Democrat Maggie Goodlander (left) celebrated her victory with supporters in Concord. (Claire Sullivan | New Hampshire Bulletin)
Maggie Goodlander has spent years in D.C. working across the branches of government. On Tuesday, voters in New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District sent her back to the capital as their new U.S. representative.
Goodlander, a former Biden administration official with deep political connections, will replace Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster, who has held the seat since 2013 and did not seek reelection. Goodlander has spent months pitching her time in D.C. as a positive as her opponents criticized her time away from the district.
She focused her campaign on taking on the “bullies” that she described as big corporations and extreme politicians. Goodlander also entered the race with a deeply personal story: She needed immediate care after losing her son at 20 weeks pregnant. Instead, she said, she faced delays caused by an influx of patients from states with restrictive abortion laws. With her appointment scheduled one day too late, she was forced to deliver her stillborn son in a hotel bathtub.
Goodlander has said she would “fight like hell” to restore federal abortion protections once guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, which was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022.
Around 11:30 p.m., Goodlander, 38, embraced supporters in Concord, exclaiming: “You guys, thank you – it’s official.” Almost official, she added. Her Republican opponent had just called her to concede.
Talking to reporters, Goodlander – who served in the Biden administration as a senior White House adviser and a Department of Justice official – said she would work to represent all of her constituents regardless of whether they voted for her. To be productive in Congress, she said she would build on President Joe Biden’s “unity agenda,” which she helped lead briefly. It focused on tackling issues related to mental health, Big Tech, veterans, cancer, and the opioid epidemic.
The Nashua native defeated Lily Tang Williams, a libertarian-leaning Republican who has launched several unsuccessful bids for Congress in Colorado and New Hampshire. Williams, a rental property manager who said she feared the U.S. was becoming more like her native country of China, advocated for cutting government spending, including by eliminating the Department of Education, and wanted the issue of abortion to remain with the states. Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Williams on Sunday.
With 86 percent of the vote in, Goodlander led Williams 53.6 percent to 46.4 percent. The race was called by the Associated Press at 1:07 a.m. Before polls closed, Williams posted online: “I am a winner regardless of the outcome tonight.”
Though this was her first run for public office, Goodlander has been deep in politics all her life. Her mother, Elizabeth Tamposi, is a former Republican state representative who worked in the administration of President George H.W. Bush; her grandfather, Samuel Tamposi, was a real estate developer involved in Republican politics.
After her upbringing in Nashua, Goodlander earned undergraduate and law degrees from Yale. She has spent her career in various government roles: an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve; a speech writer and foreign policy adviser to Connecticut independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman; a speechwriter for Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain; and a law clerk to Merrick Garland, then chief judge of the D.C. circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Less than a year ago, ahead of her run for Congress, she rented a home in Nashua, which is in the 2nd District. At an October forum, Goodlander said she plans to raise her future children in the 2nd District.
“I am a renter, and there should be more renters in Congress,” Goodlander told The Boston Globe – a statement that received backlash on account of the $1.2 million home she and her husband, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, own in the 1st District.
Goodlander has defended her ties to the district repeatedly, saying she’s a “Nashua girl” through and through and pointing to her time teaching constitutional law at Dartmouth and the University of New Hampshire. “This is the district who made me who I am,” she said at a forum.
The national party establishment helped propel her to Congress. Amid a heated primary against former Executive Councilor Colin Van Ostern, Goodlander received an endorsement from Hillary Clinton, who in 2015, between fundraisers for her presidential run, gave a reading at Goodlander’s wedding, according to Politico. Sullivan, her husband, had been an adviser to Clinton.
Goodlander had a roughly million-dollar fundraising edge – including a large portion of out-of-state cash – over her primary opponent, who quickly got behind her after losing the race by 28 points. In the general election, Goodlander outraised and outspent Williams several times over, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance.
Now, Goodlander heads back to D.C. with a new type of government gig.