Maggie Tamposi Goodlander, a former White House aide to President Biden who is running for an open House seat in New Hampshire, is drawing attention for having pitched herself as a renter while she also owns a $1.2 million home.
“I am a renter, and there should be more renters in Congress,” Ms. Goodlander, a Democrat running in the state’s Second District, told The Boston Globe in her first interview as a candidate.
But that declaration comes with an asterisk: the home that she and her husband, Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, own in Portsmouth, N.H. Records show that the couple purchased that residence for roughly $1.2 million in 2018. A real estate listing website described the property as a “private oasis.”
Ms. Goodlander, who has deep political connections, had been teaching law at the University of New Hampshire and Dartmouth College after moving to Portsmouth, a seaside city, in 2018, but she returned to Washington to work in the Justice Department after Mr. Biden won the presidency.
The Portsmouth house is in a different district than the one that Ms. Goodlander is seeking to represent, though the state has only two. The house she rented just before getting into the race is in Nashua, N.H., in a district that runs the length of the state and includes all of its western portion.
There is no requirement for House members to live in the district they represent, though they must be a resident of the state they are representing at the time of their election.
The Daily Beast first reported on the million-dollar price tag of Ms. Goodlander’s Portsmouth home. A spokesman for her campaign did not immediately comment on Thursday.
Ms. Goodlander has dismissed concerns about her time spent living outside New Hampshire by underscoring her family’s deep roots in the state, which she also highlighted in a video announcing her candidacy. Her mother, Betty Tamposi, served as a Republican legislator in the New Hampshire Statehouse and ran for the same seat that Ms. Goodlander is now trying to win.
Ms. Goodlander said in her announcement video that Nashua “has been my family’s home for over a hundred years.” A home long owned by her family there was sold in 2008, according to the real estate website Zillow and public records.
That same year was the last time that Ms. Goodlander cast a ballot in the district that she is running to represent, voting absentee when she was an undergraduate at Yale University, records show.
The seat that Ms. Goodlander is running for is being vacated by Representative Ann McLane Kuster, a Democrat, who announced in March that she would not seek re-election.
The race, in a Democrat-leaning district, has drawn a long list of candidates from both parties. Becky Whitley, a Democratic state senator, and Colin Van Ostern, a former state executive councilor who managed Ms. Kuster’s first House campaign and was the party’s nominee for governor in 2016, are among those running in the Democratic primary.
The primary elections will be held in September.
