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Maggie Goodlander, the wife of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and a former aide to President Joe Biden, shared the heartbreaking story of losing her baby boy as she announced she’s running for Congress. ‘My husband Jake and I, we’ve been trying to start a family. But when I was almost 20 weeks pregnant, we found out that we had lost our little boy,’ she says in her announcement video. ‘I went into labor and I delivered my baby myself,’ she added. ‘He died on Easter.’
Goodlander, 37, has left her job as a top adviser to President Biden and moved to Nashua, N.H., to run her political campaign. She is one of several Democrats vying to replace Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster, who is retiring. The New Hampshire House seat is one of the most competitive races in the nation this year and the winner could help decide which party controls Congress. Goodlander said her experience made the Supreme Court ‘s decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case – which overturned Roe v. Wade – ‘very, very real for me.’ ‘I want to fight for those freedoms every day for as long as I can,’ she says.
Abortion-rights has proven a strong issue for Democrats on the campaign trail. The party did better than expected in the 2022 midterm election due to high turnout among women who were angry about the Supreme Court’s decision. Biden is also using the issue to rally voters as he campaigns for re-election. Given Goodlander and Sullivan’s ties to national Democrats and the competitive nature of the seat, the race is likely to garner national attention. But the Democratic primary is competitive. Colin Van Ostern, a former gubernatorial nominee and Kuster’s former campaign manager, announced he’s running for the seat. State Senator Becky Whitley is also running.
Kuster has endorsed Van Ostern. Operatives in the state are expected to raise questions about how long Goodlander has lived and voted in New Hampshire. Goodlander and Sullivan own a $2.2 million home in a tony neighborhood in Portsmouth, N.H. It has been their primary residence since 2018 although they have a home in Washington D.C. due to their jobs. It is also in the state’s other congressional district. Goodlander, who was born in Nashua, is renting a home there while she campaigns for Congress.
She and Sullivan married in 2015 in a ceremony on Yale’s campus that was attended by Bill and Hillary Clinton , future Secretary of State Antony Blinken , Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Clinton did a reading at the wedding. Sullivan served in Clinton’s campaign and now is Biden’s National Security Adviser, the top White House official on all foreign issues, including Israel’s war with Hamas and the war in the Ukraine.
Goodlander is not as well-known as Sullivan, who has become the face of Biden’s foreign policy, but she is from a famous New Hampshire family and has an impressive resume of her own. Her grandfather, Samuel Tamposi, was the son of Romanian immigrants and a real-estate developer who brought many Fortune 500 companies to the state, including Fidelity Investments, Anheuser Busch, and Coca-Cola. He was also a part owner of the Boston Red Sox and was friends with legendary player Ted Williams. Goodlander highlighted those roots in her announcement video.
She introduces herself as ‘Maggie Tamposi Goodlander’ and starts her pitch to voters with a conversation with her and her mother Betty, who is a well-known political figure in the state. In it, Betty describes going into labor on Election Day but insisting on stopping at the polling place on her way to the hospital so she can vote. ‘I have to vote. I’m in New Hampshire girl. This is what we do,’ Betty Tamposi says in the video. Sam Tamposi also became a huge player in Republican politics, raising millions and becoming a power broker among the GOP.
Goodlander’s mother, Betty Tamposi, actually ran for Congress in the second congressional district in 1988 but lost in the Republican primary. Betty Tamposi is close to the Bush and Sununu families and was appointed as Assistant Secretary of State under President George H.W. Bush. Tamposi was fired from that job during the 1992 election over a controversy involving Bill Clinton’s passport records. During the 1992 election, when Clinton was running against her boss President George H.W. Bush, Tamposi had Clinton’s passport records sent to her home in Virginia, claiming that she was protecting them from being tampered with. At the time, Clinton’s travels as a student and his draft records from the Vietnam War were huge political issues.
While not classified, passport information is protected by the Privacy Act and access is restricted to individuals who need them for official government business. Bush ultimately fired her because Tamposi’s deputies had also searched the passport files of Independent presidential candidate Ross Perot during the campaign, prompting Perot to accuse the Bush administration of a ‘gross abuse of federal power.’ Goodlander’s father, Theodore Goodlander, is also a real estate developer and businessman. Her parents divorce in 2009 was splashed across the New Hampshire newspapers as the couple had a bitter fight over the family’s financial assets. Despite the Tamposi ties to Republicans, Goodlander would run in the Democratic Party.
In many ways her story parallels Annie Kuster, the woman she would be trying to replace in Congress. Kuster’s parents were prominent Republican officials in New Hampshire but she became a Democrat. A Yale Law graduate, Goodlander worked for Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain, clerked for the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and taught constitutional law at the University of New Hampshire Law School and Dartmouth. She is a Navy reservist and spent 11 years as an intelligence officer. She also serves on the board of the New Hampshire Women’s Foundation. She and Sullivan met at a security conference in Munich when she worked for Lieberman.
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