I saw the future of New Hampshire and its name is Karishma Manzur

Michael "Lefty" Morrill

To paraphrase Jon Landau, last night I saw the future of New Hampshire and its name is Karishma Manzur.

She does not arrive at our thresholds through the varnished hallways of politics, where ambition is credentialed and stamped like a passport, where handshakes are rehearsed and convictions trimmed to fit the ballot. She comes instead from another constellation. She comes from the world of science, where truth is not decoration but discipline, where each word is weighed as carefully as blood in a vial. A medical scientist. A writer. A community worker. A woman whose allegiance is not to an industry, but to the slow, stubborn art of truth-telling.

She stands, not merely as a candidate, but as a signal flare, a siren call. Karishma whispers something unthinkable and yet obvious: our representatives are ours. Not the property of investors, not the residue of lobbyists’ spreadsheets, not the ghosts of their own re-election fantasies. “Billionaires and corporations are buying influence in Congress,” she says with the quiet tremor of a scalpel about to cut, the kind of quiet that makes power shiver.

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Is she, perhaps, New Hampshire’s Zohran Mamdani? The question hovers like incense smoke. Mamdani, the improbable insurgent from Queens, who stormed the barricades of the Democratic machine with nothing but volunteers’ footsteps and tenants’ rage, with the sorrow-song of immigrants who refused erasure. His politics could not be amputated from life itself: it pulsed with housing, healthcare, Palestine, survival.

Karishma, too, speaks in that dialect of defiance. She dares to confront Chris Pappas, the establishment’s chosen son. She insists that campaigns are not contests for office but rehearsals for democracy: a democracy alive, participatory, insolent enough to name power aloud. She carries the double weight of insider-outsider: at once fluent in policy’s cold grammar and rooted in communities long smothered by politics’ warm platitudes.

Chris Pappas is inertia personified, an emblem of establishment politics, tilting forward just enough to seem modern, anchored firmly in yesterday’s convenience. Karishma Manzur is something deeper, more elemental. She brings with her the unfinished silences of New Hampshire, the textures of neighborhoods where politics is not debate but survival.

I have watched her at work: not as a campaigner in costume, but as a presence braided into our lives. At voter education tables, in quiet rooms where policy is made human, at gatherings where Palestine is not an abstraction but a wound. She works with New Hampshire Ranked Choice Voting, with the Coalition for a Just Peace in the Middle East. She does not descend like a candidate. She appears, already there, already ours.

Karishma Manzur. May her name ignite something larger than a candidacy. May it remind us that history does not always knock; sometimes it waits in the room, quiet and steady, until we find the courage to recognize it. This is not just a run for office. It is a pivot, a turning. The moment the future cleared its throat and spoke.