Women’s Wave Sweeps Through Primary for New Hampshire Governor

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Democratic voters in New Hampshire selected Molly Kelly, a former state senator, as their nominee for governor on Tuesday, as female candidates for governorships continue to show their strength in primary elections this year.

Kelly’s victory brings to 15 the number of women who have won governor’s nominations in this primary season, a record.

Backed by the local political establishment — she was endorsed by both of the state’s U.S. senators — Kelly, 68, defeated Steve Marchand, a former mayor of Portsmouth who ran to her left, according to results compiled by The Associated Press. She held about 66 percent of the vote with almost 80 percent of the ballots counted.

But Democrats rejected the bid of another female candidate, Maura Sullivan, a military veteran who had only moved to the state last year. She fell to Chris Pappas, a local party favorite, the AP reported, in a key House district that Republicans hope to target in November.

Sullivan, an ex-Marine and former official in the Obama administration, was besieged by criticism during the campaign that she was carpetbagging, and was running in second place Tuesday in a field of 11 candidates, well behind Pappas. Her failure to gain traction reaffirmed New Hampshire’s reputation as an insular state that is skeptical of outsiders.

Should Pappas win in November, he would be the state’s first openly gay representative in Congress. He will face Eddie Edwards, a Navy veteran and former police chief, who won the Republican primary Tuesday in a close race over Andy Sanborn. Edwards would become the state’s first African-American member of Congress.

“At the end of the day, this election is about who we are and what we can accomplish together,” Pappas said in a victory speech at his family’s restaurant, the Puritan Backroom, in Manchester. “We need to say loudly and clearly this fall that we don’t live in Donald Trump’s America.”

The group of candidates running for the seat included Levi Sanders, the son of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was running well behind Pappas.

In the governor’s race, Kelly’s path to victory in November is a challenging one: In the general election, she will face the Republican incumbent, Chris Sununu, who is one of the most popular governors in the country.

Democrats have rallied around female candidates this year, but Kelly’s immediate status as an underdog makes it unclear how much support she will receive from the national party heading into the general election.

A reliable Democratic vote during her 10 years at the state House, Kelly during her campaign has advocated for women’s reproductive rights and vowed to “freeze tuition and lower it as well” at the state’s public colleges and universities. And she has championed renewable energy, a hot-button issue given the state’s high energy rates.

She has also said she would work with the White House if she were elected governor.

“I would certainly work with the Trump administration to bring benefit to this state,” she told The Concord Monitor earlier this year.

In a brief telephone interview Tuesday, Kelly did not seem deterred by the challenge she faces in the general election.

“Do not underestimate me,” she said. “Do not underestimate the voters here in New Hampshire as well. They are ready for a change.”

“I’m going to run on the issues that are most important to the people of New Hampshire,” she added, “and make it clear that there are real differences between Chris Sununu and myself.”

Pappas calls himself a progressive, but he does not lean as far left as the label has come to imply during this election cycle. He has said he supports universal health care, but not Medicare for All, now one of the hallmarks of left-wing progressivism.

In an interview last month, he said he was in favor of immigration reform, but did not go as far as to call for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, another item on some progressive agendas. And he declined to say whether he would support Rep. Nancy Pelosi for speaker if Democrats win control of the House.

“The leadership should clearly reflect the diversity of the Democratic caucus, and so we’ll sort that all out once the election is over,” he said in the interview.

Pappas and Edwards will compete to succeed Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, a Democrat, who is retiring. President Donald Trump carried the district, in the eastern half of the state, by 2 points in 2016, and Republicans see it as a potential target this fall, though election experts expect the seat to stay in Democratic hands.

If Pappas’ primary victory did not come as a surprise, given the backing he received from the local Democratic establishment, he had to contend with a strong opponent in a race that grew increasingly heated. In the final days before the primary, he and Sullivan traded barbs, with Pappas’ campaign attacking Sullivan for not voting in the 2016 presidential primary and Sullivan questioning Pappas’ progressive record. Sullivan enjoyed some national support, raising nearly $2 million through mid-August, but her tenuous connection to the state — she had been considered a possible House candidate in Illinois, her home state, before moving here last year — was viewed as potentially problematic.

Also on the ballot was Levi Sanders, whose father won the 2016 presidential primary here by 22 points but whose campaign seemed to puzzle everyone from his father’s most enthusiastic supporters to his opponents. Though he insisted throughout his campaign that he was his own man, he assumed his father’s loud, sometimes bellicose style and advocated for many of the issues his father had helped popularize, including single-payer health care, a $15 minimum wage and tuition-free public college. On his website was website a photo of his father, front and center.

But his father never endorsed him, and he gained a reputation more as a gadfly — during campaign forums, he stridently attacked other candidates, including for their positions on health care and campaign finance — than as a credible candidate.