Democrat Maggie Goodlander may have worked in Washington, D.C. for the past decade and may have recently had to rent an apartment in Nashua to become a resident of the 2nd Congressional District, but she has one thing she wants to tell voters.
“New Hampshire has always been my home.”
However, not the one in which she actually lived.
The topic of Goodlander’s absence from Granite State came up when WMUR’s Adam Sexton asked her about the “carpetbagger” questions surrounding her first run for public office in New Hampshire.
Sexton also asked her opponent in the Democratic primary, Executive Director Colin Van Ostern.
“She said she rented an apartment in Nashua at the beginning of this campaign. She mentioned that it was more convenient for her since she is running in the election. And as I understand it, the last time she voted in this district was when George W. Bush was president. I believe it was by mail-in ballot then, almost 20 years ago. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the right to run,” Van Ostern said.
“But, man, I really think it makes it harder to represent us well,” he added.
(Goodlander’s last vote in the 2nd Congressional District was in 2008, by mail-in ballot from a house her parents had already sold before Election Day.)
WMUR aired separate interviews with the two NH-02 candidates on Sunday.
Goodlander was born in Nashua on Election Day 1986 to a prominent, politically active family, but she hasn’t lived there since 2005, when she left the district to attend Yale College. (Before that, she was a student at Groton, an upscale boarding school in Massachusetts.)
After graduating from Yale, Goodlander worked in Washington until a few months ago. Her impressive resume includes a stint as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, a stint for U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, and, starting in 2024, a stint as a senior White House adviser overseeing President Joe Biden’s “unity agenda.”
In 2023, she also opened a law firm in New Hampshire and briefly taught constitutional law at Dartmouth College and the University of New Hampshire.
When asked by a reporter if he had moved to the district just months before the primary, Goodlander replied, “I’m a renter, and there should be more renters in Congress.”
The “carpetbagger” attack is common in New Hampshire election campaigns, and was perhaps most notorious when Republican Scott Brown ran against incumbent U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen in 2014. Although Brown had family ties to the Granite State, he was a member of the Massachusetts legislature and a U.S. senator from the Bay State before his challenge to Shaheen.
Brown’s narrow 51.5 percent to 48.2 percent loss to a popular incumbent in a conservative-leaning state was a sign to many Granite State campaign experts that the carpetbagger issue was not having much impact. Brown agrees.
“People who are born here sometimes leave to do wonderful things elsewhere. And many Granite Staters I know – myself included – have always had the intention of coming back,” he told the NHJournal. “Why wouldn’t they? We live in one of the best states in the country!”
It’s also one of the smallest states — the 10th smallest in population in the U.S. — and has one of the highest percentages of residents who were born in other states and chose to move here. Less than 40 percent of Granite State residents were born here, well below the national average of around 60 percent. (In Louisiana, nearly 80 percent of residents were born in the state.)
For this reason, the “carpetbagger” argument often falls on deaf ears.
“Bob Smith and Jim Rubens tried it with Scott Brown in 2014 and it didn’t work,” said Greg Moore, regional director of Americans For Prosperity and a veteran of politics in the Granite State. “I don’t think it’s a particularly effective tactic.”
Nevertheless, Van Ostern’s biography of the last two decades differs greatly from Goodlander’s.
Born in California in 1979, Van Ostern has lived in the Granite State since at least April 2006, when he took a job in public relations at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Since then, he has worked for Stonyfield Dairy, Southern New Hampshire University and Alumni Ventures, all of which are based in New Hampshire. And he served two terms on the New Hampshire Executive Council before running for governor against Chris Sununu in 2016. (Van Ostern also unsuccessfully ran to succeed Secretary of State Bill Gardner in 2018.)
He has a strong ally in current Second District Congresswoman Annie Kuster, Democrat, who supported him in the primaries.
“For the past 20 years, I have run businesses in this state, represented dozens of cities and towns in our district, and volunteered in our community – and not just in the form of bullet points you put on your resume or list in campaign ads,” Van Ostern said.
Goodlander countered that although she has spent little time in the district, “I am proud to be a fourth-generation girl, born and raised in Nashua,” she told Sexton.
“From my living room today, I can see the shoe factory where my great-grandfather worked and the hospital where I was born on Election Day. In fact, my mother voted before she went to St. Joe to give birth to me.”
In many ways, Goodlander’s response is similar to that of Brown in 2014, who pointed out that he was born at the Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth and his mother once worked as a waitress in Hampton Beach.
Brown says the challenge for Goodlander is not her biography, but her work in the Biden administration.
“Like the other candidates in her party, she is in lockstep with the leadership. She will not close the border, nor will she help reduce inflation or taxes, nor will she cut spending or help us become energy independent,” Brown said.
As for the carpetbagger claims, Moore says any campaign team – Republican or Democratic – is making a miscalculation if it bets that this issue could affect the outcome of the race.
“Let’s put it this way: If your campaign strategy is based on New Hampshire being as provincial as Maine, you might want to rethink your strategy.”
