The Sept. 11 Democratic primary for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District has two front-runners among its 11 candidates: Marine veteran Maura Sullivan and political insider Chris Pappas. Both present start contrasts to the biggest name in the contest, Levi Sanders, the rumpled and irascible son of Bernie—who’s widely expected to lose.
Sanders doesn’t even live in the district he’s proposing to represent. He’s worked as a legal advocate in New England and occasionally stumped with his dad during the raucous 2016 presidential primary, when the socialist senator resoundingly won New Hampshire’s contest.
Levi Sanders’ campaign isn’t exactly considered a joke, said New Hampshire political veteran Mike Dennehy. “Obviously he lives outside the district. He is a longshot,” Dennehy allowed, but added that, out of 11 candidates, “He probably ranks sixth, fifth at best.” His greatest weakness is an unfamiliarity with the center-right-leaning district that includes New Hampshire’s coastal stretch and Concord, its largest city.
Of Sanders’ platform, Dennehy said, “The perception is that it’s his dad’s agenda, and he doesn’t have a true feel for the issues in the first district.” The front-runners—Sullivan, herself a carpetbagger, and Pappas—tiptoe around the “Medicare for all” plan that’s been this Democratic primary season’s constant refrain. “They’re playing it smart: It is a right of center district.”
For all his national notice, Levi Sanders offers New Hampshirites nothing especially new. His platform ignores the swingy nature of the district, which went to Trump in 2016. On matters of style and substance, he mostly cribs from his father’s virally successful—if not nationally victorious—playbook. Sanders’ tenuous relationship to New Hampshire’s 1st istrict isn’t all that’s held him back, in other words.
“Feeling that it was his turn, he chose it because it’s an open seat. He ran simply as an opportunist,” as Dennehy put it: But Maura Sullivan—who currently has the edge among Democrats, he adds, and would be harder to beat in November’s general election—is even more of an outsider. She’s just running a savvier campaign. And as for Levi, “He’s being entirely ignored.”
His claim to his political inheritance is honest, at least. He was weaned on the faddish far left. Bernie’s longshot campaigns under the Liberty Party mantle filled their lean early years while a sparse freelance income didn’t quite keep the lights on. Levi’s idealism recalls a hardscrabble past his father put behind him when he won his first real job in 1980—as mayor of Burlington.
And yet Bernie hasn’t endorsed him. Neither has Sanders’ super-PAC Our Revolution. They pinned an endorsement on Sanders’s step-daughter, who ran for mayor of Burlington this year and lost, but are passing over his son—who is by far the most progressive candidate in his.
Sanders would not tell the New York Times about his decision to snub Levi. But his former chief of staff, University of Vermont professor Huck Gutman, explained to TWS that a Bernie Sanders or Our Revolution endorsement has not so much to do with loyalty or the likelihood of a win: The perceived seriousness of a progressive candidate’s effort is the deciding factor.
In an earlier interview, Gutman described the process by which the Our Revolution board chooses candidates to back: “They decide by committee whom to support, based on who is supportive of the progressive agenda, and based on what their support will mean.” They consider carefully what message Our Revolution’s endorsement and backing will send, he said, calling the PAC a “Tea Party for the Left.”
Their aim is maximum influence. Thus, “They’re not in it for quixotic campaigns.”
