In August we wrote that Sullivan had taken a narrow polling lead and that the betting markets still refused to believe it. Half of that has since stopped being true. The markets came around, and they did it fast.

Two surveys carried the shift. The Saint Anselm College Survey Center went into the field on 17 and 18 August. It found Sullivan at 26 percent against Stefany Shaheen at 24, with Carleigh Beriont at 12. The margin of error was 5.2 points. More than a quarter of likely voters were undecided. Then the University of New Hampshire Survey Center released numbers on 26 August: Sullivan 24, Shaheen 19, Beriont 11, Heath Howard 10, Christian Urrutia 4, with 29 percent undecided.

Neither result clears its own margin of error. So the honest description is a tie in which one candidate has the momentum, because the trend line is steeper than either topline. UNH had Sullivan at 8 percent in January, when Shaheen sat at 33. That is a twenty-five point swing in seven months, and it is the number that moved the traders.

By 27 August the Kalshi market on the nomination had Sullivan at 49 and Shaheen at 47, with Beriont at 3. We said in August that the markets said no. They now say something closer to a coin flip, and we were wrong to treat their earlier scepticism as settled.

This site argues that military service gives Democratic candidates a measurable advantage. New Hampshire’s first district is the cleanest natural test of that claim we have seen all cycle. It puts two service records in the same field, in front of the same voters, on the same day. Same ballot, same electorate. If service did the work we say it does, both would show a lift.

Only one has. Sullivan leads; Urrutia is running fifth in a field where a suspended candidate is still polling ahead of him. The two records are different in shape, but neither is thin. Sullivan was a Marine Corps captain who served in Fallujah in 2005 and later became an assistant secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Urrutia enlisted in middle age, is still serving, and spends his drill time defending junior soldiers. A reader who believed our thesis and looked only at those biographies would not confidently pick which of them polls at 24 and which at 4.

So what actually separates them? Money, mostly. Urrutia has never been able to run a television advertisement. Sullivan has led the money race for most of the cycle and has spent fifteen months building on a district-wide campaign she already ran once, in 2018. She is a vice chair of the state party. Four sitting members of Congress, more than 140 state figures and three former service secretaries have endorsed her. Governor Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, both with service backgrounds of their own, campaigned alongside her this summer.

None of that is a service record. All of it is a campaign. The concession we owe our readers is short. Within a single field, service by itself did not produce a result. Anyone reading this site as an argument that a uniform substitutes for organisation has been reading it wrong.

Here is the part of Tuesday that nobody in New Hampshire is arguing about, which is usually a sign it deserves more attention. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has not put the first district on its list of seats in play. The National Republican Congressional Committee has put it on its target list.

Both committees are looking at the same district. Kamala Harris carried it by two points in 2024. Before Chris Pappas won it in 2018, it changed hands between the parties repeatedly, twice between the same two people. Pappas is now running for the Senate seat Jeanne Shaheen is vacating, so the incumbency that has held the seat steady for eight years comes off the board in November.

Republicans have a candidate with a Trump endorsement in Anthony DiLorenzo, who was added to the NRCC’s recruit programme earlier in the summer. Their spokeswoman, Maureen O’Toole, has already written the general election message, telling reporters that whoever emerges will be broke, battered and wearing what she called the progressive crown. Two Republicans who dropped out remain on the ballot and have endorsed DiLorenzo.

Cook rates the seat lean or likely Democratic, so the DCCC’s read is defensible. Still, a party committee that declines to list an open seat in a two-point district is making a bet. The bet is that the nominee will not need help. That is exactly the assumption 2018 was built on undoing.

Andrew Smith, who directs the UNH Survey Center, has described this as at least a two-and-a-half person race. The half is Beriont, who chairs the Hampton Select Board and lectures at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Her position is unusual. She has trailed Sullivan, Shaheen and Urrutia in fundraising, has never run a campaign advertisement, and has stayed off social media entirely. What she has instead is a canvassing operation. Howard handed her his endorsement when he quit on 24 August, and a group called Live Free PAC has put $49,000 into digital advertising for her. Howard’s name is still printed on Tuesday’s ballot. So some share of the 10 percent he drew in the UNH poll will go to a man who has asked people not to vote for him.

The UNH crosstabs describe a left that has not consolidated. Moderates lean toward Sullivan, liberals toward Shaheen, progressives split four ways, and self-described socialists divide between Howard and Beriont. Whether that fragmentation resolves in the final week is the open question, because the two front-runners have spent the past month attacking each other rather than her.

That fight has been ugly. Shaheen released an advertisement accusing Sullivan’s campaign of being funded by donors to AIPAC, a super PAC backed by Jeff Bezos, and executives at Palantir. Sullivan answered with a spot rejecting the AIPAC claim and going after what she called Shaheen’s fancy last name. Roll Call’s Mary Ellen McIntire reported from Manchester on 2 September. She found the contest had turned increasingly bitter over the past month. The clash has raised a question about whether Beriont can consolidate the left late.

We published a piece on Wednesday about Massachusetts. Our argument was that a closed primary in the bluest state in the country is the wrong place to test whether service wins elections. Those voters already know what they think. That reasoning applies here too, and we should apply it against ourselves rather than only when the result is inconvenient.

A Sullivan win on Tuesday would not prove that the Marine Corps did it. She has the money, the endorsements, the party position and a second run at a district that has now seen her name twice. Any competent candidate with that package would be favoured. What a win would give us is a nominee who can talk about Fallujah in a district the NRCC intends to contest. The value of that shows up in November rather than in September.

A Shaheen win would not disprove anything either. Her mother has been on New Hampshire ballots since 1996. Maggie Hassan endorsed her in August. She also has her own record on the Portsmouth City Council and on the PFAS contamination at the Pease Tradeport. Name recognition beating a service record in a low-turnout September primary tells us about primaries.

The result worth watching is Urrutia’s. Say a currently serving Guard captain who ran on veteran suicide and Medicare for All finishes at four percent. Then the thing we call an advantage is conditional on money and organisation. That is a dependency this site has not been explicit enough about. So we are saying it now, five days early, rather than after the votes are counted.

Sullivan is one of four women with service backgrounds who text daily in a Signal thread they named after the first women Marines of the First World War. The other three are Cait Conley in New York’s seventeenth, Rebecca Bennett in New Jersey’s seventh and JoAnna Mendoza in Arizona’s sixth. All three have already won their primaries.

Sullivan is the last of them still facing one, which makes Tuesday the closing item on a story we have tracked since February. If she wins, the group goes four for four and arrives at November as a slate rather than an anecdote. If she loses, the group is three for four and the one who lost is the one who ran in the state with the strongest competing brand name.

Either way the general election is where the argument gets settled, and there are sixty-one days left to run it. We will publish Tuesday’s number whichever way it lands, including if it lands against us.