Courtesy Maggie Goodlander for Congress
Maggie Goodlander is seen campaigning in New Hampshire.
BOW, NEW HAMPSHIRE – The car alarm would not stop ringing. It was blaring from one of the 30 or so vehicles, mostly trucks, parked down the road from a house party in a small New Hampshire town, a few miles outside the state capital of Concord. Inside, visitors had gathered from across the state to listen to Maggie Goodlander, a Democratic congressional candidate running for New Hampshire’s open Second District seat, vacated by Rep. Ann McLane Kuster (D-NH).
Goodlander stood on the patio, delivering her stump speech to a packed crowd of state politicos, who were huddled in the backyard of the colonial-style house. Crimson and yellow leaves, the signature foliage of New England autumn, covered the trim grass, and boots clomped on fallen acorns.
Scores of presidential hopefuls have made this same trip to the very back patio Goodlander stood on that night, stumping during the state’s traditional early primary, which can make or break a candidate’s future. In 2019, just about every Democratic candidate in the crowded field visited this home on their trips, even long-shot contenders like Tulsi Gabbard. “We were happy to invite anyone as long as they were willing to get grilled,” Mary Beth Walz, one of the hosts and a former state representative, told me with a grin.
After a brief lull, the car alarm had started up again to audible groans from the audience, just as Goodlander was getting into the swing of things. The crowd was now more preoccupied with hunting around for the culprit than they were following the speech. The moment tested whether Goodlander could go off-script. Finally, she broke the fourth wall.
Mid-sentence, she blurted out, “And I bet you there’s even a monopoly on those car horns out there. My God.” The audience laughed, relieved more than anything.
“I wouldn’t be surprised. You know there’s even a monopoly on door locks. They’re just everywhere, I’m telling you.”
THIS WASN’T A TOTAL TANGENT FOR GOODLANDER, who more than any other congressional candidate running in a swing district this election is making trust-busting a fixture of her campaign. As her off-the-cuff remark demonstrated, this is a policy area she’s become deeply immersed in.
Moments before, she’d been discussing her time inside the Biden administration, where she served in a variety of roles, but most recently at the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. There, she helped bring far-reaching cases against corporate goliaths, from pharma to meatpackers to technology companies.
Now, as a candidate, she’s trying to connect this to the everyday concerns of residents of the Granite State.
“We have about 37 percent of people in this country who are one parking ticket away from not being able to pay rent,” she said over the car alarm. “Egg prices have been up 130 percent at grocery stores. Prescription drug costs are too high.”
To sell voters on this vision for the economy, she was going to have to deal with a core characteristic of New Hampshirites: prickliness.
Her race, along with a handful of others this election, will be a test of whether a populist platform can boost Democrats in swing districts with more independent voters. Based on recent polling, Goodlander holds a comfortable lead over her Republican opponent, Lily Tang Williams. But given the state’s very purplish character—Republican Chris Sununu is ending his fourth term as New Hampshire’s governor—the Democratic leadership isn’t taking the seat for granted.
To address the housing affordability problem, which is skyrocketing in New Hampshire, Goodlander is supporting efforts to take on landlords who raise rents through algorithmic price-fixing tools like RealPage. On grocery costs, she’s backing a ban on price-gouging in line with Kamala Harris’s proposal, though Goodlander has put it more front and center. Unwinding Big Tech is part of her campaign rhetoric too, emphasizing that Congress has a role to play in oversight.
For Goodlander, there’s a common thread running through each issue: Corporate concentration has crept into every corner of the economy, throttling fair business competition and screwing consumers, even for niche appliances like door locks (where Swedish firm Assa Abloy has acquired more than 300 companies since 1994).
To sell voters on this vision for the economy, she was going to have to deal with a core characteristic of New Hampshirites: prickliness. Moments after her door lock monopoly ad lib, one of the hosts finally identified that an F-150 pickup was responsible for the car alarm. An older gentleman sheepishly admitted to being the owner, at which point a retiree barked at him, “I hope your tires are slashed too!” That’s how longtime friends interact in this state. A small magnet on the fridge inside the home read, “If you’re going to open your mouth, make sure it’s something good, moron.”
So when Goodlander made this somewhat lofty pitch for corporate power as the source of life’s daily challenges, she knew she wasn’t going to get a free pass from the crowd. Granite Staters don’t tolerate bullshit, especially when it comes to vetting politicians. There’s a saying that “Growing up in New Hampshire, you learn how to grill a candidate before you learn how to grill a hot dog,” a go-to line that Goodlander repeats frequently on the trail.
In that spirit, the question period after Goodlander’s stump speech took on the air of a press conference, not a casual “meet the candidate” event. “What you’re proposing sounds great and all but how do you plan to actually get any of it done when it’s MAGA Republicans on the other side?” asked one of the guests.
Goodlander had some explaining to do.
Luke Goldstein
Maggie Goodlander and Mary Beth Walz speak with New Hampshire voters at a private event in October 2024.
IN CERTAIN REGARDS, GOODLANDER’S ELITE PEDIGREE makes her an unlikely evangelist for the new antitrust movement. She was a national-security adviser to the late Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John McCain (R-AZ), after serving as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve for a decade. She clerked for Attorney General Merrick Garland and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer out of law school at Yale. Her husband is national-security adviser Jake Sullivan.
As an official at the DOJ Antitrust Division put it to me, “Maggie’s our person on the inside; she gets it.”
Along with her Washington bona fides, she has deep roots in New Hampshire and comes from a politically active family. The crowd assembled at the house party that evening was paradigmatic of that political network.
There were five candidates for state office in attendance, chairs of local Democratic Party chapters, bundlers, and a member of Sen. Maggie Hassan’s transition team back when she was governor. On their way up the gravel driveway, guests walked past a mailbox with the last name Walz on it. Some might have mistaken it as a zealous show of support for Kamala Harris’s running mate. But in fact, one of the hosts is a member of the Walz family. Mary Beth Walz is a ninth cousin twice removed to the vice-presidential candidate. She’s married to a former adviser to President Jimmy Carter who’s been in and around New Hampshire politics for years, now working in the energy business.
Milling about that night was Goodlander’s mother, Beth Tamposi, who has an active presence on the trail. Tamposi, a former state legislator, knows the district well.
In the late 1980s, Tamposi ran in the Republican primary for a spot in Congress. She lost in an ugly primary, in which her opponent’s principal attack was that it would be undignified for a mother to hold public office rather than taking care of her children at home.
When I spoke to Tamposi on the trail, she cited liberal causes like economic inequality and reproductive rights for women as top concerns. Clearly, that experience running in a GOP primary decades ago shaped her own political trajectory and her daughter’s, who worked for both Democrats and Republicans early in her career.
In the campaign’s introductory ad, Goodlander weaves together this story about her mother with her own experience of giving birth to a stillborn child. This personal story is an entryway for Goodlander to discuss both the threat to abortion rights and health care access, which are a major focus of her campaign.
The anti-monopoly section of her stump speech may not have received the same thunderous applause from this specific crowd as her work on the first Trump impeachment proceedings. But the audience had certainly been listening, many nodding along eagerly.
Antitrust actions may be popular with the electorate, but one challenge is that very few voters know about the breadth of litigation that’s been put into motion by the Biden administration. That’s true even among a highly informed crowd. One of Goodlander’s tasks in the campaign is to bridge that gap.
“I think these issues are intuitive and real for people … I hear about the problem of monopoly across the board, if you’re a McDonald’s employee subject to a no-poach agreement or a dairy farmer being driven out of business by a big dairy corporation,” she later told me.
But though there are plenty of McDonald’s employees in the district, there weren’t any on the porch in Bow that evening.
GOODLANDER HAD CLEARLY TAKEN NOTICE of this crowd’s lukewarm reaction and adjusted. This is about a broader principle, she later said. “No corporation is above the law, nor is any politician. This is about basic fairness.”
She wasn’t just talking about the Republican presidential candidate. She was also referring to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, citing the explosive ProPublica reporting about the undisclosed financial gifts he’d received from GOP donor Harlan Crow, while saying, “We need a new binding code of ethics for the Supreme Court.” She also entertained term limits for the high court, name-checking New Hampshire’s mandatory retirement age at 70, a check on lifetime court appointments.
Court reform is a connecting thread across Goodlander’s platform. An out-of-control judiciary ties together the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the threat of right-wing extremism, and also obstacles to regulatory enforcement posed by hostile judges appointed decades ago for their conservative views of the law.
As a constitutional law professor at Dartmouth and the University of New Hampshire, Goodlander’s pitch for why she’s running for Congress is in large part to hold the judiciary accountable. “It’s my core belief that Congress checks the power of the Court,” she told me. “And these Supreme Court decisions are getting worse by the day.” The recent decision over the summer in Loper Bright, overturning the principle that administrative agencies get deference in interpreting statutes, is just one example where Congress will have to pick up the slack moving forward.
It’s somewhat unexpected for a race in rural New Hampshire to turn into a contest over who’s the bigger China hawk.
Corruption at the courts had immense resonance for the New Hampshire crowd that night, as an issue that came up repeatedly in my conversations with guests. Perhaps more than other regions, New Englanders have a deep aversion to what they perceive as a bastardized interpretation of the founding documents.
Partisan gridlock in other branches of government was a top question from guests who pressed Goodlander on how exactly she planned to get anything done if elected to Congress. “I’ll have to summon my inner LBJ and also at times maybe Don Corleone too,” Goodlander said in response.
Along with economic populism, Goodlander is emphasizing an independent streak, her military background, and the ability to work across the aisle on compromise legislation. She often quotes a famous Ted Kennedy line that legislators have to find the 30 percent of common ground even if they disagree on 70 percent.
Thirty percent may be delusional in the current polarized environment. However, some economic policies addressing corporate power have proven to be one area with a left-right overlap. Both Republicans and Democrats, at least in theory, back efforts to combat junk fees, ban noncompete agreements workers are forced to sign, and reform practices by pharmaceutical middlemen driving up drug costs.
As a former congressional staffer, Goodlander views must-pass legislation like the National Defense Authorization Act, reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration, or the farm bill as potentially more effective avenues to attach economic reforms, rather than stand-alone legislation. That’s why Goodlander is trying to get placed onto the House Appropriations Committee, a heavy lift as a freshman congressmember.
ONCE THE QUESTIONS WRAPPED UP, I TRIED TO FIND OUT how these accomplished guests knew Goodlander and what they thought of the race. It was a highly media-savvy audience, reluctant to spill too much to a reporter about their relationship to her.
They were much more eager to air their frustrations about Goodlander’s GOP opponent, who in their eyes embodies the complete debasement of the New Hampshire Republican Party. There’s an acute sense that the state’s tradition of moderate Republicanism, which some guests used to share, has been hijacked by extremism and culture-war politics under Trump, and before that the Tea Party. With both the governorship and state legislature under Republican control, the party has free rein. In an unprecedented move, Republicans defunded Planned Parenthood and other health clinics by ending their state contracts granted by the executive council, an unusual government body controlling some of the purse strings for state funds. Only New Hampshire and Massachusetts have these institutions.
As Democrats see it, GOP House candidate Tang Williams embodies this recent MAGA-fication of New Hampshire Republicans. Tang Williams moved to the state only recently, after chairing the Libertarian Party in Colorado for a number of years and launching an unsuccessful Senate bid in 2016 on the Libertarian ticket.
She’s part of a wave of free-market activists who have moved to New Hampshire. In the 2000s, a movement called the Free State Project began recruiting people from all over the world to put roots down in the Granite State. With a small population and “Live Free or Die” credo, the theory was that libertarian utopianists could essentially annex the state’s politics and transform it into a model for limited government.
It hasn’t panned out as expected, but there has been a legitimate influx of outsiders to numerous New Hampshire towns. Their affiliated groups do exert some influence on the state’s politics such as recruiting and supporting candidates locally and at the state level. Many blame the movement for the state GOP’s lurch to the right.
At a local town hall, Tang Williams was asked directly about her connection to the project.
“I know I’ve been getting attacked. You know, people even call me ‘extreme,’” Tang Williams said. “The Free State Project is just a nonprofit organization … So I will say that it’s nothing for you to be afraid of.”
Tang Williams is running as a Tea Party–style outsider, eager to paint Goodlander as part of the swamp.
On both governing philosophy and personal biography, the two could not be more different. Tang Williams actually grew up in mainland China and went to college there before emigrating to the U.S. Opposing the Chinese Communist Party is one of the main issues she’s running on, painting Democrats as soft on China.
A former national-security adviser and intelligence officer, Goodlander is also running as a China hawk. In the primaries, she was asked for one criticism of the Biden administration. Her response was that it could do more to combat Chinese aggression. “I think that there’s more work that could be done to be tough on China,” she told WMUR-TV in Manchester. Her campaign said she was specifically referring to Chinese state-owned companies fueling opioid production and Russia’s military.
This answer raised eyebrows, since her husband Sullivan currently is the architect of the administration’s China policy. Some read that comment, which came during the primaries, as a preemptive defense for the general election against Tang Williams.
It’s somewhat unexpected for a race in rural New Hampshire to turn into a contest over who’s the bigger China hawk. But the prominence of the issue reflects the current direction in Washington in both parties on U.S.-China relations.
But foreign policy is not the most prominent part of Goodlander’s stump speech. At house parties such as the one I attended in Bow, Goodlander focuses more on reproductive rights and what broadly could be considered kitchen-table issues, though not necessarily the most conventional ones. The prominence of antitrust in her rhetoric embodies how central concentrated economic power has become to the party’s agenda.
