House Candidate Who Pitched Herself as a ‘Renter’ Also Owns a $1.2 Million Home

Maggie Tamposi Goodlander, a Democrat and former White House aide, is running for an open seat in New Hampshire’s second district.

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Maggie Goodlander rents a house in the New Hampshire district where she is running and has owned a home in a different district since 2018.

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.

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