At Sandown’s annual Old Home Days festival last weekend, politics seemed to take a backseat to the bouncy house, dunk tank, and face painting booth.
“I haven’t really paid attention” to the upcoming primary, admitted Jeff Babineau, a registered Republican who installs garage doors. In fact, with less than a month until Primary Day, Babineau said he wasn’t familiar with any of the GOP candidates in the race for the state’s 1st Congressional District.
That sentiment was echoed by Matt Kutcheid, a tractor trailer driver who said, of politics in general, “I’m very not into it.”
Voters like this, however, face a big choice in this year’s primary election. For much of the past 20 years, the 1st District was a true swing seat, but Democratic Congressman Chris Pappas has now won three straight elections, and is seeking a fourth term this November. The candidates in the Republican primary hope they can win back that seat by connecting with voters in a district that stretches from the Seacoast, to Manchester and through the Lakes Region. And they’re taking decidedly different approaches to that challenge.
Head west from Sandown to Manchester, on the edge of this district, and you’ll see plenty of signs for one candidate: Joe Kelly Levasseur.
Many of those signs carry a straightforward message: "Trump or Bust."
“I’m proud to say I’m a Trump ally. I don’t have a problem with 'Trump or Bust,'” Levasseur recently told WMUR during an interview. “ 'Trump or Bust' is not a slogan. It’s a fact.”
Levasseur has been a political fact in Manchester for more than 20 years.
He’s currently chair of the city’s Board of Aldermen, but has run for other seats over the years, including against Pappas for Executive Council in 2016.
Levasseur is a lawyer, a former restaurateur and an outspoken critic of what he dismisses as the “woke mind virus” of the left. Like Trump, he doesn't lack confidence.
“I am ready on Day One to go to Congress and do the same great job I’ve done for the city of Manchester as I will do in DC,” he told the crowd at a recent forum hosted by NH Journal. “You will love me as your congressman, I promise you.”
Love, of course, can be fleeting in politics.
Take another candidate in the GOP primary: Chris Bright, a military veteran who has founded both a crossfit gym and a facilities management company that works in the EV charging sector.
Bright backed Nikki Haley in this year’s Republican presidential primary. The 48-year old said he thought the country needed the next generation of politicians to take charge.
But he’s now fallen hard for Trump.
“I've been critical of President Trump, years ago,” Bright said during a rally shortly after the assassination attempt on the former president. “But I will tell you what: After watching that man take a shot to the head, and within seconds stand up, with the American flag behind him, and have the presence of mind to look every American out there, and rally us, I would crawl across broken glass for that man.”
Bright ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the Legislature in 2012 from his home in Derry.
Another candidate, Hollie Noveletsky, is making her first bid for elected office. She has one of the most varied backgrounds in the field: Along with training as a geriatric nurse, she has volunteered in Sierra Leone with victims of the diamond trade. Noveletsky learned to ride a motorcycle at age 50, has authored children’s books, and until recently was CEO of her family’s steel fabrication company, Novel Iron Works in Greenland.
In an interview on Goffstown Community Television, the 64-year-old Noveletsky summed up her approach to life this way:
“You have to be able to make a decision, you have to move forward,” she said. “If you sit and you ponder and you contemplate, and you think about it, nothing gets done.”
Noveletsky, like all her competitors, sees the border and immigration as top issues facing the country. In a forum hosted by NH Journal, Noveletsky said she backs Trump, but doesn’t think his plan for a mass deportation scheme could work.
But she echoes much of his rhetoric on the issue, for instance calling for a hardline on undocumented migrants.
“I do not support a path to citizenship,” said Noveletsky. “Their first act of coming into this country was to break our law.”
The candidate in this race with the deepest political resume is Russell Prescott, who also ran for this same seat two years ago, finishing fourth in the primary.
At 63-years old, Prescott’s political career long predates Trump’s rise. He has so far declined to say if he voted for Trump in this year’s New Hampshire presidential primary.
On the stump, he focuses on his own experience.
“I’ve served 10 years in the state Senate, four years on the Executive Council,” he said during the NH Journal forum. “I know how to win races. I won against Maggie Hassan in a Democrat district, because I’m a positive campaigner.”
While in office, Prescott was a reliable conservative vote. He was also part of fights over abortion rights well before the Dobbs decision.
“I am a pro-life candidate, he said. “I helped pass parental notification out of the Senate. And I want you to know that we must agree with the U.S. Constitution which is: states have rights which are reserved to themselves.”
Abortion, along with the border and the economy will likely continue to dominate this primary.
It's a race where it doesn’t appear any candidate has yet broken through as the clear frontrunner.
