It’s pretty standard these days for congressional candidates to style themselves after national political models. But that’s not the case in this year's Republican race for New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District.
That primary pits two candidates, Lily Tang Williams and Victor Orlando, who are each taking distinct, do-it-yourself approaches to prevail in a district where voters have elected Democrats for seven straight elections.
This is Williams’ third try in the 2nd District. And after what amounts to almost six straight years of hustling for votes there, Republicans tend to see her as the likely winner of the GOP primary.
That's not necessarily because they expect Williams to also win in November, but because Williams has been putting in the work of meeting voters for a long time.
“It’s up to you to judge if we like Lily or not,"
Williams said while campaigning Saturday in her hometown of Weare. "You know I’m going to go tell them what it means to be a Granite Stater.”
But there are also reasons to see Williams’ political resume as long and unsuccessful.
She is now in her fifth bid for public office, with a record that stands at 0-for-4. Two of her losses came in Colorado, where Williams briefly led that state’s Libertarian Party before she relocated to New Hampshire in 2019 as part of the Free State Project. In 2022, Williams took her first crack at running here, and managed third in the district’s GOP primary.
In 2024, she won her party’s nomination in an upset, beating two millionaire candidates. She ran on her biography — including her childhood spent in extreme poverty in China — and her fealty to President Trump.
She lost the general election to Democrat Maggie Goodlander. But along the way, she achieved viral political celebrity for roasting Goodlander — who inherited a real estate fortune but tried to campaign as a renter — during a televised debate.
In the two years since, some things have changed for Williams. For one, she’s become what she calls “very big” on social media: 34,000 followers on Instagram, 256,000 on X. It’s a profile that’s helped her raise more than a million dollars in this race.
Williams is also now working to put some distance between herself and Donald Trump.
“2024, of course — he was running for president, of course I endorsed him, but I never had the chance to shake his hand in person and meet him," she said. "So I don’t have that personal feeling about him. He’s not endorsing me, and actually, I am truly independent."
But whether the 2026 version of Williams can improve on her 2024 performance remains an open question.
Sandra Ziehm, a former chair of the Nashua School Board, took stock of the campaign after attending a recent candidate forum.
“We have lost the ability to be nice to each other, to disagree agreeably,” Ziehm said. “Lily can talk and listen to all people, no matter how rocky that gets, and things are getting pretty rocky.”
At Williams’ town hall-style meeting in Weare Saturday, state Rep. Mary Murphy of Francestown shared a political take that surfaces nearly every election season.
“We need to make sure we are electing people who will not forget that we are the ones sending them down to Washington. We can’t let them become swamp people,” said Murphy.
With the primary three weeks away, Williams is confident she’ll make it to November. She says she’s got nothing against her Republican opponent, Victor Orlando, but doubts he’ll end up being a serious challenge.
“He has zero dollars, zero dollars, He’s a young father, a nice man. We shake hands — and no negative campaigning, that’s what I think our strategy is,” Williams said.
Orlando’s campaign filings from July do show a lack of cash. While Williams reported $650,000 on hand, Orlando reported none. That was after spending $163,000 that he personally put into his campaign. The 33-year-old father of three is quick to acknowledge it is an approach with real limits.
“The limit is basically how much [money] I can convince my wife to let me have, but honestly the money spent doesn’t directly correlate with success,” Orlando said.
Orlando shared his campaign insights during an interview outside the headquarters of the SEIU 1984 last week. It’s the largest state employee’s union, and it’s backing him in the Sept. 8 primary.
It’s rare these days for a Republican candidate to talk effusively about the value of unions, but being pro-labor is crucial to Orlando’s politics, which he says are informed by working in the trades since he was in middle school.
“All of our labor laws, all of our workplace safety laws, are from unions," he said. "We would not have any of those if not for unions. So anyone who is not pro union — I’m not going to say they are mistaken, but they are mistaken. Look at the history of our country.”
Orlando is hard to pigeonhole ideologically. He’s told voters he’d like looser gun laws, and to allow young people to opt out of Social Security. But he is mostly campaigning on goals to lower the cost of housing, food and energy, and making sure New Hampshire gets more infrastructure money out of Washington.
He said he sees himself as a moderate. According to Rich Gulla, president of SEIU 1984, Orlando is a Republican speaking to lived economic realities.
“I think that the younger generation has understood that the American worker has been screwed over for the past several decades, and that the only way to have those strong family values is having a good strong working class,” Gulla said.
Whichever candidate emerges from this Republican primary can expect to face an uphill fight. Voters in the 2nd District haven’t sent a Republican to Congress since 2010.
