Karishma Manzur, a progressive challenger in New Hampshire's Democratic Senate primary, voiced support for gender-transition care for minors, including a child she described as 12 years old, while carrying her own unresolved history with federal deportation orders.
Manzur made the remarks during an appearance on the YouTube show #NHtok live, hosted by Arya Shams and Marissa Emanuele. She described a conversation with a father whose 12- or 13-year-old child was "in the process of trying to figure out if they're transitioning," then framed the issue as a matter of private health care that belongs between a patient, their providers, and their family. The comments surfaced as a majority of U.S. states have moved in the opposite direction, enacting laws and policies that restrict gender-altering medical treatments for minors, 27 states by recent count.
Manzur, a Bangladeshi-born Ph.D. scientist running to the left of Rep. Chris Pappas in the September 8 Democratic primary, cast gender-transition care in the broadest possible terms. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, she told the show's hosts:
"Every human being has the right to live the life they want to live, and if anyone needs any kind of care, health care, mental care, that is between the person, the individual, their health care providers, and their loved ones. Reproductive care, transgender care, cancer care, I mean, it's just a health care, care for their mental health."
She then described the specific case of the 12- or 13-year-old child:
"The other day, I was talking to a father, and his child is, I think it was a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old child, and they are in the process of trying to figure out if they're transitioning, etc. And he said, you know, you cannot imagine, Karishma, how difficult it is just to raise a teenager."
Manzur went on to call it "such a private moment" and "such a delicate moment," adding that "every person deserves the right to live and thrive, no matter who they are, and so that is our duty."
Manzur trails Pappas badly. A June University of New Hampshire poll put Pappas at 53 percent and Manzur at 29 percent, a 24-point gap. But the Free Beacon noted that margin represents a marked drop in support for Pappas compared with past polls, suggesting the incumbent congressman's grip on the primary may be loosening even if Manzur remains a long shot.
Pappas, described as an establishment favorite, faces pressure from both flanks. He will need to hold moderate Democratic voters while fending off Manzur's progressive challenge before a likely general-election contest against Republican John Sununu. Fox News reported that former Sen. John E. Sununu has been in conversations with Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Leadership Fund chair Cory Gardner about launching a campaign for the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Republican strategist John Ashbrook told Fox News that "the more candidates getting into these races is an indicator that Republicans are on offense heading into an all-important midterm."
Pappas himself appeared to acknowledge the competitive landscape, telling Fox News, "Whether it's corporate sellout John E. Sununu or MAGA puppet Scott Brown, NH voters won't buy it." Sununu previously defeated Shaheen in 2002 but lost to her in a 2008 rematch. Former Sen. Scott Brown and state Sen. Dan Innis are already in the Republican primary field.
For Republicans, the Democratic primary fight is a gift. Manzur's positions on gender-transition care for minors, her inflammatory statements on the Israel-Gaza conflict, and her immigration history give any eventual GOP nominee a catalog of material to use in a general election, whether or not Manzur wins the primary.
Gender-transition policy is not the only area where Manzur has staked out positions well outside the mainstream. On a local New Hampshire television station in September, she claimed that 680,000 Palestinians had been killed during Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. On the YouTube show Matt Connarton Unleashed, she went further:
"We are basically looking at the destruction of two million human lives. They're being tortured to death. They're being starved to death, bombed to death."
The actual number of dead in Gaza is believed to be in the tens of thousands, a figure that does not distinguish between fighters, militant operatives, and civilians. Manzur's claim of 680,000 dead overstates even the most aggressive estimates by an enormous margin, and her assertion that "two million human lives" face destruction effectively describes the entire population of Gaza as being systematically killed.
Manzur has also positioned herself as a vocal opponent of U.S. support for Israel. She vowed not to accept money from AIPAC, the pro-Israel interest group, though as the Free Beacon observed, AIPAC probably would not have been inclined to donate to her regardless. The anti-AIPAC group TrackAIPAC has identified Manzur as its candidate for the New Hampshire Senate seat.
On October 17, 2024, Manzur showed up at the New Hampshire Democrats' Eleanor Roosevelt Fundraising Dinner carrying a "ceasefire now" sign and wearing a keffiyeh, a protest aimed at her own party's leadership in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.
Manzur's personal biography adds another layer to her candidacy that most voters would find unusual in a Senate contender. She is a native of Bangladesh and the daughter of Major General Muhammad Abul Manzur, who was accused of being a mastermind of the assassination of former Bangladeshi president Ziaur Rahman. The elder Manzur was later executed after being taken into custody under circumstances that remain murky.
After the family came to the United States, the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush spent years trying to deport the Manzur family back to Bangladesh. Karishma Manzur herself managed to get her deportation order suspended in 2007, though the precise legal mechanism behind that suspension is not publicly clear. The whole family appears to have managed to stay in the United States.
The combination of an unresolved deportation history and a platform built on opposing border enforcement, backing gender-transition procedures for children, and repeating wildly inflated casualty figures about a foreign conflict makes Manzur a candidate who embodies the furthest edge of progressive politics. She is not running as a moderate who happens to hold one or two left-of-center views. She is running as an ideological maximalist in a state that prides itself on independent thinking.
For Pappas, the challenge is straightforward but uncomfortable. He must defeat Manzur without alienating the progressive base she is courting, then pivot to a general election against a Republican field that already smells opportunity. New Hampshire's Senate seat is one of the most competitive in the country, and every position Pappas is forced to take, or dodge, during the primary will follow him into the fall.
Manzur's 29 percent in the UNH poll is not negligible. Nearly three in ten Democratic primary voters chose a candidate who supports gender-transition care for 12-year-olds, repeats debunked casualty figures about Gaza, and dodged federal deportation orders. That number tells you something about where the Democratic base is heading, and about the distance between that base and the New Hampshire electorate that will decide the general election.
When a party's primary voters reward candidates who hold positions the broader public has already rejected in 27 state legislatures, the problem is not the candidate. The problem is the incentive structure that produced her.
