Maggie Goodlander, a lawyer who has worked in the White House and the Justice Department under President Biden, announced on Thursday her candidacy for a congressional seat in New Hampshire’s Second District, where the Democratic incumbent, Representative Ann McLane Kuster, is retiring.
Ms. Goodlander, a Democrat, has served as a White House adviser, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, a foreign policy adviser in the Senate and an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve. She has also been a U.S. Supreme Court clerk. She is married to Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser.
“I’ve served in all three branches of government, and I know how to deliver for New Hampshire,” she said in announcing her candidacy.
At least two other candidates — Colin Van Ostern, a former member of the New Hampshire Executive Council, and Becky Whitley, a state senator — are also running in the Democratic primary. At least eight candidates — including Lily Tang Williams, who ran for the seat in 2022, and Vikram Mansharamani, who ran for Senate that same year — are running on the Republican side.
In an announcement video, Ms. Goodlander emphasized her family’s ties to the district, saying they have lived in Nashua for more than a century and noting that her mother, Betty Tamposi, served in the New Hampshire House.
Ms. Tamposi was featured heavily in the video, starting with her recollection that she stopped by a local elementary school to vote before giving birth to Ms. Goodlander on Election Day, and continuing with her quoting a politician who, when she ran against him in a Republican congressional primary, said, “A woman’s place is in the home, not in the House.”
“She didn’t win, but she learned a valuable lesson that she passed down to me: Always stand up to bullies,” Ms. Goodlander said in the video, adding, “The fact is, the bullies have too much power in America right now.”
In an election cycle in which Democrats are campaigning heavily on abortion rights, Ms. Goodlander also shared an intensely personal story that she said had informed her desire to protect those rights.
“When I was almost 20 weeks pregnant, we found out that we had lost our little boy, and he died on Easter,” she said. “He was still in my womb. I was extremely worried that I was going to go into labor, and they said, ‘Oh, you’re not going to go into labor, you’re not going to go into labor.’ But I went into labor, and I delivered our baby myself.”
