategy that can be repeated. For one thing, these victories are self-reinforcing; for each candidate DSA elects, they gain more credibility and raise more money, which in turn helps them elect more candidates. The candidates themselves are generally young and charismatic with strong records of public service. They have mastered the social media game. They’re focused on issues where they have public support. Progressives have become effective “change” candidates in an environment where the political status quo is deeply unsatisfying.
The leading Democrats in New Hampshire could not more clearly represent the sort of moderate “establishment” that progressives across the country have so successfully criticized, either. They belong to political dynasties. They are party insiders. They have deep connections and deeper pockets.
But here’s the truth: New Hampshire will not nominate a progressive for any major office on Sept. 8. There isn’t even a progressive candidate for Governor. And where there are progressive challengers, the candidates are underwhelming and the races are uncompetitive.
I believe this is in part a consequence of New Hampshire’s citizen legislature, where representatives are paid a measly $100 per year. This prevents our government from being truly democratic by functionally excluding all but the wealthy and the retired from seeking office. But it also means that our state government produces few good candidates for higher office. In a legislature that is both massive (there are 400 state representatives) and part-time, everybody is a nobody. Representatives are political hobbyists rather than career politicians (a term often used as a pejorative, but there is something to be said for a practiced candidate). There is little opportunity for parties to develop talent and create clear spokesmen unless they control the governor’s office. The candidates that do emerge are uncharmismatic, unknown, and uninspiring.
You need only look to the top to see what I mean. Executive Councilor Karen Liot Hill is technically the state’s top Democrat, with Alexis Simpson leading House Democrats and Rebecca Perkins Kwoka leading Senate Democrats. None of those people are particularly promising political prospects. The state’s Democratic leadership may comprise fine public servants, but it also illuminates a shallow talent pool.
As I see it, most major race candidates in the state primary can be put into one of two categories: boring, or a former major officeholder. In the race for Governor, incumbent Kelly Ayotte is a former Senator and Cinde Warmington is boring. In the race for Senate, Pappas is a Congressman, John Sununu and Scott Brown are former Senators, and Karishma Manzur is boring. In the 1st District, Stefany Shaheen is boring and her mother is a Senator. Maura Sullivan and Carleigh Beriont are just boring.
Maggie Goodlander, who is married to former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and who comes from a prominent political family herself, is running for reelection in the 2nd District (which includes Plymouth). To her credit, progressive challenger Paige Beauchemin is not boring. But let me add some nuance to what has been a fairly reductive, if not illustrative, overview. Sometimes being a boring politician is a fine strategy, but it does not work if you are an underdog or if your candidacy is otherwise disruptive, as progressive candidacies almost always are. And so, successful progressives like Mamdani and El-Sayed brought energy to their campaigns with aggressive media strategies that created clear brands. They focused their campaigns on a few popular positions: free buses, city-owned grocery stores, and a rent freeze for Mandani; Medicare for All and Israel for El-Sayed.
But the energy that Beauchemin, who represents Nashua in the Statehouse, has generated (to the extent that she has generated any) has mostly detracted from her seriousness as a candidate rather than bolster it. Case in point: the most media attention Beauchemin has received as a candidate was for flipping off Ayotte during the Governor’s State of the State address in February.
I’m not offended by middle fingers. This very publication printed a large one on the cover of our magazine two years ago. I agree with Beauchemin’s view of the Governor and I support her right to express that view. At the same time, that’s exactly the kind of action that makes it easy to categorize a candidate as a fringe provocateur rather than a serious challenger.
Like Beauchemin, the other candidates that come from state government all suffer from a lack of polish in some form or another. Heath Howard initially led the 1st District’s progressive field, but the 26-year-old state Rep. struggled to fundraise and never really recovered from a string of controversies that alienated some progressive voters.
Cinde Warmington, the milquetoast 68-year-old former Executive Councilor, falls squarely into the boring category. She lost the gubernatorial nomination to Manchester Mayor Joice Craig in 2024. To her credit, Warmington’s 2026 campaign has adopted some of the affordability-anchored populist rhetoric that has been central to progressive success this year. But her platform has not really followed suit. She remains a “pledge” candidate (no income tax, no sales tax), and I find it difficult to take Democrats seeking state office seriously when they refuse to address the state’s revenue crisis.
Warmington’s reputation is also tarnished by her legacy as an attorney for Shaheen and Gordon (no, not that Shaheen; the firm is named for longtime Democratic activist and lawyer William Shaheen, the Senator’s husband), where she lobbied on behalf of Purdue Pharma and OxyContin in the early 2000s. Warmington has since said she was misled about the nature of the drug, which she called a “miracle drug” with “very few side effects” in 2002.
The 1st District’s frontrunners, Stefany Shaheen and Maura Sullivan, do not come from state government, but they certainly represent the party establishment. Shaheen, who served on the Portsmouth City Council from 2014 to 2016, is the daughter of Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Sullivan, who served a number of roles for the Obama administration, has acted as the Vice Chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party since 2023. Beriont has only recently emerged as the 1st District’s progressive frontrunner after Howard and Christian Urrutia dropped out of the race. Urrutia, a National Guardsman and former AirBnB executive, endorsed Shaheen this weekend in what he described as a two-person race between her and Sullivan.
And in the race for Senate, Pappas holds a sizable lead over Manzur. Of the progressives on the ballot, Manzur seems to have the most momentum heading into Election Day, though her winning would constitute a massive upset. Like Goodlander, Pappas finds himself among the more conservative ranks of Congressional Democrats. Both representatives supported the Laken Riley Act in 2025, which stripped due process rights from non-citizens, for example.
The Senate race being the highest profile, and one with massive implications for control of the Senate as a whole, it is a shame that Manzur was the best progressive candidate New Hampshire could run. She lacks the experience of public servants and elected officials like Mamdani, El-Sayed, and Nixon, and she lacks the charisma of “outsider” candidates like Platner. Manzur has embraced the pro-Medicare for All and anti- Israel and AIPAC positions that progressives have successfully campaigned on elsewhere, but she lacks the messaging coherency and conviction that helped those candidates win.
I am sorry that I don’t have many nice things to say about the Democrats running for office. I sincerely want Democrats, and progressives in particular, to succeed in New Hampshire. But I also want to be clear about the diagnosis behind my prediction. Progressives will do poorly in New Hampshire, yes, but do not confuse that with a failure of their ideas or evidence that the state is inherently inhospitable to progressives. Progressives will lose in New Hampshire because the candidates are bad.