Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat elected in 2008, is New Hampshire’s senior senator. She is the first woman in U.S. history to be elected both a governor and a senator.
Shaheen grew up in St. Charles County, Mo., north of St. Louis, and graduated from Shippensburg College in Pennsylvania. She got a master’s degree at the University of Mississippi. She moved to New Hampshire in 1973, where she worked as a teacher and ran a silver and leather business with her husband, attorney William Shaheen. She worked as a staffer on Democrat Jimmy Carter’s successful presidential primary campaigns in New Hampshire in 1976 and 1980, and worked on other Democratic campaigns as well. She managed Democrat Gary Hart’s 1984 campaign in the New Hampshire primary, in which he beat Walter Mondale 37%-28%. She also worked for the unsuccessful gubernatorial campaigns of Paul McEachern in 1986 and 1988, when he lost to John Sununu and Judd Gregg, respectively.
In 1990, Shaheen was elected to the state Senate, where she supported expanded health care coverage and term limits on federal and state legislators. In 1996, she ran for governor. She had no serious primary opposition, while the Republicans had a close race between U.S. Rep. Bill Zeliff and Board of Education Chairman Ovide Lamontagne, a strong conservative who won the nomination. Shaheen took a pledge not to support an income or sales tax and won the general election 57%-39%, carrying every county.
As governor, Shaheen won more funding from the legislature for kindergarten programs and signed a bill creating a needle-exchange pilot program. She vetoed bills that would have abolished the estate tax and the death penalty. A 1997 state Supreme Court ruling that outlawed New Hampshire’s system of local school financing provided a continual challenge. Shaheen proposed increasing state revenues through slot machine gambling and a hike in the tobacco tax, but the court invalidated her plan in 1998. That same year, when her two-year term was up, Shaheen was re-elected by 66%-31%. But she then abandoned her pledge to oppose an income or sales tax and was re-elected in 2000 by only 49%-44%. During that term, the controversy over school funding continued, and the Republican-controlled legislature refused to pass either an income or sales tax.
In 2002, Shaheen ran for the Senate. As in her 1996 race, Republicans had a seriously contested primary in which U.S. Rep. John Sununu, son of the former governor and George H.W. Bush White House chief of staff, defeated the very conservative incumbent, Robert Smith 53%-45%. Shaheen supported President George W. Bush’s tax cuts and the authorization of military force in Iraq passed by Congress in October 2002. But her abandonment of the tax pledge came back to haunt her, and Sununu won 51%-46%.
In the 2004 election season, Shaheen was the national chairman of Democrat John Kerry’s presidential campaign and helped orchestrate his sudden rise in the polls and his victory in the New Hampshire primary, as competitor Howard Dean’s support collapsed. After that election, in 2005, Shaheen became director of the Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics at Harvard. She said she had no interest in running for office again. But after the Democratic sweep of November 2006, many local Democrats pressed her to run against Sununu in 2008. Other Democrats were already in the race, including Katrina Swett, wife of former U.S. Rep. Dick Swett and daughter of the late California Rep. Tom Lantos. She raised $1.2 million for the race. A July 2007 poll showed Shaheen far ahead of Sununu in a theoretical matchup, with Swett and other Democrats running behind him. In September, Shaheen quit her job at Harvard and announced that she was running. Swett and others dropped out of the race.
Much of New Hampshire’s attention over the next few months was devoted to the presidential race. In December 2007, Shaheen’s husband, William, co-chairman of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s national and New Hampshire campaigns, told reporters that Republicans would attack Democratic candidate Barack Obama for admitting in his autobiography that he “got into drinking” and experimented with drugs. The next day, Clinton apologized, and Shaheen’s husband resigned his position in her campaign.
The Senate campaign was a rematch between two candidates in a very different political atmosphere. In 2002, Shaheen had emphasized areas where she agreed with Bush and congressional Republicans; in 2008, she emphasized her disagreements with them. She attacked Sununu for votes against changing the tax treatment of oil companies and was supported by environmental groups. She also attacked Sununu for supporting the Bush administration’s economic policies. Shaheen led in polls throughout the campaign, but Sununu rebounded after gas prices reached $4 a gallon, and he criticized Shaheen’s opposition to offshore oil drilling. He also attacked her for doubling state spending in her six years as governor. But he may have lost ground in October 2008, when he voted for the $700 billion government bailout for the financial industry, which Shaheen, like many challenger candidates in both parties, opposed.
It was one of the most closely contested Senate races in the country, and both candidates raised and spent more than $8 million. The outcome was a reversal of 2002. Shaheen won 52%-45%, a spread just slightly greater than Sununu’s six years earlier. It was the first Democratic Senate victory in New Hampshire since 1974.
In the Senate, Shaheen has been a reliable Democrat, with some moderate tendencies on economic issues. On the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, she impressed colleagues with her command of issues developed from her days as governor. After the 2010 BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, she called for the abolition of the much-criticized Minerals Management Service—which was subsequently carried out—and introduced a bill creating a new research and development program at the Interior Department to focus on ways to respond to spills. She also sponsored a measure establishing a carbon incentives program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on private forest land, and another to provide a 30% tax credit for investment in biomass heating systems. When the Obama administration proposed in its fiscal 2012 budget to cut in half the LIHEAP program helping low-income residents pay their energy bills, she was among the Northeastern lawmakers who reacted with outrage. She was given the chairmanship of Energy’s water and power subcommittee in 2011 and promised to explore the expansion of hydroelectric power as a renewable energy source.
Shaheen sought to avoid the frustrations many former governors experience in the Senate. Borrowing an idea from her days as a chief executive, she introduced a bill with Georgia Republican Johnny Isakson in January 2011 to move to a two-year budget cycle. She also worked with a bipartisan group that sought to enact many of the recommendations made by President Obama’s deficit commission in 2010, and she joined Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin in trying to rein in the number of Senate filibusters, which have contributed to legislative stalemate in recent years. During the health care debate, Shaheen got several provisions in the final bill, including closing a loophole allowing drug companies to avoid competition with generic drugs and launching a pilot program providing follow-up care for hospital patients.
On the Small Business Committee, Shaheen in 2010 raised concerns that federal regulators were wasting taxpayer dollars by funding duplicative broadband infrastructure projects as part of the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus program. In the 112th Congress (2011-12), she picked up a seat on the Armed Services panel, where she can keep an eye on the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, an important employer in eastern New Hampshire. The Pentagon recommended it be shuttered in 2005, but the independent base closure commission later rejected the idea.
In recent years, Shaheen has tended to local matters. After $276 million was allocated to build a new federal prison in Berlin, New Hampshire, Congress cut funds for the prison and it remained empty. Shaheen pushed to restore funding for the prison, arguing it would supply 332 jobs and put $40 million annually into the area’s economy. Shaheen helped get funding for the prison attached to an appropriations bill and it passed the Senate in November 2011. Obama later signed this into law. In early 2012, Shaheen pushed for passage of the federal transportation authorization bill partly to avoid delaying the project to widen Interstate 93, which runs through Concord, Manchester, and Boston.
Shaheen has been actively trying to persuade the Food and Drug Administration to issue “clear and reasonable guidance” on the artificial pancreas device that could help people living with diabetes. Shaheen has a personal connection to this issue: her granddaughter, Elle Shaheen, has Type 1 diabetes and she participated in a medical trial for an artificial pancreas at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Despite representing a state where Republicans still hold a voter registration edge, Shaheen has not shied away from the culture wars. In March 2011, she signed on to cosponsor a bill that would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and allow the federal government to provide benefits to same-sex married couples. Shaheen has also been a big supporter of Planned Parenthood, under fire from House Republicans who have accused the group of using federal dollars to fund abortions. In October 2011, she was one of 10 senators calling on House Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla. to end his investigation of the beleaguered group.
