WEST LEBANON — Former Executive Councilor and 2016 gubernatorial candidate Colin Van Ostern is one of two Democrats vying for incumbent Annie Kuster’s seat in Congress.

Kuster, who is not running for reelection, has endorsed Van Ostern, who managed her unsuccessful 2010 campaign, for the New Hampshire 2nd Congressional District seat. The state primary is Sept. 10

Van Ostern, 45, lives in Concord and has held management-level roles at Stonyfield Farms, an organic yogurt company, and Southern New Hampshire University. He graduated from George Washington University and received a master’s degree from Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.

In a Monday meeting with the Valley News’ editorial board, Van Ostern discussed his views on a range of local, national and foreign policy issues. In addition to protecting reproductive rights and tackling the housing crisis, he says that voters in the 2nd District are concerned about affordable child care, education, health care and protecting American democracy.

“Americans are desperate to turn the page on Trump,” he said.

In Maggie Goodlander, Van Ostern faces an opponent with a resume peppered with high-level Washington roles, including 11 years in naval intelligence work and a stint as a senior advisor to the Biden administration.

Van Ostern said that he stands on his own record, particularly of helping to restore Planned Parenthood funding and implement the Affordable Care Act, but highlighted the fact that most of Goodlander’s campaign funding has come from out-of-state sources.

“The vast majority of the money that we raise is from people right here in New Hampshire. That’s different from my primary opponent,” he said.

In addition to Kuster, Van Ostern has the backing of a number of local politicians, including State Sen. Sue Prentiss, of Lebanon, several Upper Valley state representatives, as well as the mayors of Claremont and Lebanon.

Van Ostern’s campaign has raised $1.1 million thus far, according to the most recent Federal Election Commission report. Goodlander’s campaign has raised $1.6 million, with the majority coming from individual contributions.

Van Ostern led Goodlander by 12 percentage points in a May 31 poll by Public Policy Polling. The most recent poll conducted July 9 by the same organization, however, had Goodlander leading by 22 points. Both polls were sponsored by the Principled Veterans Fund, a super PAC that supports Goodlander.

Running from the Massachusetts border to Canada and from Claremont to Concord, New Hampshire’s 2nd District is geographically vast and includes nearly 700,000 residents in urban, suburban and rural regions.

Van Ostern is confident that he understands the issues that matter most to voters throughout the district.

“I know this district really well. I know what our lives are like here,” he said, before referencing his four years of experience on the Executive Council, which approves the spending of major portions of the annual state budget, along with voting on the appointment of judges and state commissioners.

“I represented 49 cities and towns on the Executive Council for two terms that went all the way through Sullivan County to the (Connecticut) river down to the Monadnock region,” he said.

Reproductive rights, he said, is the issue that brought him to the five-member Executive Council and a concern of voters throughout the Second District.

“This is an extraordinarily pro-choice state and a pro-choice district,” he said.

“That’s a local issue and the reason I ran for office in the first place,” he added, noting that he fought successfully to restore state-level funding for Planned Parenthood.

Along with reproductive freedoms, the cost of housing impacts residents throughout the 2nd District “almost uniformly,” he said. “This is not just about low-income housing or workforce housing. People in fairly affluent areas can’t afford to move because housing prices have doubled and mortgage prices have doubled.”

Asked what Democrats can do to recapture the loyalty of voters in places like Claremont, a former Democratic stronghold that went for Trump in 2016, Van Ostern said that political leaders need to “show up,” for those places and make personal connections with voters.

He discussed his own background, moving a number of times growing up, graduating from college with hefty debt and sharing with many of his potential voters the experience of living with financial insecurity.

It’s important to have elected officials who “know what it’s like to live without health insurance, or feel crushed under tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt on top of student loans,” he said. “I think those experiences matter to voters.”

With a tight housing market, people are commuting to the core of the Upper Valley from communities such as Claremont. “People wouldn’t have done that in 2006 or 2007,” he said, and “that’s an extraordinary opportunity,” to pursue public-private partnerships to revitalize the city.”

Closer to the heart of the Upper Valley, Van Ostern fielded a question about the Dartmouth administration’s decision to call the police in response to a peaceful protest against the war in Gaza on the Green in May. Though he didn’t think that any college handled the Gaza protests perfectly, Dartmouth’s was neither “the most forgiving nor the most extreme version of how college administrations handled it,” he said.

He declined to condemn Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock’s decision outright. “I’m just really loathe to second guess from the outside without having been personally involved myself,” he said.

At the national level, Van Ostern approved of President Biden’s decision to end his campaign for a second term, and expressed gratitude for his political service.

“I think it was the right decision,” he said. “I think it was an extraordinary act of selflessness.”

Selfless public service is not a quality that Van Ostler thinks that most voters associate with members of Congress.

“I think frankly, most people have a pretty low opinion of Congress,” he said.

“They want candidates who hold themselves to a higher standard there,” he said. “I think people want leaders who are accountable to them, not to big powerful outside interests.”

In matters of foreign policy, Van Ostern and Goodlander both favor a two-state solution to the Israeli-Hamas war and supplying of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents.

“I do think history will tell us that sometimes it is crisis that provokes a level of change that’s needed to make forward progress,” Van Ostern said.

To Van Ostern, the Israel-Hamas conflict has local, as well as national and international, implications, particularly regarding antisemitism.

He noted that a synagogue in Concord has, according to its rabbi, has been locking its doors since the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh.

“When you walk into a religious service, and you see the doors are locked behind you and that there was a law enforcement member there. It reminds you that antisemitism is an example of something that is very real that a lot of folks in our own communities are dealing with,” he said.

On internat ional trade, Van Ostern said that he would “probably” have voted yes on the recent TikTok law, which requires the social media giant’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest from TikTok or face a ban in the US. He has two children and is concerned about the mental health impacts of social media on young people, he said.

“But it’s the level of foreign control that makes TikTok unique,” Van Ostern said. “We would not have allowed the Soviet Union to own NBC in 1987. That doesn’t mean we should ban it but we shouldn’t allow foreign ownership.”

Van Ostern hopes to restore voters’ faith that the government is on their side. “The way to do that is by putting everyday families, middle class families, first in national policy,” he said. “There are not enough people who are fighting for  families like the one I grew up in.”

  Christina Dolan can be reached at cdolan@vnews.com or 603-727-3208.

CORRECTION: Colin Van Ostern led Maggie Goodlander by 12 percentage points in a May 31 poll by Public Policy Polling. The most recent poll conducted July 9 by the same organization, however, had Goodlander leading by 22 points. Both polls were sponsored by the Principled Veterans Fund, a super PAC that supports Goodlander. A previous version of this story included an incorrect name for the polling firm.