Christian Urrutia is striving to become the first Latino elected to Congress in New England. A military and human rights lawyer who once worked at the Pentagon to try to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and who successfully fought for justice for the murder of a Chilean folk singer by the Pinochet regime, Urrutia is running in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District, the primary for which is next Tuesday, September 8. He earned the support of the state’s progressive groups; he campaigned by walking across the district wearing a heavy backpack and Army boots; and he raised over a million dollars, enough to run ads on television. He’s running on core progressive ideas and forthright calls for anti-Trump resistance that have propelled other candidates to victory this year.
And there are 9.7 million reasons why it’s not going to work.
That’s the amount of money that the two establishment contenders for the seat vacated by Rep. Chris Pappas, who is running for U.S. Senate, have raised and seen spent on their behalf by outside super PACs. It’s an appropriate though grim end to an election season that will feature roughly $1 billion in dark money before it’s all over.
These sums aren’t always sufficient to place favored candidates into Congress—Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan is a good example of overcoming them. But when campaigns don’t hit the national radar, that money makes a bigger difference, and locks its recipients into owing their seat in Congress to powerful people with their own agendas.
A substantial number of those power elites have come to New Hampshire’s First District to support either a scion of the state’s political establishment or a former Marine captain and senior executive at PepsiCo. AIPAC, Jeff Bezos, Walmart, and an array of obscure pop-up PACs are involved, and in one instance, two PACs that have exchanged money this year are on opposite sides.
The sniping and recent negative attacks between the two establishment choices could have created a similar dynamic as the race in Michigan’s Seventh District, which saw progressive Will Lawrence navigate through the infighting of the two establishment candidates and build his own power base to victory. But outside progressive groups have largely ceded the field in this New Hampshire contest, and there wasn’t any coalescing onto a single candidate.
There are dozens of districts like this across the country, mostly outside the headlines, where money is a defining factor. That’s a big reason why Congress is seen as so beholden to corporate interests.
STEFANY SHAHEEN IS THE DAUGHTER of the outgoing senator and former governor of New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen. She has served on the Portsmouth City Council and the city’s police commission, and owned and then sold a health technology business. Stefany doesn’t invoke her famous mother on the campaign trail because she doesn’t have to. The name is an establishment brand in the state, and for a while it looked like that would be enough.
Then Maura Sullivan decided to run. She has a familiar profile that you may remember from Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, the current governors of New Jersey and Virginia, both of whom have endorsed her: a previous life in national security or the military (in this case, as a Marine logistics officer who served in Iraq with commendation), now running as a moderate “Hellcat,” playing against a stereotype of a weak Democrat.
Sullivan tried to win this seat (announcing her candidacy after living in New Hampshire for all of three months) the last time it came open in 2018, losing to Pappas. She then became a vice chair of the state Democratic Party, and also has Obama administration experience to tout, though she padded her résumé by including a four-year unpaid board position on the American Battle Monuments Commission. Her service in management at Pepsi is less discussed on campaign stops.
Sullivan has raised $3.6 million for the race, compared to the $2.4 million Shaheen has raised, and her outside backing comes from familiar sources. VoteVets has spent $2 million on her behalf; the establishment-linked veterans PAC has senior officials who are running front groups for the credit card industry and advising the main artificial intelligence super PAC. Another veteran-focused PAC called Servant-Leader has dropped $1 million for Sullivan; nearly all of Servant-Leader’s money was transferred from two funds called With Honor, to which Jeff Bezos and his family have delivered over $12 million. Alice Walton, heiress to the Walmart fortune, was also a With Honor donor in the past.
One interesting wrinkle is that Servant-Leader gave Article One PAC $250,000 this year, but Article One has spent over $1 million on behalf of Stefany Shaheen in this race, putting the two partner PACs on opposite sides.
Shaheen has also benefited from $605,000 in spending from the super PAC of the League of Conservation Voters, and another $546,000 from The No Kings PAC, of which little is known. No Kings has raised close to $2.9 million this year according to FEC filings, but hasn’t spent in any other race. However, it has made significant amounts of expenditures to Mothership Strategies, which has been criticized for scamming donors out of hundreds of millions of dollars since 2018.
Sullivan’s name recognition and big-money support enabled her to creep up in the polls. Whereas at the beginning of the year Shaheen was ahead by double digits, the most recent polls show Sullivan narrowly ahead. That’s when, and why, Shaheen decided to go negative.
Shaheen’s attack ad hit Sullivan for receiving $300,000 from former AIPAC donors—by some accounts more than Sullivan raised from all her donors who actually live in New Hampshire—as well as the Servant-Leader support via Jeff Bezos, and $9,000 from executives from Palantir.
Sullivan has responded that she does not accept donations from AIPAC as an organization and hasn’t sought their endorsement. This alibi has been made in text messages between campaign officials and voters viewed by the Prospect. Sullivan’s campaign also explained that many of the donations from 150 AIPAC donors were from personal friends, though that didn’t reassure AIPAC critics, and that they have no bearing on her position on Israel-Palestine policy. Sullivan did not mention donations and an endorsement from Democratic Majority for Israel, which has similar policy goals to AIPAC. That endorsement does not appear on Sullivan’s own website. A separate pro-Israel organization called NORPAC has bundled $20,000 for Sullivan.
It was nonetheless jarring, if not surprising, to see Stefany Shaheen, whose mother is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a longtime AIPAC endorsee, and a reliable supporter of Israel military aid, attack her opponent over her funding from AIPAC donors. In addition, Article One PAC, which has spent $1 million supporting Shaheen, shares the same billionaire donor, Jane Street Capital’s Robert Granieri, as AIPAC. While Sullivan failed to state her position on the Massie Amendment, which would have frozen military aid to Israel, Shaheen only came out in favor of it in August, a few weeks after the vote was taken.
Urrutia said he would have supported the amendment shortly after the vote. “Why are we sending billions to Israel, a country with universal healthcare, while Washington insiders keep telling Americans that we cannot afford universal healthcare here at home?” he said in a statement in July.
Sullivan struck back with her own ad, using veterans to call Shaheen’s claims lies. “Maura doesn’t take a dime from corporate PACs or AIPAC,” the ad says, which wasn’t Shaheen’s claim: She’d said that AIPAC donors and corporate donors were giving to Sullivan directly. But the real attack was about Shaheen riding her family’s coattails. “Stefany’s the kind of person that was born on third base and thought she hit a triple … I want a fighter, not a fancy last name,” the vets say in the ad.
Not surprisingly, there do appear to be behind-the-scenes machinations by Jeanne Shaheen on her daughter’s behalf. She’s criticized Sullivan to veterans groups and tried to get New Jersey Gov. Sherrill to rescind her Sullivan endorsement. Maggie Hassan, New Hampshire’s other senator, made a late endorsement of Stefany Shaheen last week, and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a potential 2028 presidential contender, also recently endorsed her.
Both Sullivan and Shaheen have “red boxes” on their website that dictate when, where, and with what message super PACs should be running ads on their behalf. Sullivan is trotting out a new angle in her red box about Shaheen’s donations from corporate lobbyists.
In the last week, two other mysterious PACs entered the fray with over $1 million in attack ads against Sullivan. The first, VPP, which has the same vendor as The No Kings PAC and is connected to something called UniteDemocrats, has spent about $68,000. The second, New Leadership, has spent $989,000. VPP, which does direct mail, has only worked in one other race this cycle—a failed effort for Lauren Babb Tomlinson in California—while New Leadership has the same ad buyer as Article One PAC and a number of individual donors who are venture capitalists, investors, and a telecom CEO. The PAC only had $544,000 in its account as of the end of July, so it has been stuffed with money from elsewhere to afford its spending against Sullivan.
A perfect example of the super PAC takeover in this race is seen in a mailer highlighting the Bezos and Palantir executive support for Sullivan. It was created by the “Integrity in Democracy Project,” which itself was paid for by Project 218, a dark-money PAC tied to longtime liberal organization American Bridge.
URRUTIA DID ASK ALL CANDIDATES to take the “People’s Pledge” and swear off dark-money super PACs. Obviously, that didn’t work. But the viciousness of the Shaheen-Sullivan spat could still redound to the benefit of a third candidate.
Unfortunately for Urrutia, the progressive universe never settled on any one candidate. Carleigh Beriont, a town council member and schoolteacher who raised a relatively paltry sum ($587,000), and Heath Howard, a democratic socialist in the state legislature who raised next to nothing, crowded the field’s progressive quadrant. Howard recently dropped out and endorsed Beriont, who is now operating as the progressive alternative. Beriont has shown movement in recent polls, but with just a small state PAC helping her with $51,000 in outside support, she may not have the financial wherewithal to get noticed across the district.
Progressives have largely stayed out of the race, despite the dynamics of the top two candidates dragging each other down. There’s been almost no outside help and no high-profile backers coming to the district. Beriont has called Sullivan and Shaheen “two sides of the exact same coin,” but there’s too much money sloshing around to give any other candidate a chance to let voters know about their campaigns, or even their existence.
Campaign officials working for progressive candidates in the district have expressed frustration with the inability of progressives to back someone early as an alternative to the big-money (and dark-money) candidates, and with the role that super PAC money is playing in the race. “Money has a toxic role in politics,” Urrutia told the Prospect. “Democrats must show we’re better than this and can be effective without dark money.”
In lower-profile races, the “invisible primary” of money and connections often dictates the choices for voters. While progressives have been able to blunt that impact in several races across the country and even win in swing districts in addition to deep-blue seats, these largely obscure, big money–dominated kind of races are ultimately the bread and butter of the Democratic delegation in the House. And the more that these kinds of races are left to the establishment to fight over, the more that the nagging problems among Democrats of excessive caution and a lack of core principles can crop up.
