The 1st Congressional District: Eastern NH voters have plenty of options Tuesday

With four-term U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas relinquishing his seat in order to run for Senate, there is a wide open race for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District.

And it’s a crowded one.

A group of CD1 Republicans struggling to differentiate themselves

Three main candidates lead the pack in the GOP primary for the 1st District.

Hollie Noveletsky, a businesswoman from Newfields, is leading in the most recent poll. An August UNH poll showed 28% of surveyed voters preferred her. She’s the CEO of Novel Iron Works, and she’s run for this seat before. In 2024, she was runner up in the Republican primary. This year, she’s tried to pitch herself as the pro-Donald Trump candidate in the race.

However, it was Anthony DiLorenzo, a Portsmouth businessman, who earned Trump’s endorsement. The UNH poll had him as a close second with 25% of the vote.

In a more distant third place is Manchester State Rep. Brian Cole, who has sought to leverage his experience in the state Legislature to prove to voters that he’s the one who can get things done in Washington, D.C. In the UNH poll, 7% of surveyed voters said they’d vote for him.

Lindsey Anderson, of Moultonborough, is polling at 1%, and Melissa Bailey dropped out of the race before endorsing DiLorenzo. Bailey’s name will still be on the ballot.

Noveletsky said she stands with the Trump administration on issues such as trade, a topic that has elicited criticism from small-business owners impacted by his steep tariffs.

“We all believe in free trade,” she said during a WMUR debate last week. “It is a global economy, but we need to have fair trade, and since NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) we have hollowed out our manufacturing in exchange for cheap goods, and so we need to bring back our trade partners to the table to renegotiate our trade agreements. And we use the tariffs as a carrot or a stick.”

She has also applauded the Trump administration for shutting down immigration at the southern border, supported Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency elimination of USAID and the firing of federal employees, and opposes “red flag” laws that would allow courts to temporarily take guns away from people who pose a danger to themselves or others.

DiLorenzo has been criticized by his primary opponents for not being sufficiently conservative. During the WMUR debate,  Noveletsky and Cole attacked DiLorenzo for saying that he has no issue with a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who lack permanent legal status but pay taxes and have not been convicted of a felony.

“I’ve already answered the question several times,” he said. “I’ve been very, very clear about this. I believe in enforcing the immigration laws, and I would prioritize dangerous people first over people that are working and paying taxes. But the bottom line is, our laws call for deportation if you’re here illegally, and I support our laws.”

DiLorenzo supports some bread and butter fiscal conservative policies such as a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. He also says he fully supports Social Security and Medicare, and that he wants to keep transgender girls and women off female sports teams and out of locker rooms.

Cole boasts that he’s the only leading GOP candidate in elected office.

“I’m the only person in the race that actually has legislative experience,” he said in an interview with the Bulletin. “… That’s the difference between me and the other candidates. Day one, when I get into Washington, I’m gonna be able to hit the ground running. I know what I’m going to be doing. It’s not going to be a learning curve for me.”

His signature achievement as a legislator came when Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed legislation he sponsored, House Bill 1735, which expanded the state’s Right to Try Act. The bill offers experimental treatments to those with “chronic and debilitating” conditions even if they aren’t dying from the illness.

“That’s going to change lives,” he said. “… Besides the health benefits and people having access to it and everything like that. You’re talking about creating big-time paying jobs for people in New Hampshire, the biotech industry. This is a trillion-dollar industry.”

He also touted his time on the House Ways and Means Committee, where he opposed legislation that would’ve increased taxes on second homes in New Hampshire.

Before Pappas was elected in 2018, Republicans and Democrats traded off in the 1st District. From 2006 until 2018, it switched hands four times between Republican Frank Guinta and Democrat Carol Shea-Porter, with Republican Jeb Bradley holding it before that. Political observers are now wondering whether that means voters in the district, which includes Manchester, Portsmouth, and Laconia, have moved to the left or whether Pappas was a uniquely strong candidate. November may provide insight.

Two moderates and a cluster of progressives on the Democratic side

The Democratic side of the race is even more crowded.

Maura Sullivan and Stefany Shaheen, two center-left Democrats, lead the polls, while Carleigh Beriont, the third-place candidate, has been consolidating progressive support in the race’s homestretch. Two other progressives, Christian Urrutia and Sarah Chadzynski, have trailed in polls, and Urrutia dropped out of the race on Sunday and endorsed Shaheen. Matthew Emerson, Sarah Bella Spinoza, and Bill Conlin will also be on the ballot

Sullivan, of New Castle, is a Marine Corps veteran. She worked in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense under former President Barack Obama. This is her second time running for the seat. In 2017, she was the runner-up to Pappas among 11 candidates in the primary. The August UNH poll showed 24% of surveyed voters preferred her.

Shaheen garnered 19% of voters in the same poll. She is a former Portsmouth city councilor and works in the biotech industry at a Manchester firm called ARMI, which is run by Dean Kamen. She’s also the daughter of former governor and current U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who is retiring from Congress after November’s elections.

Beriont, a Hampton Select Board member, has tried to position herself as the progressive choice in the race and has built momentum in the final weeks of the primary. At 11% in the UNH poll, she’s still well behind Sullivan and Shaheen. State Rep. Heath Howard, another progressive candidate, dropped out of the race last month and endorsed Beriont (his name will remain on the ballot) after that poll was conducted. Howard had garnered 10% of voters in that poll.

Chadzynski, another progressive, earned 1% of voters in the poll.

All of the Democratic candidates in the 1st District support some form of Medicare for All. Sullivan has proposed “Medicare for All who want it,” which would expand Medicare to everyone but allow them to opt out if they’d prefer to keep a private insurer. The rest of the candidates support a single-payer system where Medicare replaces private insurers. However, Shaheen and Beriont said they’d accept a system like Sullivan’s proposal if they thought it was the only way to make Medicare for All happen. While Chadzynski supports single-payer Medicare for All, she says she doesn’t think it’s feasible in a divided Congress and said she would focus on more piecemeal measures.

There have also been fights over campaign finance. Sullivan and Shaheen have raised $3.6 and $2.4 million, respectively. The race could become the most expensive congressional primary in state history, at somewhere around $12 million when all the numbers come in. 

During a televised debate on WMUR Thursday, Shaheen attacked Sullivan over her campaign funding, saying that 90% of her money comes from out of state — a claim Sullivan denied before lobbing thinly veiled nepotism charges at the daughter of New Hampshire’s senior senator. 

Sullivan also accepted nearly $300,000 from donors who also donated to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (commonly known by its acronym AIPAC), leading to attacks from Shaheen and the progressives. Amid worsening public opinion of Israel and as a growing number of independent experts conclude the Middle Eastern country is committing genocide, AIPAC has become a flashpoint in Democractic politics, particularly among those arguing that accepting the money will make candidates beholden to the country’s demands for military aid. 

After the New Hampshire Union Leader reported that Beriont received $500 from a New Jersey donor who had also donated $25,000 to AIPAC, the candidate publicly announced she was returning the donation.

Still, like the GOP candidates, the leading candidates have often struggled to differentiate themselves from one another. They all oppose the federal government’s aggressive immigration crackdown. They all support reopening impeachment hearings against Trump. They all want to protect access to abortion.

On Tuesday, voters will determine whose message was most effective.

Getting to the polls and voting

The polls will open at varying times on Tuesday morning depending on the municipality. Voters can find out where their polling location is and which races will be on their ballot on the Secretary of State’s website at https://app.sos.nh.gov/pollingplacesampleballot. New Hampshire allows same-day voter registration. To register to vote on Election Day, voters will need to provide proof of their identity (driver’s license, government-issued photo ID, or passport), age (also driver’s license, government-issued photo ID, or passport), U.S. citizenship (birth certificate, passport, naturalization papers, or other proof), and domicile (government-issued ID or documentation with an address on it).