Leading Democrats in New Hampshire are moving fast to coalesce around Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid to replace President Joe Biden as their party’s nominee for president.
Within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement that he was abandoning his reelection bid, nearly the entire Democratic Party apparatus in the state — including the entire congressional delegation, all candidates for top state offices this year, and the every one of the party’s delegates to the upcoming Democratic National Convention — threw its support to Harris’s candidacy. Many cited the urgency of the effort to defeat former President Trump in November and the relatively short amount of time to reorient that effort behind Harris.
“One hundred days is a sprint, and we need fresh legs,” said Karen Hicks, a Concord Democratic strategist, who held top posts in the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean and is advising the congressional campaign of Maggie Goodlander this year
The rapid flow of local support for Harris comes as Democratic donors across the country poured more than $81 million into Harris’s nascent presidential campaign in the hours following Biden’s Sunday announcement that he was leaving the race to back her bid to become the country's first female president.
Congresswoman Annie Kuster, who is retiring this year, was the first major Democrat in the state to back Harris Sunday afternoon.
By evening, after Harris made her presidential bid official by filing paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, New Hampshire’s 39 delegates to next month’s Democratic National Convention pledged their backing.
“Kamala Harris will defeat the Trump-Vance ticket, their dangerous Project 2025 agenda, and will build upon the successes and values of the Biden-Harris administration,” the delegates said in the statement issued Sunday evening.
From there it was a cascade of endorsements.
Congressman Chris Pappas and the two leading Democrats running for governor, former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig and Executive Councilor Cinde Warmignton, all threw their support to Harris.
So did Democratic leaders in the State House, as well as the two Democrats vying to replace Kuster in Congress: former Biden Administration lawyer Maggie Goodlander and former Executive Councilor Colin Van Ostern, who helped orchestrate the Biden write-in-campaign during the New Hampshire Primary earlier this year.
Biden’s New Hampshire campaign, meanwhile, quickly retooled itself in support of Harris.
“Dems in array,” Biden-Harris state campaign director Aaron Jacobs wrote in a post on X Monday. “New Hampshire Democrats could not be more united and excited to elect Kamala Harris.”
Veteran observers of New Hampshire Democratic politics said the
united front was driven by necessity.
"I think Democrats recognize the imperative of defeating Donald Trump and MAGA extremists,” said Rich Sigel, a former top adviser to both US Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and former Gov. John Lynch.
Lucas Meyer, a political strategist and former president of the New Hampshire Young Democrats, said replacing Biden on the ticket with Harris adds “a lot of juice” to the race that should help Democrats mobilize the voters they need to win.
“This is not a clean slate, but it’s do or die, and it’s a far better conversation to be having than the previous one,” Meyer said.
