Not every politician has their own walk-up music. Jeanne Shaheen does.
When the former New Hampshire governor and retiring U.S. senator comes out on stage for political rallies, Tina Turner’s ‘The Best’ is generally playing at top volume.
For Democrats in the state, it’s an accurate moniker: For more than three decades, Shaheen showed her political party how to win elections in a changing state, creating a blueprint others have followed.
As Jeanne Shaheen exits the political stage this year, her daughter Stefany is now running for Congress in New Hampshire’s 1st District. In a moment when the status quo, the establishment, and the entitled are all fighting words in politics, the “Shaheen” name appears to present both potential upside and risks for the senator's daughter, who is working to shape her own identity on the trail.
When Stefany Shaheen talks about her campaign for Congress, she stresses her roots and her record of public service, with scant references to her mother.
“New Hampshire is my home. I raised my family here, grew my small business here, and I will never stop fighting for our state, or for you,” she said during an appearance on Manchester public television.
Shaheen served on the Portsmouth city council and police commission. Her stump speech also focuses on health care, including her daughter's experience growing up with Type I diabetes.
“Our health care system is broken, and it has to be fixed,” Shaheen said.
Her professional career is very much centered around diabetes advocacy: Shaheen co-founded a health tech company focused on nutrition, and has her name on its patent. (The company, Good Measures, was acquired in 2024.) In 2015, Shaheen also wrote a book about her daughter’s companion dog.
Her most recent work was a multi-year consulting role for a federally funded bio-tech project in the Manchester millyard run by Dean Kamen, where she was paid more than $120,000 annually, according to tax records. Kamen is a longtime ally to her mother, and the senator has vocally backed the millyard effort, called ARMI. Jeanne Shaheen has said it was Kamen’s decision to hire her daughter.
A ‘fancy last name’
But while Stefany Shaheen is pointing voters to her own accomplishments and identity on the campaign trail, there’s no way to avoid the connection to her mom.
For some voters, that’s just fine.
“I see it as an asset to getting elected,” said James Shanley, a retired chef, who attended a recent Shaheen house party in Portsmouth. “I understand the hesitation to have dynasties. But I think winning right now is the most important thing.”
The way he sees it, at a time when Democrats are looking for every advantage in the midterms, a familiar last name could be just one more asset on Election Day.
To Shaheen’s competitors, though, it’s an opening.
Consider the messaging in a recent television ad from Maura Sullivan, another Democrat running in the 1st Congressional District: “Stefany is the kind of person that was born on third base and thought she’d hit a triple. I want a fighter. Not a fancy last name.”
Sullivan, a military veteran, ran for this congressional seat eight years ago, and is now running neck and neck with Shaheen atop the polls. She’s leaning into a trendy idea in politics these days: that nepotism, be it a Kennedy, a Bush or a Sununu, is harming the country.
Anne Williams, a Sullivan backer who attended a recent house party in Manchester, dismissed the idea that Shaheen’s pedigree was a negative. For her, choosing Sullivan in this primary came down to experience.
“I think she is a very competent person,” Williams said of Shaheen. “I just don't think her resume stacks up to Maura’s, so it was an easy decision for me.”
Williams is following the congressional race closely. There are going to be plenty of other voters, though, who enter the booth on September 8th, see “Shaheen” on their ballot, and decide how to vote on the spot based on how they feel about the current senator.
For Beriont, a purely grassroots effort
None of the focus on the Shaheen name actually tells voters what Stefany Shaheen stands for, or how her politics may differ from her mom's. Last November, there was a minor political rift between mother and daughter. Jeanne Shaheen helped broker a deal in the Senate to re-open the federal government after a lengthy shutdown, angering many progressives. Stefany Shaheen said she opposed the move.
“Stefany is very independent,” the senator told WMUR about the disagreement, before making a plug. “That’s what’s going to make her an excellent congresswoman.”
Stefany Shaheen has benefited in other ways from her mother's long political career. The Union Leader recently reported that she has received more than $150,000 from Washington lobbyists, including several who had previously served in Congress alongside her mother. (Shaheen's campaign has noted that it has received more individual gifts — 3,300 — from New Hampshire residents than any of her competitors.)
Other candidates in the race for the 1st District are raising questions about Stefany Shaheen that have nothing to do with her last name.
“Maura Sullivan got in, Stefany Shaheen got in, and then I got in,” Carleigh Beriont explained to supporters the other evening during a rally in Hampton Falls. “And I got in, because I think they are wonderful, and to me, they represented two sides of the exact same coin.”
In the Democratic primary, Beriont has worked to generate grassroots support through face-to-face campaigning and delivering tens of thousands of hand-written post cards instead of glossy mailers.
Beriont, a one-time union organizer for Harvard University’s graduate student union, now chairs Hampton’s selectboard. Outside of that community, she lacked pretty much any name recognition until she jumped in the race.
Recent polling shows momentum, though, as she barnstorms the district as a kind of happy warrior for progressive causes.
“We have so much power. And anybody who is telling you, ‘Oh this race is over. Oh, someone else is going to win’ — they’re not on our side, guys,” said Beriont.
At a Beriont event last week, Amy Loyd of Hampton sat on a couch with her mother, both of whom were still trying to decide between Beriont or Shaheen. Loyd said likes both candidates’ backgrounds, even if one is more well-known.
“I’m a little Machiavellian about this,” she said.
While Shaheen’s experience and potential guidance from her mother could be helpful, Loyd said it’s “not a deciding thing for me, though. It really is: who can win.”
One Shaheen has a track record of doing just that.
The other is trying to prove she’s more than just a name.
