Shaheen donated hers. Sullivan hasn't said a word.

Highlights

• AIPAC-adjacent donor money is larger than first reported: $370,630 independently verified for Sullivan, $29,650 for Shaheen, $500 for Beriont, each confirmed by matching employer and city, not just name, across five separate PAC donor lists.

• Shaheen donated her AIPAC funds to three NH Community Health Centers. We call on Sullivan to do the same. $370,000 would go a long way for NH Community Health Centers.

• 117 of Sullivan’s confirmed donors appear on more than one AIPAC-adjacent donor list; one donor is confirmed across all five.

• Shaheen’s TV ad claims “$300,000 bundled from AIPAC donors,” a figure that closely aligns with the $370,630 independently confirmed here.

• Beriont caught and voluntarily refunded a $500 check from a documented UDP donor.

• Sullivan’s “no corporate PAC money” claim does not hold; she accepted $2,500 from a corporate PAC.

In 2018, I ran in the Democratic primary for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, the same seat and the same primary that a crowded field is now fighting over again. Chris Pappas, who won that race and has held the seat since, is giving it up this year to run for the Senate seat Jeanne Shaheen is vacating. That leaves NH-01 a genuine open seat, and it has drawn nine Democrats and five Republicans, including Maura Sullivan, whom I ran against in that same primary seven years ago, and Stefany Shaheen, the senator’s daughter.

Part 1 of this series assessed the money from independent expenditures by Jeff Bezos and VoteVets, among others, concluding that only 10% of Sullivan’s contributions are from NH residents in contrast with Shaheen’s nearly 50%. Parts 2 and 3 of this series traced how AIPAC PAC’s earmarking reaches sitting members of Congress and found that the mechanism is used to protect incumbents already in office. NH-01 has no incumbent, and after checking, I found that AIPAC PAC’s conduit-earmarking mechanism is not identifiable in this race. However, the race is not short on outside money. The money is just coming from different mechanisms.

AIPAC-adjacent donors, independently identified and verified

The Union Leader reported that Maura Sullivan received roughly $304,580 from 153 AIPAC- and United Democracy Project-affiliated donors, compared with $24,400 for Shaheen from 10 such donors, and that only one donor, Washington’s Ron Abramson, gave to both. I set out to independently verify the AIPAC-adjacent contributions in this race.

NH-01 candidates’ donor lists were pulled directly from the FEC’s API and cross-referenced with every name from five reference lists (see Table 1): AIPAC PAC’s complete donor base, AIPAC PAC’s earmarked donors, NORPAC (a different pro-Israel PAC), United Democracy Project (AIPAC’s super PAC), and Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. Each record was individually verified against the employer and city, rather than the name alone, and deduplicated across all five lists. Four of the five reference lists were pulled across three election cycles (2026, 2024, 2022).

Table 1. AIPAC-Adjacent Donor Overlap, by Reference List

Carleigh Beriont, a Hampton selectwoman also running in the Democratic primary, was checked against all five lists the same way. There were zero matches against NORPAC, UDP, DMFI, or AIPAC PAC’s full donor base; however, Beriont received a $500 check in June from Maurice Zekaria of Oakhurst, NJ, who gave $25,000 to UDP in 2024. Per the Union Leader, Beriont refunded the check immediately upon learning of the connection and said so on the record.

Recently, Shaheen released a television ad attacking Sullivan over “$300,000 bundled from AIPAC donors,” a figure that underestimates the total of $370,630 by $30,630.

$3.65 million in Independent Expenditures

Using a purpose-built FEC race-sweep tool that pulls every independent expenditure filed about any NH-01 candidate, from any committee, whether seeded in advance or not, the total outside spending in this race so far is $3.65 million. Despite explicitly including AIPAC’s United Democracy Project and NORPAC in that sweep, neither has filed a single independent expenditure in this race. The actual spenders are:

• VoteVets: $1.21 million supporting Sullivan.

• Article One PAC: $1.02 million supporting Shaheen, funded by the Servant-Leader Fund ($500,000), Glen Tullman ($100,000), and Laurence Tosi ($25,000).

• LCV Victory Fund: $606,000 supporting Shaheen.

• The No Kings PAC: $468,000 supporting Shaheen.

• Servant-Leader Fund: $355,000 supporting Sullivan, funded in turn by With Honor Fund III ($1.43 million) and With Honor Fund II ($840,000).

• Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, a different pro-Israel group from AIPAC: $382 supporting Sullivan, one filing, negligible.

The same veteran-candidate-recruitment network, anchored by With Honor Fund, is backing both leading Democrats simultaneously: Servant-Leader Fund gives directly to Sullivan while also funding Article One PAC’s spending for Shaheen.

Christian Urrutia, Heath Howard, and Carleigh Beriont all show zero outside PAC spending in either direction, worth watching whether that holds or shifts as the primary closes. Urrutia and Howard have both publicly pledged to reject AIPAC money.

Checking the “no corporate PAC money” claim

Separately from the AIPAC question: Sullivan’s campaign has described her fundraising as free of corporate PAC money. Checking this against her FEC filings shows two corporate PAC contributions: a $2,500 contribution from the Second Front Systems Inc. PAC on June 27, 2025, registered with the FEC as a Lobbyist/Registrant PAC, the standard designation for a corporate-sponsored PAC. So Sullivan's claims run contrary to the facts.

Another $350 contribution from Democracy Engine on February 12, 2026. Democracy Engine is a payment-processing conduit through which other PACs route donor money, not as a traditional corporate PAC, so this could be a small, real contribution or something processing-related.

This analysis covers only direct PAC-to-candidate contributions visible on Sullivan’s Schedule A. It would not capture corporate PAC money routed indirectly through a joint fundraising committee, a PAC-to-PAC transfer, or another conduit, the same kind of indirect channel this piece already found AIPAC-, NORPAC-, UDP-, and DMFI-adjacent money moving through elsewhere. This analysis may have missed PAC avenues that this specific method wouldn’t identify.

A challenge to Sullivan

The Shaheen campaign says it has redirected all donor funds tracked by AIPAC to three New Hampshire community health centers. That’s the right response to money a candidate doesn’t want attached to her campaign.

I’d like to see Sullivan donate the AIPAC-adjacent, NORPAC-adjacent, UDP-linked, and DMFI-linked money, all $370,630 of it, not just the portion that becomes politically inconvenient.

New Hampshire voters deserve more than a press release matching an attack ad; they deserve to see where the money goes.

Every declared candidate’s Pre-Primary Report is due August 27, twelve days before the September 8 primary, and will cover the final fundraising stretch. This piece will be updated, not finalized, once the filing posts are made.

This is a snapshot, not a final accounting.

Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a Senior Research Scientist at a national non-profit. She identified the pediatric cancer cluster on the New Hampshire seacoast in 2014, served on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, and co-founded the New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance. Her research program includes PFAS ecological epidemiology and perinatal exposure.

Data sources: FEC Schedule A (itemized individual and PAC/committee receipts) and Schedule E (independent expenditures), pulled directly via the official FEC API (api.open.fec.gov), not scraped or estimated. AIPAC PAC’s earmarked-donor data comes from its monthly FEC filings, searched for the literal phrase “Earmarked for [committee name] (ID)”, not inferred from matching committee IDs. Independent expenditure totals come from a full-race-sweep tool that pulls Schedule E filings for any NH-01 candidate from any committee, whether seeded in advance or not.

Donor cross-reference methodology: every candidate’s complete donor list was checked against five reference lists, including everyone who has ever given earmarked money to AIPAC PAC, AIPAC PAC’s own complete donor base, NORPAC, United Democracy Project, and Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. Four of the five span three election cycles (2026, 2024, 2022). Every match was individually checked against name, employer, and city, since common names produce real false positives without that second check. Figures reported here are the confirmed floor after deduplicating across all five lists, so a donor found on more than one list is counted once.

The complete underlying dataset, including every donor list, every cross-reference result, and the corporate PAC disbursement data, is published here.