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Maggie Hassan
New Hampshire
Senator since 2017
Challenged by Don Bolduc
“I have promised the people of my state that I will never stop fighting to reclaim the freedoms that we lost... and I refuse to allow this to be the final say on a woman’s freedom. ”
Maggie Hassan is a lifelong New Englander — born in Boston and raised in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Her family was politically minded, and Hassan, her siblings, and family friends tell stories of signed photos of politicians like JFK hanging in the house, notable people paying visits, and family discussions of current events around the dinner table where everyone was encouraged to participate. Her father, Robert Coldwell Wood, was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Lyndon Johnson, and Hassan recalls helping her family organize mailers for the League of Women Voters as a kid.
Beginning her career as a lawyer, Hassan wouldn’t enter the political fray until 1999 when Jean Shaheen — then New Hampshire governor and current fellow senator — asked her to take a role on the Advisory Committee to the Adequacy in Education and Finance Commission. Hassan used her role on the committee to start the work that has defined much of her political career: advancing protections and policies for people with disabilities in schools and out of them. It’s a personal commitment for Hassan, whose son Ben lives with cerebral palsy. Advocating for him in schools led Hassan to fighting not just for her family, but for all people with disabilities at all stages of life. It wasn’t just chance that permitted her son to attend public school: “It happened because of the champions and advocates who went before us. So, as his life unfolded, I found myself needing to advocate not only at the local level, but also at the state level around budget issues.”
Six years after entering public service, Hassan became a New Hampshire State Senator, serving till 2010 and spending two years as the State Senate’s majority leader. In 2013 she became the state’s second woman governor (the first being Shaheen), during which time she also made a national impact as Vice Chair of the Democratic Governors Association and as a superdelegate at the DNC. When her second term was up, Hassan decided to take it to the federal stage, beating out Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte to join the U.S. Senate in 2017.
—Drew Zeiba
Drew Zeiba is an editor and writer of criticism, cultural journalism and fiction for publications including Artforum, PIN–UP, Cultured and Vulture among others. He recently contributed to a critical essay on Warhol’s erotic drawings to the monograph Andy Warhol: Love, Sex & Desire (Taschen). Born and raised in New Hampshire he now lives in New York.
Voting Record
Maggie Hassan’s voting record is relatively liberal, with bipartisan collaboration mostly on issues pertinent to rural Americans and related to substance misuse. Her occasional departures from her more progressive Democratic colleagues have primarily been on less contentious Trump nominations and on issues of defense and national security.
Unsurprisingly, Hassan has been one of the Senate’s most vocal advocates for Americans with disabilities, introducing, sponsoring, and advocating for a wide range of bills focused on educational access, workforce equity, safety, and other concerns. Gender equality in the workforce and in healthcare has been another focus. Her active support for maternal health and the right to reproductive choice has earned her a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, and she has sponsored, introduced, or advocated for multiple bills focused on fair pay and family leave. Gay marriage was in part pushed through as law in New Hampshire in 2009 thanks to Hassan, who later, as governor, issued an executive order banning anti-trans discrimination. She continues to advance legislation in the Senate protecting and empowering people of all genders and sexual identities.
While New Hampshire leans libertarian in many aspects, no less so than on guns, Hassan has continually supported protections to help reduce firearm-related violence. She flunks the NRA’s infamous ranking with a “D.” In 2018, she was among ten senators who requested hearings on mass shootings. But that doesn’t mean Hassan doesn’t work hard on issues that are especially important to New Hampshire voters: She’s a proponent of ecological conservation, a supporter of rural communities, and has been an advocate in the Senate on bills addressing the opioid epidemic that has hit New Hampshire hard.
Policy Positions
Gender Equality and Reproductive Health
Hassan has long been a standout on gender equality and reproductive rights. As governor, she signed an executive order banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression. During her political career she has vocally supported funding for and the independence of Title X centers like Planned Parenthood, coming for Republican challengers within the state for their attempts to curtail the right to reproductive choice. In the Senate, she’s introduced multiple bipartisan bills focused on maternal healthcare. In the workplace, Hassan helped reintroduce the Paycheck Fairness Act and supports universal, gender-neutral paid family and medical leave for the nation.
Disabillity Rights
Hassan is a strong advocate for people with disabilities. Just two weeks into her tenure as senator, Hassan got public recognition for grilling Betsy DeVos during the outgoing Secretary of Education’s confirmation hearing. Hassan’s questioning revealed that, among no shortage of disqualifying incompetencies, DeVos seemed not to know about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. In Congress, Hassan has actively pushed to provide the never-delivered funding promised by 1975’s Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. She has helped introduce the RISE Act, which would facilitate the transition of students with disabilities from K–12 to higher education, and cosponsored legislation that offered further protections for such students from campus sexual assault, of which they are disproportionately survivors. While governor, she made New Hampshire the first state that banned paying disabled workers below minimum wage and in the Senate is co-sponsoring the Transformation to Competitive Employment Act to get rid of the discriminatory practice nationwide.
Opioid Epidemic
Representing a state especially hard-hit by the opioid epidemic, Hassan has introduced and supported legislation to support healthcare and addiction treatment, target drug trafficking, and, in her role on the Senate Finance Committee, taken a strong stance in hearings with pharmaceutical execs. Along with Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins, she has introduced legislation that would create new medical residencies in addiction treatment and pain management. She has also supported various motions to increase the presence and access to addiction treatment centers, improve recovery housing, support foster children affected by the epidemic, and has opposed attempts to curtail Medicare. Along with Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, and Sheldon Whitehouse, she has vocally opposed D.O.J. plans to make the Sacklers’ Purdue Pharma, the notorious manufacturer and booster of Oxycontin, a public trust or public benefit company. For better or worse, some of the most successful bipartisan efforts related to opiates in the Senate have been largely focused on enforcement, such as the STOP Act and INTERDICT Act, which delivered additional resources to Customs and Border Patrol and law enforcement.
Surveillance and Civil Liberties
On some key issues, Hassan’s voting breaks with the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party and the more libetarian-minded Republicans. She has voted to renew the PATRIOT Act and prevented an amendment to the invasive law that would’ve put up more barriers to warrantless tracking of browsing and search history and has upheld controversial surveillance laws like FISA. She also cosponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, a law which would impinge on the right for state contractors to boycott Israeli products and businesses in response to the oppression of Palestinians.
Endorsements
American Nurses Association
Americans for Democratic Action
Council for a Livable World
DAPAC
Emily's List
Feminist Majority Political Action Committee
Friends of the Earth Action
Human Rights Campaign
J Street PAC
NARAL Pro-Choice America
National Organization for Women
National Women's Political Caucus
NextGen America
Planned Parenthood Action Fund
Pride Fund to End Gun Violence
Sierra Club
Challenged by Don Bolduc
There are few Republican politicians that embody the far-right ambitions of Trumpism better than New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc. The retired Army general was one of the leading voices in the Northeast denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and despite walking back his claims due to pressure from his party, still attests that Biden was elected through “massive fraud.” In his first failed Senate run in 2020, Bolduc referred to the Democratic candidates as "a bunch of liberal, socialist pansies," and in the 2022 primary he sought (but failed to secure) the endorsement of Donald Trump, calling him a "strong guy, tough guy." Bolduc’s staunch, anti-government stance is reflected in his policy positions. Despite relentless complaints on the campaign trail about inflation, for which he blames the Democrats, he opposes the popular provision in the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act that would allow for Medicare to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices, asserting that "Anything the government’s involved in, it's not good, it doesn't work.” Unsurprisingly, Bolduc also parrots Covid-related conspiracy theories, believing that vaccines contain “microchips” from Bill Gates, and claiming, even at the height of the pandemic, that face masks “cause more problems than they solve.” Even though Bolduc’s victory over his more moderate Republican opponent Chuck Morse led many Democrats in the state to breathe a sigh of relief as Maggie Hassan pulled ahead in the polls, now is not the time to become complacent. Electing Don Bolduc would bring more of the radical reactionary politics of extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene to the Senate at a time where much-needed progressive policy ideas are getting drowned out by a vocal minority.
Current Polling
Date: November 1 2022 Source: FiveThirtyEight.com
State: New Hampshire
“Live Free or Die” is New Hampshire’s state motto, and Granite Staters take it pretty seriously. The swing state has long leaned libertarian, favoring a hands-off approach when it comes to regulation, taxation (there is no sales or personal income tax in the state), and civil liberties. In terms of party allegiances, voters are by a plurality undeclared and New Hampshire is consistently a battleground swing state in all levels of government, with winners often scraping by with narrow margins. Historically the state relied on agriculture and textile manufacturing at the core of its economy, but the past several decades have seen that outsourced while a growing population turns increasingly to jobs in healthcare (among the state’s principal employment sectors), business services, education, and engineering.
The state remains one of the least racially and economically diverse in the nation, which paired with its libertarian leanings makes some Granite Staters wary of certain progressive policies, especially when it comes to economics or perceived choice and autonomy in areas like education. That said, the hands-off attitude frequently favors candidates protective of personal and civil liberties on the whole. The current Republican governor, for example, claims to be pro-choice (though his policy record sometimes belies this) among other positions you’d be hard-pressed to find most in-office Republicans condoning. But demographics — and attitudes — are changing. While some areas remained Trump strongholds in 2020 (Biden won the state), there is strong support for progressive stalwarts, including neighboring Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, who cinched the first-in-the-nation Democratic primary elections in both 2016 and 2020. However, with New Hampshire’s independently-minded voters’ habit of voting out incumbents and flipping party allegiances, nothing is ever certain.