On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, former state Sen. Melanie Levesque told a Nashua crowd she was jumping into the Executive Council District 5 race.
“I really care about our state. I care about Nashua, Brookline, all of our towns and cities. So I have to be bold, to speak up, to show up, and to run for Executive Council,” she said. Levesque, a Democrat who represented Nashua in the state Senate, will be challenging eight-term incumbent Dave Wheeler.
News of her announcement was first reported by Nashua Ink Link.
Levesque is well known in New Hampshire politics. She lost to Wheeler in 2024 (53-47 percent), and she ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state in 2022.
“On the council, we have the responsibility to spend within our means and find ways to save,” Wheeler said of his challenger.
“Melanie would be a rubber stamp for every reckless spending item we can’t afford which would lead us no where other than an income tax to cover the hole she’d blow in our state budget.”
Levesque’s announcement is also an inadvertent reminder of her party’s inability to find a major candidate to challenge Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte.
For months, Democrats have subtly — and not so subtly — hinted that former Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington would soon be entering the governor’s race. Multiple sources confirmed to NHJournal in December that Warmington was planning a mid-January announcement.
It hasn’t happened, and Warmington remains in hiding. Now speculation has begun that Democrats have given up on Warmington — who lost to Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig in the 2024 gubernatorial primary — and are looking for another option.
On Wednesday, the University of New Hampshire Survey Center released its latest “Granite State Poll,” a States of Opinion Project, which found Ayotte with solid leads over the two Democrats tested in the survey.
Neither of the names UNH tested was Cinde Warmington’s.
Instead, they surveyed head-to-head matchups between Ayotte and Democrat gadfly Jon Kiper (50-39 percent) and between Ayotte and Portsmouth Mayor Deaglan McEachern (49-41 percent). In an interview with the Portsmouth Herald, McEachern was less than enthusiastic about entering the race. “I’d be really happy not to run for governor,” he said.
The survey (UNH conducts a survey of thousands of panelists rather than random polling) found Ayotte’s approval number — 50 percent approve, 45 percent disapprove — is above water, but it’s hardly overwhelming. Her average approval rating since the UNH survey began in September is 5.6 percent.
At the same time, only 42 percent of respondents said Ayotte deserved to be reelected, while 44 percent said no.
“Kelly has a base problem,” one veteran Republican activist told NHJournal. “She’s got to use this legislative session to fix that.”
Some Democrats, like former Portsmouth Mayor Steve Marchand, have been arguing for months that Ayotte’s numbers show she’s vulnerable, particularly in a midterm cycle that’s likely to strongly favor Democrats. And it doesn’t help that President Donald Trump’s approval in New Hampshire was 32 percent in the latest NHJournal poll.
Plus, state party chairman Ray Buckley made the unusual move of releasing a strategy memo arguing Ayotte is “doomed” in 2026, without having a Democratic candidate in the race to seize the alleged opportunity.
As questions continue to swirl around the viability of a Warmington candidacy, the fact that she couldn’t make the polling cut at UNH doesn’t help.